here - At Home

”
“
sneak
peeks
new fiction
FROM
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
sneak peeks
new fiction
from
Houghton Mifflin
Harcourt
”
includes excerpts of novels by:
Lisa Lutz
Sarai Walker
P. W. Singer and August Cole
Margaret Verble
Amy Stewart
Elly Griffiths
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Boston
New York
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
How to Start a Fire
Copyright © 2015 by Lisa Lutz
Dietland
Copyright © 2015 by Sarai Walker
Ghost Fleet
Copyright © 2015 by P. W. Singer and August Cole
Maud’s Line
Copyright © 2015 by Margaret Verble
Girl Waits with Gun
Copyright © 2015 by Amy Stewart
The Zig Zag Girl
Copyright © 2015 by Elly Griffiths
Sneak Peeks Sampler
”
Copyright © 2015 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company
www.hmhco.com
eISBN 978-0-544-70565-4
v1.0415
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Boston
New York
LISA LUTZ
How to Start a Fire
(Excerpt)
ON SALE: May 5, 2015
”
From the bestselling author of the Spellman mysteries comes this story of
unexpected friendship—three women, thrown together in college, who grow to
adulthood united and divided by secrets, lies, and a single night that shaped them
all. When UC Santa Cruz roommates Anna and Kate find passed-out Georgianna
Leoni sprawled on a lawn one night, they wheel her to their dorm in a shopping cart.
Twenty years later, they gather around a campfire on the lawn of a New
England mansion. What happens in between—the web of wild adventures, unspoken
jealousies, and sudden tragedies that alter the course of their lives—is charted with
sharp wit and aching sadness in this realistic depiction of women’s friendship, warts
and all.
PA RT I
All good things are wild and free.
— Henry David Thoreau
20 0 5
Lincoln, Nebraska
“Are you lost?” the man asked.
“No,” she said.
“Where are you headed?”
“Don’t know.”
“Seat taken?” he asked.
“As you can see, it’s empty,” she said.
He sat down across the table. A road map of the lower forty-eight states
separated the man and woman. It also joined them in a way.
“Wasn’t an invitation,” she said, not pleasantly. Not unpleasantly.
He ignored the comment. He ate lunch in this diner every day at noon.
It felt kind of like home. He didn’t need an invitation to sit down in his own
dining room.
“So, let me get this straight. You don’t know where you’re going, but
you’re not lost.”
“That’s the gist of it.”
“On a road trip?”
“Something like that.”
“You picked a good place to begin a journey. We’re practically smack in
the middle of the country.”
“And the middle of nowhere,” she said.
He couldn’t argue with that and nodded in agreement. “My name’s Bill.”
“Hello, Bill.”
“You got a name?”
“Everyone has a name.”
Bill waited. He was expecting a name. She wasn’t sure which one to use.
“Kate,” she said. It felt odd saying her real name again.
“That’s a nice, simple name.”
“I guess so.”
“You should be careful, Kate. A woman alone on the road. Never a great
idea,” Bill said.
“I can take care of myself,” she said.
“Some people, you just don’t know. You don’t know what they’re capable of.”
“I think I do.”
“I’ve been around awhile,” Bill said.
She couldn’t argue with him about that. The lines were etched deep on
his forehead like a maze of estuaries, with his hair running from the shore.
He’d managed to avoid the middle-aged spread, but his gut still seemed a
little soft. She knew he meant well. She also knew he’d keep talking because
he was tired of hanging on to all that wisdom.
“I’m sure you have. Can I get the check, please?” she asked the waitress.
“A woman shouldn’t be traveling alone,” Bill continued. “Especially if
she’s got no particular destination. I know you think I’m just an old man
prattling on and I should mind my own business. But I got a daughter
about your age and I would tell her the same thing.”
“Has your daughter ever killed a man?” she asked.
“Excuse me?”
Kate leaned in and spoke in a whisper so as not to disturb the other patrons. “Has your daughter ever killed a man?”
“Of course not,” Bill said.
“I didn’t mean for it to happen, but it did.”
Kate said it to silence him. She was surprised how well it worked. It
slipped off her tongue so easily this time. She wondered why that was.
Bill placed his hands on the map and traced the Continental Divide.
Kate paid the check and carefully folded up the map. She smiled warmly
at Bill, just to ease the tension.
“Excuse me. I have to be somewhere.”
19 9 3
Santa Cruz, California
“Eighteen is the age of emancipation. Now you’re free to do whatever you
want except rent a car, run for president, and drink legally, but that’s what
fake IDs are for,” Anna Fury said.
She was lying flat on a dewy lawn, staring up at a starless sky. Soon the
moisture from the grass would seep through her thick pea coat and she’d
announce that it was time to go. When she was uncomfortable.
Kate Smirnoff, next to her, clutching her legs in a shivering ball, was already uncomfortable. But she liked the challenge of seeing what she could
endure. She had on an old man’s suit coat. Her father’s coat, which she wore
less out of sentimentality and more for reasons of cost and comfort. Most
of Kate’s wardrobe had previously been inhabited by other souls. Her father’s coat, unlike Anna’s navy-surplus purchase, was far too big and made
Kate look even younger than she was. At midnight she’d turned eighteen,
but she still looked fifteen. Much of it you could blame on her small frame,
just over five feet and barely ninety pounds. But the pageboy haircut and
the giant blue toddler eyes didn’t help. Neither did clothes that needed to
be belted or pinned to stay on — they made her look like a child playing a
very drab game of dress-up.
Anna looked like an intellectual in a French art film — a boyish silhouette offset by long, neglected brown hair. She’d take a scissors to it only
when she encountered a stubborn tangle. Anna was pretty in a plain way,
the kind of pretty that had been thought beautiful in the seventies, but
not anymore. Her features were all too standard. Except her eyes, which
slanted downward and always gave the subjects of her gaze the sense that
they were being studied.
Nirvana’s In Utero was blasting on a loop in the rundown Craftsman
house on Storey Street. That’s why they’d left. Kate was afraid overexposure
would cause her to loathe something she loved. So they’d taken their pints
and retired to a neighbor’s lawn, where Anna was now pontificating about
the age of emancipation.
“How does it feel to be free?” Anna asked.
“I don’t feel any different,” Kate said.
“Now I’m cold,” Anna said, jumping to her feet and shaking the wet
grass from her coat. Next to Kate, Anna felt like a giant, even though she
was just a scrape more than five four.
They walked along the lit side of the road at Kate’s behest. Clothed all
in black, they wouldn’t stand a chance if a car careened around the corner.
Kate thought of such things; Anna didn’t.
“Nobody can tell you what to do anymore,” Anna said.
About four months earlier, when Anna had turned eighteen, she’d
stopped at a gas station, bought a pack of cigarettes, and smoked one on
the porch while her mother barked her disapproval. Anna didn’t smoke,
but she had to deliver the message loud and clear: I’m free. Although she’d
soon realized she wasn’t.
“Turning eighteen was the happiest day of my life,” Anna continued. “I
bet twenty-one will be pretty good too.”
“Do you see that?” Kate asked.
Across the street a woman was sleeping under a willow tree. It was the
light flesh of her thigh set against the dark landscape that caught Kate’s eye.
They approached. The motionless woman was wearing a short black dress
hiked up high on her almost comically long, well-toned legs. The smell of
vomit was in the vicinity. Her only source of warmth was a short denim
jacket.
“What do you think she’s doing out here?” Kate asked.
“I think she got tanked at the party and went outside to barf,” Anna said
authoritatively.
“It’s forty degrees out. Why would she wear something like that?”
Anna knelt down and tried to shake the woman awake.
“Wake up! It’s time to go home.”
“I’m sleeping,” the woman slurred.
“I know her,” said Kate. “She’s in my biology class. I think she’s on the
women’s basketball team. She’s always wearing sweats and coming in with
wet hair after practice. Plus, she’s really tall.”
Anna shook the woman more vigorously, but each time, she got little
more than garbled words and an adjustment in sleep posture.
“Maybe we can carry her,” Anna said.
“No,” said Kate. “You can’t carry dead weight. You see it in movies all
the time, but it’s almost impossible. For once, I’d like to see a film that accurately reflects that challenge.”
“We’re not leaving her,” Anna said.
“How did I get here?” the tall woman asked.
“We brought you here last night,” Kate said.
“Where am I?” she said.
“Porter College. Where do you live?”
“Stevenson,” the tall woman said.
Kate held her tongue. There were subcultures in the UC Santa Cruz residential colleges, and it was well known that Stevenson was where all the
Republicans lived — not that there were many of them at the decidedly leftwing university.
The room was disconcertingly familiar to the tall woman, as if someone had redecorated badly while she’d been sleeping. The walls were the
same dirty beige, and the bland chipboard furniture was battered similarly,
just in different places. There were two of everything: two twin beds that
contained storage compartments beneath, two four-drawer dressers with
mirrors on top, two wardrobe closets. The red velvet comforter was most
definitely not hers. In her eye line was a poster of a malnourished-looking
man holding a microphone. His jeans were partially undone.
“Who are you?” the tall woman asked.
“Kate Smirnoff. Like the vodka.” Kate extended her hand in a formal
businesslike gesture.
“Hi,” the confused guest said, accepting the handshake.
“And you’re Georgianna Leoni,” Kate said, tripping a bit over the name.
“How do you know?”
Kate handed her guest a small clutch purse. “We found this under your
body. Your ID was inside. Should I call you Georgianna?”
“George.”
“Good. That’s better in an emergency. ‘George, call 911,’ as opposed to
‘Georgianna, call 911.’ ”
“What happened?” George asked.
“We were at a party on Storey Street last night. You were probably at the
same one. We found you passed out under a willow tree. After you’d vomited, most likely. We decided we’d better move you because there were lots
of really drunk men at the party. Do you want some water?”
“Yes, please.”
Kate filled a purple plastic tumbler from the in-room sink.
“I don’t remember coming back here.”
“Not surprising,” Kate said. “Anna slapped your face a few times to
wake you up. We got you to your feet and walked you maybe half a block,
like coaches and trainers do with football players who get injured on the
field. But then you stopped moving on your own, and you’re heavier than
you look.”
“Then what happened?” George asked, because stories about things
you did that you don’t remember are always particularly compelling.
“Then we found the shopping cart,” Kate explained. “Getting you inside
was a whole other hassle. I won’t go into the details, but if you have any unexplained bruising, suffice it to say, that was the cause. Sorry. We tried. But
you really do weigh more than you appear to.”
“And then what?”
“We carted you to the shuttle stop. The shuttle driver was kind enough
to help you onboard. It was late, and we didn’t know where you lived, so
we just took you back here. The RA helped us get you inside. After he left,
Anna took your dress because it still had vomit on it. The rest is history.”
George lifted the covers and noticed she was wearing a Banana Slugs
T-shirt and underwear. She scanned the room for her clothes, but it was
hard to spot anything amid the chaos.
“Where is my dress?” George asked.
“Anna’s washing it. She should be back any minute.”
As if on cue, Anna Fury entered the room, carrying a laundry basket
and a can of Dr Pepper.
Anna smiled and said with the air of someone who knows, “I bet you’re
hung-over.”
She dropped the laundry basket on the floor and handed the soda to
George. “This should help — that’s why it’s called Dr Pepper. But what you
really need is a greasy breakfast.”
George cracked the soda and took a sip. It helped. She crawled out of
bed and glanced in the mirror.
“I look like shit,” she said.
Anna rolled her eyes. George was the kind of woman who could do
nothing to shake her beauty. The old T-shirt, matted brown hair, and mascara migrating down her face only added to her attractiveness. She had
a perfect olive complexion and freakishly high cheekbones and eyes that
were a green-gray color Anna realized, when she finally got a good look
at them, she had never seen before. George was on the cusp of being too
tall. All legs, but useful legs, not decorative sticks. The kind of legs that
could send a person places, like into the air for a perfect lay-up. Looking
at George, Anna felt a stab of envy. But she understood from watching her
mother that there was a cost to beauty — you were chained to it for years,
and when it finally released you, you didn’t know who you were anymore.
George put on her dress from the night before, a form-fitting jersey that
had clearly shrunk in the wash.
“Thank you for . . .” George said.
“You’re welcome,” Anna said. She turned to Kate. “I figured out what
we should do today,” she said with the expression of a scientist who has just
found solid proof of his career-making theorem.
“What?” Kate said.
“Go camping,” Anna said.
“Where?” Kate asked.
“I think it’s time you saw the Stratosphere Giant,” Anna said.
George must have looked confused, so Anna explained. “Kate is prone
to desultory and passing obsessions. When I first met her, it was the actor
Lon Chaney. Now she’s really into the California redwoods. The giant ones.
Not your average redwoods.”
George stared blankly. Kate misunderstood the expression, interpreting
it as information-seeking rather than the slow uptake of the hung-over.
“Some of those trees grow to over three hundred and fifty feet. That’s
longer than a football field. You can even drive your car through one of
them. Probably not a truck,” Kate said.
Anna turned to George and said, “You should come too. That’s exactly
what you need: fresh air, enormous trees, a dip in a cold pond, s’mores, and
sleeping under the stars.”
It wasn’t like George to participate in spur-of-the-moment activities,
but Anna seemed so sure of her plan. When people have a certainty that
you lack, being swayed feels less like a sharp turn than a slow arc in the
road. George returned to her dorm, showered, and changed into practical
clothes. She washed the makeup from her face and scrubbed a phone number off her forearm. His name was Doug, or maybe Don. She had left the
party with him — that she could remember. What she couldn’t recall was
why he’d left her passed out on the lawn.
Attending Santa Cruz was not unlike going to college in a campground.
You walked through the woods to class, and there were miles of trails
where you could avoid even seeing a campus structure. But Anna firmly
believed that adventures could not exist at one’s door. They required travel.
She was using Kate’s obsession as an excuse to take a road trip. Her car was
already loaded with off-season clothing, neglected schoolbooks, a myriad
of empty soda cans and candy wrappers, and camping gear. Kate, always
more practical, brought food, water, and emergency flares for the six-anda-half-hour journey.
It was decided that George should take the back seat so she could stretch
out her legs. For the first hour of the drive, George listened to Kate and Anna’s conversations as if she were tuned in to a radio show. Their back-andforth had a speed and rhythm she couldn’t match. George’s hangover was
still quietly vibrating, so she just watched and listened. After a while she realized that she had never seen two women so patently different be so at ease
with each other.
Kate and Anna had met only three and a half months earlier. They were
thrown together not by the careful dorm-room pairings that the housing
administrators prided themselves on but simply because they were late applicants in a pond of already-paired fish.
“I have a theory,” said Anna now. “They try to match roommates based
on common interests and similar backgrounds and areas of study. But
from my observation, that breeds competition. What truly matters in a
congenial cohabiting situation are sleep habits, taste in music, and levels of
cleanliness. Kate and I have all three in common — basically, we’re sloppy
insomniacs who loathe pop music. But in everything else, we’re like night
and day. See, I’m a biology major; Kate, business. I have two parents, still
married. Both of Kate’s are dead. Car crash when she was eight. I’ve never
held a job. Kate has worked in her grandfather’s diner since she was twelve.
I grew up in Boston. Kate was raised right here in Santa Cruz. She’s never
even left California. Can you believe that?”
“We won’t be far from Oregon,” said Kate, who didn’t seem to mind
having her life summarized solely in terms of how it differed from Anna’s.
“Maybe we’ll just dip inside,” Anna said, “so you can say you’ve been
there.”
As Anna shattered the speed limit on Highway 101, the landscape
turned a lusher green. Dark clouds pushed their way into the sky as headlights started to blink on. Anna interrogated her new friend with a series of
seemingly random but actually premeditated questions. What song would
your torturers play to drive you mad? “It’s a Small World.” How many hardboiled eggs can you eat in one sitting? Five. (Anna was impressed; most
people couldn’t answer that question.) Who would you save in a fire, Keith
Richards or Pete Townshend?
“I don’t know,” George answered, indifferent to both men.
“The answer is Pete Townshend. A fire wouldn’t kill Keith Richards,”
Anna said.
Kate asked the pedestrian kinds of questions and learned that George
was a midwestern girl, raised in Chicago. An only child. Still-married parents. Italian American father. WASPy mother. She had several male cousins
who’d taught her how to fight and play basketball. She had had a four-inch
growth spurt when she was thirteen and played on the boys’ team until
high school. Her major: undecided.
A few hours into the road trip, Kate posed a question that spurred a
rapid-fire conversation George found hard to follow; it was like listening to
actors in a 1940s radio show.
Kate:
Anna:
Kate:
Anna:
Kate:
Anna:
Kate:
Anna:
Kate:
Anna:
Did you check the weather?
No. I thought you were going to do that.
Did you tell me to do that?
No.
Then why did you think I would?
Because you’re more practical than I am.
It’s going to start raining soon.
You don’t know that.
I do.
No, you don’t.
Small droplets of water dotted the windshield. Then the drizzle turned
to rain, forcing Anna to turn on the windshield wipers.
Kate: What more proof do you need?
Anna: What’s a little rain?
Kate: We can’t go camping in the rain.
Anna: Why not?
Kate: You can’t start a fire in the rain.
Anna: So we won’t have a fire.
Kate: If we don’t have a fire, then we don’t have s’mores.
Anna: So?
Kate: Camping isn’t camping without s’mores. We can’t have other
Anna:
Kate:
Anna:
Kate:
Anna:
George:
Anna:
Kate:
Anna:
Kate:
Anna:
George:
cooked food either.
We can have potato chips, beef jerky, and beer.
Maybe you should slow down.
What does that sign say?
Make the wipers go faster.
That’s as fast as they go.
I think you should pull off the road.
Good idea. We’ll find a place to bunk for the night.
A Motel 6 or something.
Not a Motel 6. Some place that sounds more rustic.
Like what, the Rustic Inn?
It can’t be a chain motel and it has to have the word Lodge in the
name.
What was that?
The car swerved back and forth across two lanes with a rhythmic
thumping sound. Anna slowed the car, turned on her emergency blinkers,
and pulled onto the shoulder of the road.
Anna: I’m not an expert, but I think we have a flat tire.
Kate:
Anna:
George:
Anna:
George:
Anna:
Kate:
George:
Anna:
George:
I second that opinion.
Don’t worry. I’m going to take care of everything.
Do you know how to change a tire?
No.
I can do it. My dad showed me like a year ago.
Good to know. For future reference.
Uh-oh.
You don’t have a jack, do you?
Nope. But it wouldn’t do us any good anyway.
Why not?
Anna: A jack is useful only if you have a spare tire.
George: You don’t have a spare?
Kate: She used to.
Anna: I took it out a while back. Wanted to see if I got better mileage
without the extra weight.
George: Oh my God.
Anna: Relax. Everything is under control.
Anna donned a yellow rain slicker that she found under a waffle iron
in the trunk. George didn’t ask about the waffle iron — or the toolbox, or
the snowshoes, or any of the other items that together easily exceeded the
weight of a spare tire. Several minutes elapsed as Anna attempted to flag
down passing vehicles, only to be drenched by their splash. Eventually, a
Ford truck pulled over a little way up the road.
Anna ran the fifty-yard dash to the truck. Kate and George watched her
gesture to whoever was sitting in the passenger seat. An objective observer
would have thought the tale she was weaving was far more complicated
than a simple flat tire. Then Anna turned around to face her travel companions, gave the thumbs-up sign, and casually walked back to the VW.
Anna opened the car door. “Just grab your coats and whatever you need
for the night. They’ll drop us in town. We’ll get the car fixed in the morning. Oh, and Kate, you’re a foreign exchange student from the former Yugoslavia.”
Anna insisted on buying Charlie Ames and Greg Wilkes, Humboldt
County loggers and longtime residents, dinner for their trouble. At least
that’s what she said, but really it was to prolong Kate’s impersonation of an
Eastern European exchange student. Charlie and Greg had never met anyone from a country that no longer existed. They were intrigued. They also
wanted to present their country in a flattering light, and they tried to include Kate in all conversation.
“So, Katia, how are you liking your visit so far?” Charlie asked, enunciating each syllable with careful precision.
“Oh, America iz very nice,” said Kate in a perfect Czech accent. That
was the only accent Kate could do; she figured the men wouldn’t know the
difference.
“And where were you headed before your tire blew?”
“Avenue of the Giants,” Anna said. “That’s all we came for. Katia and I
have been pen pals for almost ten years now. She read about the giant redwoods in school. Heard there was a tree you could drive your car through
and just had to see it. Isn’t that true, Katia?”
“Yes,” Kate said. “I have grrret luf fur de big trees.”
George dropped her napkin under the table and searched for it until
she could get her laughter under control. This took a long time and made
Charlie and Greg either suspicious or uncomfortable, which broke up Kate,
who covered for her sudden, inexplicable laughter by picking up a saltshaker and saying, “Look, iz so funny. We don’ haf in my country.”
Anna, however, was the master of her invented game. She never cracked,
not during the meal or the ten-mile drive to the Redwood Lodge or even
when she retold her invented tale to the motel clerk.
“I just feel terrible. This is her first time in America and we get a flat
tire.”
In room 15 of the Redwood Lodge — which looked about as rustic as a
Motel 6, with the exception of the faux-pine finish on the dresser — George
and Anna passed a bottle of cheap whiskey back and forth, repeating their
favorite Katia quotes of the night.
“My home is no more der and dat make me sad.”
“Who doesn’t vant to dance on Stalin’s grafe?”
“In my country, lipstick is fur whores and men who vant to be vomen.”
“Television is de best ting about your country. And Pop-Tarts.”
“Americans are wasteful. Ve can feed a family fur a week on a pot of
borscht.”
George was awed by Kate’s ability to play Anna’s game. What George
didn’t know was that Kate was always playing Anna’s games. Maybe that
was why she wasn’t laughing.
The rain never relented. The tent was never pitched. The following morning, Anna had her car towed to a gas station, where the tire was replaced.
Kate insisted that Anna also purchase a spare, knowing that money was
not an object. A stranger wouldn’t have guessed that Anna was a rich girl,
mostly because Anna was hell-bent on avoiding that label.
After taking a vote, the women decided to continue their rain-soaked
adventure. They drove through the Avenue of the Giants, the massive trees
looming above. George had never seen anything more beautiful. Kate studied her map, trying to pinpoint the location of the Stratosphere Giant, currently the tallest tree in the world — although that statistic was debatable,
since not all trees had been measured.
Despite the weather, Kate demanded they go on a hike. It was then she
and Anna learned that George was on the track team as well as the basketball team. Her pace was brutal. George was so awestruck that she barely
noticed her companions huffing and puffing in her wake. Kate struggled to
match George’s speed while offering morsels of information she had gathered over the past few months.
“The oldest coastal redwood is over two thousand years old. Can you
imagine that?”
“Which one is it?” George asked.
Kate looked around. “Don’t know,” she said. “But many are at least six
hundred years old. Take your pick.”
George stopped in her tracks and craned her neck to try to see the
top of a tree. As she continued along the trail, she found a white anomaly
among the green brush.
“What is this?” George asked.
“It’s an albino redwood. A mutant,” Kate said. “They can’t manufacture
chlorophyll, so they’re white. They survive as parasites, linking their root
system with normal trees and getting nutrients from them. They can grow
to only about sixty feet. But aren’t they cool?”
“They’re amazing,” George said.
Kate’s obsession had been sated. She had seen in real life what she had
only read about in books. But it seemed she’d passed her obsession on to
George, as if it were a physical object that could be handed off.
Anna liked the trees and all. She didn’t mind the hike, but her internal
experience was far milder than the other girls’. Anna slowly caught up with
George and Kate, pulled out a joint, and lit up, smoking among the greenery.
“How can you smoke in a place so beautiful?” George asked.
“It makes it more beautiful,” Anna said.
They stayed in the Redwood Lodge one more night and made s’mores on
their camping stove in their room, which meant flattening them on a skillet. Kate shook her head in disappointment; this was not how it was done.
She missed the smell of burned marshmallow and wanted the musty, used
odor of the motel room to disappear. Anna lit a joint, even though George
pointed at the No Smoking sign.
“That only refers to cigarettes,” Anna said.
The scent of marijuana overpowered the various odors of past occupants that seemed layered in the room. Anna passed the joint to Kate, who
lately, after months of rejecting the offer, had found herself giving in now
and again. She took a drag and suffered a brutal coughing fit.
George shook her head in the manner of people who don’t partake.
Kate said, when she could speak again, “It will make the s’mores taste
better.”
George, being the guest, was served first. The chocolate and marshmallow dripped onto her fingers, stinging them with their heat. She took a bite
and thought, Why does it need to taste better?
The next day, Anna drove thirty minutes north on the 101 and crossed the
Oregon border.
“Welcome to Oregon,” Anna said, as if she were a representative of the
state. “You have now officially been to two states,” she said to Kate. “How
do you feel?”
“I think I like Oregon. It’s definitely my second-favorite state,” Kate said.
“Excellent,” said Anna as she began looking for an exit so that they
could start their journey home.
After forty-eight hours of constant chatter, the trio drifted into silence.
It wasn’t the tense silence of those who’d had their fill of one another, just
an unspoken sparing of words. They knew when to speak and when to
stop.
“I’m hungry,” George announced as the mileage signs to Santa Cruz
dipped into double digits.
“I know a place,” Kate said.
An hour later, they were sitting in Smirnoff ’s Diner on Church Street,
devouring an assortment of pies and French fries. Ivan, Kate’s grandfather,
guardian, and the owner of the establishment, approached the table and
scoffed dramatically at the victuals selected from his very own menu. Had
he taken their order instead of Louise, he would have insisted on the turkey dinner or meatloaf or something that had been a square meal back in
his day.
He kissed his granddaughter on the cheek and then turned to Anna.
“Are you behayfing yussef?” he said as he bent down to kiss her forehead.
“Always,” Anna said, insincerely.
“Meet George,” said Kate. “She’s our new friend.”
“Is gut to make new frens,” Ivan said.
George noted that Ivan’s accent was an exact replica of the one Kate
used with the loggers.
He shook George’s hand. “George, you say?”
“Short for Georgianna,” she said.
“I call you Georgianna,” Ivan said.
“Okay,” George said.
“Why did you order dis junk?” Ivan asked.
“We were hungry,” Anna said, not exactly answering the question.
“I bring you someting with protein,” Ivan said, still staring at the table
and the young women around it.
“I’m a vegetarian now,” Anna said.
“You ate hamburger here last veek,” Ivan said.
“That was last week,” Anna said. “Things change.”
Ivan turned to George and gestured in the direction of Anna. “Watch
out for dis one. She’s got the devil in her.”
Ivan winked at Anna, but he wasn’t joking. Not exactly. He patted his
granddaughter on the head and said, “I get back to the bookkeepings. I see
you Monday.”
Anna explained more of Kate’s story to George: Kate had been raised
by her grandfather from the age of eight. She’d lived with him until she
was eighteen, when he insisted that she move into the dormitory, even
though she was going to college only a few miles from his residence. She
still worked at the diner three days a week for pocket money.
What Anna didn’t mention to George was that Kate planned on taking
over the diner. Anna didn’t mention it because she couldn’t fathom anyone
wanting something so ordinary out of life. Kate had tried to explain it to
her. It wasn’t just about the familiarity of the diner and how it tied her to
her family. She wanted something that was hers completely. A tiny kingdom to rule as a benevolent dictator. She didn’t have Anna’s gift for becoming a dictator in any situation.
Anna pulled up in front of Stevenson College. As George slipped out
into the soft, drizzly air, Anna said, “Let’s do this again sometime. And
when I say this, I mean something completely different.”
Not knowing what that something might be, George said, “That
sounds fun.”
“Don’t be a stranger,” Kate said.
SARAI WALKER
Dietland
(Excerpt)
ON SALE: May 26, 2015
”
Meet Plum Kettle, a thin girl living in a fat body waiting for her life to begin, just as
soon as she has gastric bypass surgery. Enter Jennifer, a guerrilla group terrorizing
those who mistreat women, and suddenly Plum finds herself mixed up in a sinister
plot. Other women challenge Plum to deal with her past and reconsider her future—
and then things really start to get interesting. Part Fight Club, part Bridget Jones,
Dietland is an audacious debut novel that will knock you out.
She waited for a few minutes to see if she was going to shrink any
further: she felt a little nervous about this; “for it might end, you
know,” said Alice to herself, “in my going out altogether,
like a candle. I wonder what I should be like then?”
— Lewis Carroll,
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
R a bbit
Hol e
:::
:::
when I noticed that a girl was following
me, nearly the end of May, a month that means perhaps or might be. She
crept into the edges of my consciousness like something blurry coming into focus. She was an odd girl, tramping around in black boots
with the laces undone, her legs covered in bright fruit-hued tights, like
the colors in a roll of Life Savers. I didn’t know why she was following
me. People stared at me wherever I went, but this was different. To the
girl I was not an object of ridicule but a creature of interest. She would
observe me and then write things in her red spiral-bound notebook.
The first time I noticed the girl in a conscious way was at the café.
On most days I did my work there, sitting at a table in the back with
my laptop, responding to messages from teenage girls. Dear Kitty, I
have stretch marks on my boobs, please help. There was never any end to the
messages and I usually sat at my table for hours, sipping cups of coffee
and peppermint tea as I gave out the advice I wasn’t qualified to give.
For three years the café had been my world. I couldn’t face working
at home, trapped in my apartment all day with nothing to distract me
from the drumbeat of Dear Kitty, Dear Kitty, please help me.
One afternoon I looked up from a message I was typing and saw
the girl sitting at a table nearby, restlessly tapping her lime green leg,
her canvas bag slouched in the chair across from her. I realized that I’d
seen her before. She’d been sitting on the stoop of my building that
morning. She had long dark hair and I remembered how she turned
to look at me. Our eyes met and it was this look that I would remember in the months to come, when her face was in the newspapers and
IT WAS LATE IN THE SPRING
on TV — the glance over the shoulder, the eyes peeking out from the
thick black liner that framed them.
After I noticed her at the café that day, I began to see her in other
places. When I emerged from my Waist Watchers meeting, the girl
was across the street, leaning against a tree. At the supermarket I spotted her reading the nutrition label on a can of navy beans. I made my
way around the cramped aisles of Key Food, down the canyons of colorful cardboard and tin, and the girl trailed me, tossing random things
into her shopping basket (cinnamon, lighter fluid) whenever I turned
to look at her.
I was used to being stared at, but that was by people who looked
at me with disgust as I went about my business in the neighborhood.
They didn’t study me closely, not like this girl did. I spent most of my
time trying to blend in, which wasn’t easy, but with the girl following
me it was like someone had pulled the covers off my bed, leaving me
in my underpants, shivering and exposed.
Walking home one evening, I could sense that the girl was behind
me, so I turned to face her. “Are you following me?”
She removed tiny white buds from her ears. “I’m sorry? I didn’t hear
you.” I had never heard her speak before. I had expected a flimsy voice,
but what I heard was a confident tone.
“Are you following me?” I asked again, not as bold as the first time.
“Am I following you?” The girl looked amused. “I’m afraid I don’t
know what you’re talking about.” She brushed past me and continued
on down the sidewalk, being careful not to trip on the tree roots that
had burst through the concrete.
As I watched the girl walk away, I didn’t yet see her for who she
was: a messenger from another world, come to wake me from my
sleep.
:::
at that time, back then, I imagine looking down on it as if it were contained in a box, like a diorama — there
are the neighborhood streets and I am a figurine dressed in black. My
daily activities kept me within a five-block radius and had done so for
years: I moved between my apartment, the café, Waist Watchers. My
life had narrow parameters, which is how I preferred it. I saw myself as
an outline then, waiting to be filled in.
From the outside, to someone like the girl, I might have seemed
sad, but I wasn’t. Each day I took thirty milligrams of the antidepressant Y ——. I had taken Y —— since my senior year of college. That year
there had been a situation with a boy. In the weeks after the Christmas break I slipped into a dark spiral, spending most of my time in the
library, pretending to study. The library was on the seventh floor and
I stood at the window one afternoon and imagined jumping out of it
and landing in the snow, where it wouldn’t hurt as much. A librarian
saw me — later I found out I had been crying — and she called the campus doctor. Soon after that pharmaceuticals became inevitable. My
mother flew to Vermont. She and Dr. Willoughby (an old gray man,
with gray hair, tinted glasses, a discolored front tooth) decided it was
best for me to see a therapist and take Y ——. The medication took
away my sadness and replaced it with something else — not happiness,
but more like a low dull hum, a weak radio frequency of feeling that
couldn’t be turned up or down.
Long after college ended, and the therapy ended, and I’d moved to
New York, I continued to take Y ——. I lived in an apartment on Swann
WHEN I THINK OF MY LIFE
Street in Brooklyn, on the second floor of a brownstone. It was a long
and skinny place that stretched from the front of the building to the
back, with polished blond floorboards and a bay window that overlooked the street at the front. Such an apartment, on a coveted block,
was beyond my means, but my mother’s cousin Jeremy owned it and
reduced the rent for me. He would have let me live there rent free if
my mother hadn’t nosed in and demanded I pay something, but what
I paid was a small amount. Jeremy worked as a reporter for the Wall
Street Journal. After his wife died he was desperate to leave New York
and especially Brooklyn, the borough of his unhappiness. His bosses
sent him to Buenos Aires, then Cairo. There were two bedrooms in the
apartment and one of them was filled with his things, but it didn’t seem
as if he would ever come back for them.
There were few visitors to the apartment on Swann Street. My
mother came to see me once a year. My friend Carmen visited sometimes, but I mostly saw her at the café. In my real life I would have
more friends, and dinner parties and overnight guests, but my life
wasn’t real yet.
The day after my confrontation with the girl, I looked up and down
the street but I didn’t see her, so I set off, relieved not to be followed. A
day of work at the café awaited me, but first I would stop at my Waist
Watchers meeting, taking the long route so I could bypass the boys
who congregated at the end of my block and often made rude comments.
My Waist Watchers meetings were held in the basement of a
church on Second Street. The gray-rock church sat between a dry
cleaner and a health club, the outline of its stained-glass window a
daisy shape. Inside the church I walked down the circular steps to the
basement, where I was greeted at the door by the usual woman with
the clipboard. “Hello, Plum,” she said, and directed me to stand on
the scale. “Three hundred and four pounds,” she whispered, and I was
pleased that I was two pounds lighter than last week.
At the table by the door I signed the register and collected the
weekly recipes, moving quickly so I could leave before the meeting
began. I had been a Waist Watcher for years and didn’t need to attend
the meetings; if I never attended another one I would still be able to
recite the tenets of the program on my deathbed.
There were only women at these morning meetings, and most
of them were slightly older than me, with babies or toddlers they
bounced on their laps. They were doughy from past pregnancies, but
not big. Around them I felt much larger, as well as much younger. I was
more like one of Kitty’s teenage girls compared to them, even though
I was almost thirty. When I was around women who had grown-up
lives, the kind of life I thought I should have, I felt suspended in time,
like an animal floating in a jar of formaldehyde.
I made my way back up the stairs and put the recipes, which were
printed on thick card stock, into my laptop bag. At home I had a collection of more than a thousand Waist Watchers recipes, which I
arranged by snacks, main courses, desserts, and so on. After I cooked a
dish, I rated it on the back with a star. Five stars was the best.
I tried to be a good Waist Watcher, but it was difficult. I would
start off each day with the right breakfast and snacks, but sometimes I
would grow so hungry that my hands would shake and I couldn’t concentrate on anything. Then I’d eat something bad. I couldn’t stand
hunger. Hunger is what death must feel like.
Given my failure at dieting, my plan was to trade Waist Watchers
for weight-loss surgery. The surgery was scheduled for October, little
more than four months away. I was excited about it, but also terrified at
the thought of having my internal organs cut up and rearranged and of
the possible complications that might follow. The surgery would make
my stomach the size of a walnut; afterward I’d only be able to eat
spoonfuls of food each day for the rest of my life. That was the horrible part, but the miraculous part was that I would lose between ten
and twenty pounds a month. In one year it would be possible to lose
more than two hundred pounds, but I wouldn’t go that far. I wanted to
weigh 125 pounds, and then I would be happy. Waist Watchers could
never give me that. I’d been devoted to the program for years and I
was bigger than ever.
When I exited the dark church, blinking into the sunshine, I
expected to see the girl leaning against the tree, but she wasn’t there.
I hurried across the street so I didn’t have to pass in front of the health
club windows, where the smug spinners could have gawked at me.
Since I hadn’t seen the girl that day, I assumed I had scared her away, but
when I arrived at the café she was there. Rather than follow me, she had
begun to precede me. Perhaps she could claim that I was following her.
As I passed her table, she chewed the cap of her ballpoint pen,
feigning thought. I ignored her, heaving my laptop bag up onto my
usual table. With her nearby it was going to be difficult to concentrate
on my work, but I logged into my account and downloaded the new
messages, then opened the first one:
From: LuLu6
To: DaisyChain
Subject: step brother
Dear Kitty,
I’m 14 and a half. I hope u can help me. My mom got married last year
to this guy Larry. My real dad is dead. Larry has two sons they are my
step brothers Evan and Troy. I’m rilly scarred and I don’t know what to
do. So many times I have woke up in the middle of the nite and Troy
is in my room watching me sleeping. When he sees me awake he
leaves. He’s 19. I think maybe he touches me but I don’t know. One
time he came in to the bathroom when I was taking a shower naked
and he saw me. He said he likes my boobs. I told my mom and she
says I’m making this up so she will get divorced from Larry (cuz I hate
him). What should I do?
Luv,
LuAnne from Ohio
LuAnne was my first girl of the day, so I wasn’t yet working at the
height of my powers. I stared out the window to avoid the anxiety
brought by the blinking cursor and started my response in my head.
Dear LuAnne, I’m sorry your mother doesn’t believe you. Your mother shouldn’t be
allowed to call herself a mother. The mothers of Kitty’s readers often chose
men over their daughters, the desire for romance overwhelming the
need to protect their child. I was tempted to respond to LuAnne by
asking for her telephone number so I could call her mother and tell her
that she was a horrible person. I’m glad you came to me for help, LuAnne. Contact your school guidance counselor immediately. He or she will be able to help you
with your problem. No, that wouldn’t do. LuAnne deserved better than to
be passed off like a baton.
With the strange girl in my peripheral vision, like a tiny bug, I
placed my hands on the keyboard and began to type, channeling Kitty’s voice:
From: DaisyChain
To: LuLu6
Subject: Re: step brother
Dear LuAnne,
I’m *very* upset that your mom doesn’t believe you. I believe you! I
doesn’t have a lock, then put a chair or a piece of furniture in front of
it. Pile books or other heavy items on top of the furniture. If Troy still
gets into your room, scream as loud as you can when you see him. It
wouldn’t hurt to keep a baseball bat or other such weapon with you at
night. Do you have a cell phone? If so, call 911 in an emergency like this.
The next thing I want you to do is tell a trusted adult (your best friend’s
mom or your favorite teacher) what’s going on and she will be able to
you, you will need to contact the police. Do you know where the police
station is in your town? You could go there and explain what’s happening
I’m glad you reached out to me, LuAnne. I’m sending you courage
through this email.
Love,
Kitty xo
I read through my response and sent it off. I would try not to think
of LuAnne again, of her bedroom door with the chair in front of it,
of her stepbrother slipping under the covers with her and sentencing
her to a lifetime of therapy or worse. I needed to put her out of my
mind, and the Internet was convenient in that way — people could
be deleted, switched off. I responded to each girl only once, and if
she wrote again, I usually ignored her; with the volume of messages I
received each day, I didn’t have time to become a pen pal. To survive
my job I needed the callousness of an emergency room doctor.
Next.
There were hundreds of messages in my inbox. Before continuing
on, I wanted to order my lunch, the usual low-fat hummus and sprouts
on oatmeal bread (300), but the girl was standing at the counter, paying
for her fruit smoothie. Carmen served her without knowing there was an
invisible tether connecting the girl to me; wherever I went, so went she.
Carmen’s café looked like a 1950s kitchen, with walls painted turquoise, and vintage jadeite teacups on display. The front of it was
entirely glass, presenting a view of Violet Avenue that was a moving
tableau of people and cars. Carmen needed extra help occasionally
and I would work behind the counter or bake for her, arriving before
dawn to make cupcakes and banana bread. Despite the temptations, I
loved to bake, but I didn’t allow myself to do it often.
I met Carmen in college, and although we were merely acquaintances then, we connected again in New York. She allowed me to use
the café as an office. We were friends, since our relationship extended
beyond the café to phone calls and occasional outings, but with Carmen
pregnant, I couldn’t help but worry that things were going to change.
The girl returned to her table with the smoothie and sat down.
She didn’t write in her notebook, which sat unopened in front of her.
Instead, she twisted the silver rings she wore on each of her fingers,
moving from one finger to the next, looking bored. I had bored her.
Was the girl actually following me? She had seemed genuinely surprised when I confronted her. I couldn’t think of a reason why she’d
want to follow me, unless Kitty had sent her to spy on me, to make
sure I was doing my work. The girl didn’t seem like the type of person
who would work for Kitty, but then neither did I.
From: AshliMcB
To: DaisyChain
Subject: big problems
Dear Kitty,
This is going to sound strange, but I like to cut my breasts with a razor.
It’s something I started doing last month, but I don’t know why I do it. I
like to trace around my nipples and watch the blood seep through my
bra. It’s an embarrassing problem and there’s no one else I can tell it
to. I hate my breasts, so I don’t care if they’re scarred. They’re small
and mismatched. I’ve seen porn websites and I know I’m not normal
but I can’t keep cutting myself because I might bleed to death or get
infected. Please help. I can’t stop. I know it’s weird, but I do it because
it feels good. It hurts, but it feels good too.
Your friend Ashli (17 years old)
A cutter. I felt a momentary blip of dismay at the thought of such
troubled girls writing to a magazine editor for help, but if they didn’t
I’d be out of a job. I looked through my computer files and copied and
pasted my standard response about cutting, adding a few personalized
tweaks.
From: DaisyChain
To: AshliMcB
Subject: Re: big problems
Dear Ashli,
I’m very worried that you’re cutting yourself. Many girls do this, so
please don’t feel that you’re weird, but as your friend Kitty, I ask that
advice on this topic, but at the bottom of this message there is a web
address that will give you a lot of information and options for getting
help from professionals in your local area.
The next paragraph of my message would focus on breasts and
porn. I looked through my files: My Documents/Kitty/Breasts/Porn.
Many of us have breasts that don’t match. Please remember that
women in porn aren’t normal. You are normal!
To make her feel better, I could have told her that I dared not show
my own breasts, nipples pointed toward the floor, to anyone. I hated
to even show them to the doctor, though when I was lying down on
the examining table it wasn’t so bad; only when standing up could one
see the full, hideous effect. I couldn’t tell Ashli this because I was pretending to be Kitty, whose perfectly symmetrical breasts stood at full
salute, I was sure.
For most of the afternoon, the messages I answered fit into predictable categories (dieting, boys, razor blades and their various uses).
There was also a string of complaints from Canadian readers of the
magazine. (Dear Tania: Now, let’s be reasonable here, I didn’t refer to Quebec as
a country on purpose.) There were a few more difficult letters (Dear Kitty:
Have you ever fantasized about being raped?) but nothing I couldn’t handle.
As fast as I answered the messages, more of them flooded in, so I rarely
felt a sense of accomplishment. While girls in far-off lands had their
genitals trussed like Thanksgiving turkeys, Kitty’s girls had their own
urgent problems. (If Matt doesn’t call me, I’LL DIE.) I wasn’t good with
questions about boys.
There was no end to these pleas. They came from the heartland,
from north and south and east and west. It seemed there was no part of
the American landscape that was not soggy with the tears of so many
girls. After writing an email that explained the difference between
a vulva and a vagina (Your vagina is the passage to your cervix. It provides
an opening for menstrual blood. To answer your question, no, you cannot shave a
vagina. There is no hair there!), I looked up and noticed that the girl was
gone. Relieved, I opened the next message, not expecting something
of interest or anything to restore my faith in girl-kind. (Every night after
dinner I go into the bathroom and throw up.) Before I could slip into despair,
which usually happened every afternoon around three o’clock, Carmen surprised me with a cup of black coffee (FREE FOOD ) and an oatmeal cookie (195).
She was wearing a maternity top in a pastel shade; her enormous
belly looked like an Easter egg. She sat down across from me, letting
out a huff of air, running her fingers through her clipped black hair.
“Go on, read me one.” The messages from Kitty’s girls had a car-crash
allure.
I looked down at my computer screen. “Dear Kitty, is it always
wrong to have sex with your father?”
“You’re making that up. Please, God.” She was unsure and waiting
for a sign from me. When I started to laugh, she laughed too, and I
felt wicked, like a therapist mocking her patients. Carmen rubbed her
belly and said, “We used to want a girl, but now I’m not so sure. You’ve
scared me. Girls are scary.”
“Not on the surface,” I said. “Only when you dig deep.”
“That’s even scarier.”
While I had Carmen’s attention, I decided to ask her about the
strange girl. I hadn’t mentioned her before, not wanting to seem paranoid. “Did you see that girl sitting over there?” I said, pointing to the
empty chair.
“The one with the eyeliner? She’s been coming in a lot lately. Why,
was she bothering you?”
“She seems a bit strange, don’t you think?”
Carmen shrugged. “Not particularly. You see the people who come
in here.” She paused, and I hoped she was recalling something important about the girl. Instead, she asked if I would cover a shift for her
next week while she went to the doctor. I hesitated. I was trying to be
good on my diet. Sitting at my normal table wasn’t bad if I blocked
out the sights and smells around me and drank my coffee and tea, but
behind the counter was another matter.
“Sure,” I said. On some days, Carmen was the only person I spoke
to. It was only small talk, but at the right moments, she brought me out
of my head. For that, I owed her.
Carmen went back to work, and since I was being good, I took only
a small bite of the oatmeal cookie. Two teenage girls at the next table
smirked as they watched me. I set the cookie down and decided to
work more quickly so I could leave. The best way to work was to dive
headlong into the water, feeling my way in the darkness, not letting
anything stick to me, just letting the current carry me along:
Why are all the models in your magazine so skinny girls are so lucky I’ll
never be anything but fat ass bitch he said to me after class but I still
like him and I know that is crazy cuz he is so mean to me and my friend
want to get rid of these gross red bumps on our arms can you help me
please cuz my legs look so fat in a swimsuit so should I quit the swim
team or what should I do if no guy asks me to the dance cuz my cousin
asked me to go with him but is that incest or not every guy likes girls
with red hair on my vagina is not sexy tits my history teacher said to
me when I wore my purple shirt so he is a perv and now I’m afraid I’m
going to gain weight on vacation what can I do if I can’t afford a nose
job no guy will ever like me with this nose I am sure of it is a mystery
to me how you can sleep at night you fucking bitch but why did he say
that to me I am not a bitch so I don’t understand why my mom won’t
let me use tampons because I told her I would still be a virgin if I use
a tampon will you email her for me and my boyfriend had sex because
he made me do it but then he said he was sorry so does that count as
rape cuz I still love him but I am confused about why every time I wear
red lipstick it gets stuck to my front teeth.
And one last message, from a man in prison: I like to masturbate while
looking at pictures of you. Will you send me a pair of your panties?
Delete.
At home there was a package. I sat on my bed, the straps of my purse
and laptop bag still tangled around me, and ripped open the puffy
brown parcel. Inside was a knee-length poplin shirtdress, white with
purple trim. It was even prettier than the photographs in the catalog
had been.
In the corner of my bedroom was a floor-length mirror in a brass
frame. I kept it covered by a white sheet, which I tossed aside so I
could hold the dress in front of me, imagining what it would look like
when it fit. When I was done I put it in the closet with the other toosmall clothes.
My regular clothes, the ones I wore on a daily basis, were stuffed
into the dresser or flung on the floor. Stretchy and shapeless, threaded
with what must have been miles of elastic banding, they were not in
fashion or out of fashion; they were not fashion at all. I always wore
black and rarely deviated from the uniform of ankle-length skirts and
long-sleeved cotton tops, even in the summer. My hair was nearly
black too. For years it had been shaped into a shiny chin-skimming
bob, with blunt bangs cut straight across my forehead. I liked this
style, but it made my head look like a ball that could be twisted from
my round body, the way a cap is removed from a bottle of perfume.
Inside the closet, there was nothing black, only color and light.
For months I had been shopping for clothes that I would wear after
my surgery. Two or three times a week the packages arrived — blouses
in lavender and tangerine, pencil skirts, dresses, a selection of belts. (I
had never worn a belt.) I didn’t shop in person; when someone my size
went into a regular clothing store, people stared. I had done it once
after I’d spotted a dress in a store window that I couldn’t resist. I went
inside and paid for it, then had it gift-wrapped as though it were for
someone else.
No one knew about the clothes, not even Carmen or my mother.
Carmen didn’t even know about the surgery, but my mother did and
she was against it. She was worried about the potential complications.
She sent me articles that outlined the dangers of the procedure, as well
as a tragic story about children who were orphaned when their mother
died post-surgery. “But I don’t have any children,” I said to her on the
phone, unwilling to indulge her.
“That’s not the point,” she said. “What about me?”
This isn’t about you, I had wanted to say, and refused to discuss the
surgery with her again after that.
After straightening and rearranging the clothes, I shut the closet door.
I knew it was foolish to buy clothes I couldn’t try on. They might not fit
right when the time came, but I bought them anyway. I needed to open
the closet door and look at them and know this wasn’t like the other
times. Change was inevitable now. The real me, the woman I was supposed to be, was within my reach. I had caught her like a fish on a hook
and was about to reel her in. She wasn’t going to get away this time.
...
Carmen called to ask if I wanted to join her and her girlfriend at a pizzeria for dinner, but I didn’t like to eat at restaurants when I was following my program, so I said no. From one of the new Waist Watchers
recipe cards, I made lasagna, which used ground turkey instead of beef
and fat-free cheese and whole-wheat pasta. While it was cooking it
smelled like real lasagna, but it didn’t taste like it. I gave it three stars.
After I ate a small portion (230) with a green salad (150), I cut the rest
into squares and put them in the freezer. My hands were still slightly
trembly from hunger, but I would be good and not eat anything more.
After changing into my nightgown and brushing my teeth, I took
my daily dose of Y —— from the bottle, the pink pill. It was my ritual
before bed, like saying a prayer. As I finished my glass of water, I went
to the window in the front room and pulled back the curtain, looking
to see if the girl was sitting on the stoop, listening to her music, but
she wasn’t there.
P. W. SINGER and AUGUST COLE
Ghost Fleet
(Excerpt)
ON SALE: June 30, 2015
”
Two experts on the future of warfare join forces to create a taut, convincing novel
about the next world war.
“Reads like the very best of classic Tom Clancy, updated for the twenty-first century,
persuasive in its detail, simultaneously thrilling and terrifying.” —Phillip Meyer, author
of The Son
243 Miles Above the Earth’s Surface
“I am so sorry.”
What did Vitaly mean by that? As the sole American astronaut on
the International Space Station, U.S. Air Force Colonel Rick Farmer
was used to being the target of the Russian crew’s practical jokes. The
most recent had involved their sewing him shut inside his sleeping bag
and then wide-casting his reaction for the whole net to see.
Now, that had been funny. But this was outside. Different rules
when you’re floating outside, only a thin tether keeping you hooked to
the station.
The odd thing was that Cosmonaut Vitaly Simakov’s voice had been
unaccompanied by his usual booming laugh.
Farmer rechecked his tether, more for mental reassurance than any
need. It had been twenty-four minutes since he’d been able to raise
Vitaly or anyone else in the station on his suit’s radio. That message
was the last Farmer had heard from the mission commander after he’d
made his way out of the station to repair the fluky number four solar
panel. Even Houston was offline. He chalked up the silence to another
one of those technical problems that made daily life in space so difficult, rather than the romance NASA still spun for the media.
With a PhD from Caltech in systems engineering and over four
thousand flight hours in everything from T-38 trainers to F-22 stealth
fighter jets, Farmer knew that big, complicated things sometimes just
did not work as they were supposed to. He remembered the time his
twin boys had played around with his flight gear on the eve of his first
deployment to Afghanistan, half a lifetime ago. “Daddy needs a helmet
because sometimes his job can be really hard.” He hadn’t told them
that in his line of work, the mundane stuff was the hardest.
Farmer approached the hatch to reenter the space station.
“Farmer, validate. Open hatch,” he commanded the system.
Nothing.
He said it again, emphasizing each word this time to allow the voicerecognition software to lock on.
“Farmer. Validate. Open. Hatch.”
It was as if the system couldn’t hear him.
He reached for the manual override and lifted the cover that protected the emergency-open button. Well, he thought as he pressed it,
this was fast on its way to becoming one.
Nothing.
He pressed again, harder, the force of his fingers against the bright
red button pushing him backward in the weightless environment of
space. If he hadn’t been tethered to the station, that push would have
sent him spinning off at a rate of ten feet per second on a trajectory
toward Jupiter.
Nothing. What the hell?
The outside of his visor was gold-coated, the world’s costliest sunglasses. Inside was an array of computer displays projecting everything
from his location to the suit’s internal temperature.
Farmer couldn’t help noticing the red light flashing in the corner, as
if he needed the computer to inform him that his heart rate was spiking. He paused to center himself with a deep breath, looking down at
the sweeping span of blue beneath. He tried to ignore the black void
ringing Earth, which seemed to widen menacingly. After half a minute
of steady breathing from his core, just like the NASA yoga instructor
back in Houston had taught him, he stared hard at the door, willing it
to open.
He tried the button again, and then again. Nothing.
He reached down for his HEXPANDO. The expanding-head hexagonal tool had been designed by NASA’s engineers to remove or install socket-head cap screws in hard-to-reach places. It was a glorified
wrench.
The instructions explicitly said that the HEXPANDO was “not intended for application of torque.”
Screw it.
Farmer banged the HEXPANDO on the hatch. He couldn’t hear
any sound in the vacuum of space, but the pounding might resonate
within the station’s artificial atmosphere on the other side of the hatch.
Then a hiss of static and Farmer’s radio came back to life.
“Vitaly, you hear me? I was getting worried there. The comms are
on the fritz again, and now the damn voice-command systems on the
hatch aren’t working,” said Farmer. “Tell Gennady I am going to send
him back to trade school in Siberia. His repair job yesterday actually
broke everything. I need you to open manually from the inside.”
“I cannot. It is no longer my decision,” said Vitaly, his voice somber.
“Say again?” said Farmer. The red heart light pulsed just outside his
field of vision, as if Mars were suddenly blinking over his shoulder.
“I am no longer authorized to open hatch,” said Vitaly.
“Authorized? What does that mean? Get Houston, we are going to
sort this out,” said Farmer.
“Goodbye, my friend. I am truly sorry. It is orders,” said Vitaly.
“I’ve got an order for you. Open the fucking hatch!” said Farmer.
The soft pulse of static that followed was the last sound Farmer
would hear.
After five minutes of pounding on the hatch, Farmer turned from
the station to stare down at the Earth beneath his feet. He could make
out the Asian landmass wreathed in a white shroud, the cloud of smog
stretching from Beijing southward toward Shanghai.
How much time did he have? The red light’s urgent flashing indicated spiking respiration. He tried to calm himself by running calculations in his head of the Earth’s rate of turn, the station’s velocity, and
his remaining oxygen. Would it be enough time for the Eastern Seaboard to come into view? His wife and grown boys were vacationing
on Cape Cod, and he wanted to look down at them one last time.
PA R T 1
You can fight a war for a long time or you can make your nation strong.
You cannot do both.
— S U N -T Z U, T H E ART O F WA R
10,590 Meters Below Sea Level, Mariana Trench, Pacific Ocean
Sometimes history is made in the dark.
As he scanned the blackness, Zhu Jin thought about what his wife
would be doing right now. He couldn’t see her, but he knew that ten
kilometers above, Liu Fang would be hunched over her keyboard, ritually tightening her ponytail to burn off the tension. He could imagine
her rough sneeze, knowing how the cigarette smoke from the other
geologists irritated her.
The screens inside the Jiaolong-3 Flood Dragon deep-water submersible were the only portholes that modern science could offer the
mission’s chief geologist. His title was truly meaningful in this case. Lo
Wei, the Directorate officer sent to monitor them, had command, but
ultimately, responsibility for the success or failure of the mission fell
on Zhu.
So it was appropriate at this moment, he thought, that he alone was
in control, deep below the COMRA (China Ocean Mineral Resources
Research and Development Association) deep-sea exploration vessel
Xiang Yang Hong 18. This particular pocket of the Mariana Trench belonged to him alone.
Zhu guided the course underwater with a series of gentle tilts of the
softly glowing control-sleeve gloves he wore. He was moving too close
to the sheer trench walls to consider using the autopilot. He exhaled to
clear his mind. There was so much pressure, poised to crush his vessel
and everyone’s dreams at any moment.
He adjusted the headset with a nudge of his shoulder. There, just as
he thought. Blinking, he leaned forward, as if proximity to the lightly
glowing video screen and the crushing darkness beyond the sub’s hull
could make the moment any more real.
This dive was the last; it had to be.
A wave of his hands, and the sub backed away from the wall and
paused, hovering. Zhu turned off the exterior lights. Then he turned
off the red interior lighting. He savored the void.
The moment had come. It was the culmination of literally decades
of research and investment. No other nation had even attempted to
plumb the depths of the sea like Zhu and his comrades, which was
why 96 percent of the ocean floor still remained unexplored and unexploited. Indeed, the training alone for the deep-sea dive had taken a
full four years once the team at Tianjin University developed the submersible. Compared to that, the five days of searching on this mission
was nothing.
This descent, with Zhu at the controls, was the mission’s last shot.
At some point soon, the team knew, the Americans would be paying
them a “friendly” visit, or maybe they would have the Australians do it
for them. The Chinese were too close to the big U.S. base in Guam; it
was a wonder nobody had come to look into what they were doing yet.
Either way, the clock was ticking, both for the COMRA vessel and, he
worried, its crew.
He thought of Lieutenant Commander Lo Wei standing over Zhu’s
wife’s shoulder, getting impatient, lighting cigarette after cigarette as
she sneezed her way through the smoke. Zhu could almost feel the
crew scrutinizing her face with the same intensity they viewed their
monitors. They would think, but not say aloud, How could he fail us,
when he knew the consequences for us all?
Zhu had not failed.
The discovery itself was anticlimactic. A screen near Zhu’s right
hand flashed a brief message in blue and then flipped into a map
mode. There had been indicators of a gas field here, but as the data
streamed in, he now knew why his gut had guided him to this spot.
He nudged the submersible on, sorting the deployments of the sub’s
disposable autonomous underwater vehicles, which would allow the
team to map the full extent of the discovery. Each vessel was, in effect, a mini-torpedo whose sonic explosion afforded the submersible’s
imaging-by-sound sensors a deeper understanding of the riches beneath the sea floor. The sound waves allowed the computer to “see”
the entirety of the field buried kilometers below the crust. The mini-
torpedo technology came from the latest submarine-hunting systems
of the U.S. Navy; the resource-mapping software had originated with
the dissertation research of a PhD student at Boston University. They
would never know their roles in making history.
After thirty-five minutes of mapping, it was done.
Enough time in the dark, Zhu thought. The transition between the
deep and the surface, he once confided to Liu, was the worst. To die
there would be his hell, trapped in the void between the light of day
and the marvels of the abyss. But this time it was his joy; the void filled
with the sense of anticipation at sharing the news.
When he opened the submarine’s hatch, he saw the entire crew
peering over the port rail, staring down at him. Even the cook, with
his scarred forearms and missing pointer finger on his left hand, had
come to gape at the Jiaolong-3 bobbing on the surface.
He squinted against the bright Pacific sun, careful to keep his face
expressionless. He searched for Liu among the crew gathered at the
ship’s railings. At the crowd’s edge, Lieutenant Commander Lo stood
staring at him with a sour face, an unspoken question in his eyes. Zhu
locked eyes with his wife, and when he couldn’t contain his discovery anymore, he smiled. She shouted uncharacteristically, leaping with
both hands in the air.
The rest of the crew turned to stare at her and then began cheering.
Just beyond them, a faint sea breeze lifted the Directorate flag hanging
by the ship’s stern; the yellow banner with red stars fluttered slightly. To
Zhu, it seemed like perfection, fitting for the moment. When he looked
back to the rail, he noticed that Lieutenant Commander Lo was gone,
already on his way inside to report the mission results back to Hainan.
U.S. Navy P-8, Above the Mariana Trench, Pacific Ocean
Even from eight thousand feet up, they could see that the people on
the deck were celebrating something.
“Maybe the captain announced a pool party,” said Commander Bill
“Sweetie” Darling from the controls.
Darling and his crew were on their way back from a check-out flight
on the P-8 Poseidon’s recent engine upgrades. The plane had been designed for warship hunting, but there were none in the quadrant, and
they were bored. The Directorate research vessel offered some excitement, at least as much as could be had in this corner of the Pacific.
The copilot, Dave “Fang” Treehorn, sent a live feed of the Xiang
Yang Hong 18’s deck from the P-8’s sensor-pod cameras. The cockpit of
the Poseidon, a Boeing 737 passenger jet modified to Navy specifications for sub hunting, was considered spacious by military standards.
But military aviators always want more information, and Darling regularly flipped through the available sensor feeds on the cockpit screens
to satisfy the craving.
“Time to head down and take a closer look?” asked Treehorn.
“No fair that they get to have all the fun today. If it’s a party, we
should have been invited,” said Darling. “Make sure to zoom in and
grab shots of that submersible; give the intel shop some busywork.”
“Registry says it’s a science expedition,” said Treehorn.
The P-8 dove smoothly down to five hundred feet, Darling banking
the plane in a steep turn that kept the vessel off the starboard wing. A
plane that big, that fast, and that low roaring overhead was disconcerting to any observer. The crew of the Xiang Yang Hong 18 would be on
notice now.
“X-Ray Yankee Hotel 18, this is U.S. Navy Papa-8 asking if you need
assistance,” said Darling. “We noticed you are stopped just over a
rather deep hole in the ocean, not the best place for snorkeling.”
Treehorn started laughing, as did the rest of the P-8 crew listening
in on the comms.
Darling brought the plane back up to a thousand feet. “That’s good;
now maybe they can actually hear their radio,” said Treehorn.
“Got their attention, though,” said Darling.
“I’ll say. Check your screen. They’re hoisting the submersible and
trying to put a tarp over it at the same time,” said Treehorn. “One guy
just fell overboard.”
Then a voice came on the radio. Darling instantly recognized the
command tone of a fellow member of the military brotherhood.
“U.S. Navy P-8, this is Zhu Jin, chief scientist of an official expedition of the China Ocean Mineral Resources Research and Devel-
opment Association. We are in international waters, operating under
scientific charter. Do you copy?”
“We copy, XYH 18,” said Darling. “I don’t want to get into the legalities, but these waters are protected U.S. Exclusive Economic Zone, as
designated by the Mariana Trench Marine National Monument. Stand
by. We will be vectoring a U.S. Coast Guard vessel to ensure that you
are not engaged in illegal fishing.”
“Negative. This is a scientific mission. We do not need authorization. Any further interference with this peaceful mission will be considered a hostile act by the Directorate government,” said the voice.
“Do you copy?”
“Well, that got nasty pretty fast,” said Treehorn to his pilot.
“Foreplay’s for chumps,” said Darling.
“Are we really calling in the Coasties?” asked Treehorn.
“Naw. I guarantee they aren’t fishing, but no need to start a war over
it,” Darling responded.
“We copy, XYH 18,” he said into the radio. “Papa-8 is leaving station.
You lost one overboard, don’t forget.”
Darling brought the P-8 up to three thousand feet and powered
back the engines, giving the big jet a near weightless moment. Then
Darling brought the P-8 around and pointed the nose down at the Chinese ship’s stern, backing off the twin engines’ power even more, so
that the almost ninety-ton jet’s dive was nearly silent.
“We’re not done yet. I’m going to take her low, and when they’ve
got their heads down, we drop a Remora two thousand meters off the
stern,” said Darling.
“Aye, sir,” said the weapons crewman. “Standing by.”
Xiang Yang Hong 18, Mariana Trench, Pacific Ocean
Lieutenant Commander Lo handed the radio’s mike back to the
captain.
“This is taking too long,” said Lo. “We need to be gone before their
border-guard ship arrives. Dr. Zhu, do you have everything that your
team needs?”
“Yes, we could do more surveys, but it is —”
A roar shook the entire ship. Zhu hit the deck with his hands over
his ears. There was a flash of gray as the P-8 went overhead at full
power less than a hundred feet off the starboard side.
Lo couldn’t help but admire the move. Spiteful, yet audacious. The
scientist felt like he might throw up.
As the jet’s thunder receded, one of the crew shouted, “Something
in the water, a torpedo behind us!”
“Calm down,” said Lo, standing with his hands on his hips. “If it was
a torpedo, we’d already be dead. It’s just a sonobuoy, maybe one of their
Remora underwater drones.”
“Do they know?” said Zhu.
“No, there’s nothing up here of interest. What matters for us is far
below,” said Lo, nonplussed, as he eyed the drone now following in
their wake.
He turned back to the scientist. “And Zhu?” said Lo. “The leadership is aware of your success. Enjoy the moment with your wife. And
make sure the submersible is secured.”
It was the first kind word he had ever said to Zhu.
National Defense Reserve Fleet, Suisun Bay, California
The sun rising over the East Bay gave the fog a paper-lantern glow.
“Torres, you sleep at all last night?” said Mike Simmons. The contractor patiently scanned the water ahead of the battered aluminum
launch, seeming to look right through the nineteen-year-old kid he
shared it with. His fist enveloped the outboard motor’s throttle, which
he held with a loose grip, gentle despite his callused palms and barnacle-like knuckles. He sat with one knee resting just below his chin, the
other leg sprawling lazily toward the bow, at ease but ready to kick the
kid overboard at a moment’s notice.
“No, but I’m compensated,” said Seaman Gabriel Torres. “Took a
stim before I came in.”
Mike took a sip from a pitted steel sailor’s mug. His right trigger
finger had a permanent crook from decades of carrying his coffee with
him eighteen hours a day. He shifted his weight slightly and the launch
settled deeper to starboard, causing Torres to catch himself on his
seat in the bow. The retired chief petty officer weighed a good eighty
pounds more than Torres, the difference recognizable in their voices as
much as in the way the launch accommodated them.
“Big group sim down at the Cow Palace again,” said Torres. “Brazilian feed. Retro night. Carnival in Rio, back in the aughts.”
“You know,” Mike said, “I was in Rio once then. Not for Carnival,
though. Unbelievable. More ass than a . . . how I got any of my guys
back on the ship, I still do not know.”
“Hmmm,” Torres said. He nodded with absent-minded politeness,
his attention fixed on his viz glasses. All these kids were the same once
they put those damn things on, thought Mike. If they missed something
important, they knew they could just watch it again. They could call up
anything you’d ever said to them, yet they could never remember it.
The gold-rimmed Samsung glasses that Torres wore were definitely not Navy issue. Mike caught a flash of the Palo Alto A’s @ logo
in reverse on the lens. So Torres was watching a replay of Palo Alto’s
game against the Yankees from last night. Beneath the game’s display, a
news-ticker video pop-up updated viewers on the latest border clashes
between Chinese and Russian forces in Siberia.
“Game was a blowout, but the no-hitter by Parsons fell apart at the
bottom of the eighth,” said Mike. “Too bad for the A’s.”
Torres, busted, took off the glasses and glared at Mike, whose eyes
continued to pan across the steely water.
The young sailor knew not to say anything more. Shouting at a contractor was a quick path to another write-up. And more important,
there was something about the old man that made it clear that, even
though he was retired, he would like nothing more than to toss Torres
overboard, and he’d do it without spilling a drop of coffee.
“Seaman, you’re on duty. I may be a civilian now and out of your
chain of command,” said Mike, “but you work for the Navy. Do not
disrespect the Navy by disappearing into those damn glasses.”
“Yes, sir,” said Torres.
“It’s ‘Chief,’ ” said Mike. “ ‘Sir’ is for officers. I actually work for a
living.”
He smiled at the old military joke, winking to let Torres know the
situation was over as far as he was concerned. That was it, right there.
The sly charm that had gotten him so far and simultaneously held him
back. If Torres hadn’t been aboard, the chief could have puttered across
the bay at a leisurely seven knots and pulled up, if he had the tide right,
at the St. Francis Yacht Club. Grab a seat at the bar and swap old sea
stories. After a while, one of the divorcées who hung out there would
send over a drink, maybe say something about how much he looked
like that old Hollywood actor, the one with all the adopted kids from
around the world. Mike would then crack the old line that he had kids
around the world too, he just didn’t know them, and the play would be
on.
The rising sun began to reveal the outlines of the warships moored
around them. The calls of a flight of gulls overhead made the silent,
rusting vessels seem that much more lifeless.
“Used to be a bunch of scrap stuck in the Ghost Fleet,” said Mike,
giving a running commentary as they passed between an old fleet
tanker from the 1980s and an Aegis cruiser retired after the first debt
crisis. “But a lot of ships here were put down before their time. Retired
all the same, though.”
“I don’t get why we’re even here, Chief. These old ships, they’re
done. They don’t need us,” said Torres. “And we don’t need them.”
“That’s where you’re wrong,” said Mike. “It may seem like putting
lipstick on old whores in a retirement home, but you’re looking at the
Navy’s insurance policy, small as it may now be. You know, they kept
something like five hundred ships in the Ghost Fleet back during the
Cold War, just in case.”
“Floater, port side,” said Torres.
“Thanks,” said Mike, steering the launch around a faded blue plastic
barrel bobbing in the water.
“And here’s our newest arrival, the Zumwalt,” Mike announced,
pointing out the next ship anchored in line. “It didn’t fit in with the
fleet when they wasted champagne on that ugly bow, and it doesn’t belong here now. Got no history, no credibility. They should have turned
it into a reef, but all that fake composite crap would just kill all the
fish.”
“What’s the deal with that bow?” said Torres. “It’s going the wrong
direction.”
“Reverse tumblehome is the technical term,” said Mike. “See how the
chine of the hull angles toward the center of the ship, like a box-cutter blade? That’s what happens when you go trying to grab the future
while still being stuck two steps behind the present. DD(X) is what
they called them at the start, as if the X made it special. Navy was going to build a new fleet of twenty-first-century stealthy battleships with
electric guns and all that shit. Plan was to build thirty-two of them. But
the ship ended up costing a mint, none of the ray guns they built for it
worked for shit, and so the Navy bought just three. And then when the
budget cuts came after the Dhahran crisis, the admirals couldn’t wait
to send the Z straight into the Ghost Fleet here.”
“What happened to the other two ships?” said Torres.
“There are worse fates for a ship than being here,” said Mike, thinking about the half-built sister ships being sold off for scrap during the
last budget crisis.
“So what do we gotta do after we get aboard it?” asked Torres.
“Aboard her,” said Mike. “Not it.”
“Chief, you can’t say that anymore,” said Torres. “Her.”
“Jesus, Torres, you can call the ship him if you want,” said Mike. “But
don’t ever, ever call any of these uglies it. No matter what the regs say.”
“Well, she, he — whatever — looks like an LCS,” said Torres. Officially designated FF for frigate, everyone in the Navy still called the LCS
by its original name, Littoral Combat Ship. “That’s where I wish I was.”
“An LCS, huh? Dreaming of being off the coast of Bali in a ‘little
crappy ship,’ wind blowing through your hair at fifty knots, throwing
firecrackers at pirates?” said Mike. “Get the line ready.”
“Didn’t I hear your son was aboard an LCS?” asked Torres. “How
does he like it?”
“I don’t know,” said Mike. “We’re not in touch.”
“Sorry, Chief.”
“You know, Torres, you must have really pissed somebody off to get
stuck with me and the Ghost Fleet.” The old man was clearly changing
the subject.
Torres fended the launch off from a small barge at the stern. Without
looking, he tied a bowline knot that made the old chief suppress a
smile.
“Nice knot there,” said Mike. “You been practicing like I showed
you?”
“No need,” said Torres, tapping his glasses. “Just have to show me
once and it’s saved forever.”
USS Coronado, Strait of Malacca
Each of the dark blue leather seats in the USS Coronado’s wardroom
had a movie-theater chair’s sensory suite, complete with viz-glasses
chargers, lumbar support, and thermoforming heated cushions that
seemed almost too comfortable for military life — until you were sitting through your second hour of briefings.
This briefer, the officer in charge of the ship’s aviation detachment
of three remote-piloted MQ-8 Fire Scout helicopters, thanked her
audience and returned to her seat. A few side conversations abruptly
stopped when the executive officer rose to give his ops intel brief.
When the XO, the ship’s second in command, stood at the head of
the room, you felt a little bit like you were back in elementary school
with the gym teacher looking down at you. The twenty-first-century
Navy was supposed to be all about brains. But physical presence still
mattered, and the XO, Commander James “Jamie” Simmons, had it.
He stood six four and still looked like the University of Washington
varsity heavyweight rower he’d once been, projecting a physicality that
had become rare among the increasingly technocratic officer corps.
“Good morning. We’re doing this my way today,” said Simmons.
“No viz.”
The crew groaned at the prospect of having to endure an entire brief
without being able to multitask or have their viz glasses record the
proceedings.
A young lieutenant in the back coughed into her fist: “Old school.”
Coronado’s captain, Commander Tom Riley, stood to the side holding a gleaming black ceramic-and-titanium-mesh coffee mug emblazoned with the shipbuilder’s corporate logo. He couldn’t help himself
and smiled at the impertinent comment.
The display screen loaded the first image and projected it out into
the room in a 3-D ripple: a heavily tattooed man on a matte-black
electric waterbike firing an assault rifle one-handed up at the bridge of
a container ship. Simmons had picked up this technique from an old
admiral who’d lectured at the Naval War College: instead of the typical huge slide deck with immersive animations, he used just a single
picture for each point he wanted to make.
“Now that I’ve got your attention,” said Simmons, switching the image to a map of their position at the entry to the Strait of Malacca. A
swath of red pulsing dots waited there, each marking where a pirate
attack had taken place in the previous year. “More than half of the
world’s shipping passes through this channel, which make these red
spots a global concern.”
The roughly six-hundred-mile-long channel between the former
Republic of Indonesia and Malaysia was less than two miles wide at
its narrowest, barely dividing Malaysia’s authoritarian society from the
anarchy that Indonesia had sunk into after the second Timor war. Pirates were a distant memory for most of the world, but the red dots
showed that this part of the Pacific was a gangland. The attackers used
skiffs and homemade aerial drones to seize and sell what they could,
mostly to fund the hundreds of militias throughout the archipelago.
None of the gangs bothered with hostages ever since Chinese special operations forces, at the behest of that country’s largest shipping
concern, had wiped out the population of three entire islands in a single night. It didn’t end the attacks, though. There were six thousand
inhabited islands left. Now the pirates just killed everyone when they
seized a ship.
“This is Coronado’s focus during the next three days,” said Simmons. “It’s a standard presence patrol. But it connects to a bigger picture that Captain’s asked me to brief you on: We will be linking up with
the Directorate escort force at eighteen hundred, making this a true
multinational convoy.”
The XO then changed images, zooming out from the Coronado’s
present position in its southeast corner to a larger map showing the
strategic landscape of the entire Pacific.
“This leads me to the main brief this morning. It’s a long one. But
there’s a bonus: if you don’t fall asleep on me, I’ll make sure you get
double your PACE ed cred.” That brought a few smiles; the Program
for Afloat College Education, a quick way for sailors to earn college
credits on the Navy’s dime, was popular among the young crew.
“We’re breaking some ground here on this multinational undertaking. It’s the first joint mission with Directorate naval forces since
Washington started the embargo threats,” he said. “Which means our
friends from Hainan are taking it seriously. As you can see on the
screen, the Directorate will have one of their new oilers here for refueling, which it doesn’t really need. They want us to see that in addition to
having the world’s biggest economy, they’re buying their naval forces
the range to operate anywhere on the planet.
“To understand why having a ship like an oiler is a big deal, you need
to take a step back. Let’s start with Dhahran three years ago. When the
nuke — well, more technically, the radiological dirty bomb — went off,
it made the Saudi house of cards fall down. Between Dhahran glowing
and the fights over who comes in after the Al Saud family, the world
economy’s still reeling from the hub of the global oil industry effectively going offline,” he said.
His next slide showed a graph of energy prices spiking. “Oil’s finally
coming off the two-hundred-ninety-dollar peak after the attack, but
you don’t want to know how much this cruise is costing the taxpayers.
Put it this way: enjoy yourselves and all this sunshine because your
grandkids are still going to be paying the tab.”
“They’ll be paying in ramen,” said Lieutenant Gupal, one of the
ship’s newest officers. Ramen was slang for RMN, renminbi, the Chinese currency that, along with the euro, had joined the American dollar as the global reserve currency following the dollar’s post-Dhahran
crash.
“At least we can sail with our own oil now,” said Captain Riley. “When
I joined back in the Stone Age, Middle East oil owned the market.”
“True enough,” said Simmons. “And shale extraction is coming back
at even higher levels than before the moratorium after the New York
quake. Dhahran made people stop caring so much about groundwater
seepage.”
A new map of global energy reserves appeared on the screen. Simmons stepped closer to the crew and continued.
“The captain hit the key change to focus on. The scramble for new
energy resources, heightening regional tensions here, here, and here,
are sparking a series of border clashes around the world. The fact that
the South China Sea oil fields were disappointments put new pressure
on the Directorate. The hunt goes on,” said Jamie. “The oilers are the
Directorate’s way of showing that their interest in this is now global.”
A screen shot of a smoking mine in South Africa replaced the map.
“That’s the Spiker mine, near South Africa’s border with Mozambique. Remember that? These trends all connect. Even the renewed
push toward alternative energy sources has caused more conflict than
cooperation. Technologies like solar and deep-cycle batteries depend
on rare-earth materials, rare being the operative word,” said Simmons.
The picture shifted to the iconic photo of the green Chinese People’s
Liberation Army tank bulldozing into the Ministry of Public Security’s
riot-control truck as the crowd in Shanghai’s People’s Square cheered
the soldiers on.
“This is important, so pay attention,” said Simmons. “You all know
the history of the Directorate. When the world economy cratered after Dhahran, the old Chinese Communist Party couldn’t keep things
humming. Their big mistake was calling in the military to put down
the urban workers’ riots, thinking that the troops would do their dirty
work for them, just like back in ’89. They failed to factor in that a
new generation of more professional military and business elite saw
the problem differently than they did. Turned out the new guard
viewed the nepotism and corruption of those ‘little princes’ who had
just inherited their power as a bigger threat to China’s stability than
the rioters. They booted them out, and instead you’ve got a Directorate regime that’s more popular and more competent than the previous
government, and technocratic to the extreme. The business magnates
and the military have divided up rule and roles. Capitalism and nationalism working hand in hand, rather than the old contradictions
they had back in the Communist days.”
The image switched to one of the Directorate Navy’s new aircraft
carriers tied up next to a pier, Shanghai’s skyline in the background.
“The bottom line is that the Directorate has changed China. They
took a regime mired in corruption and on the brink of civil war and
forged a locked-down country marching in the same direction, the
nation’s business leaders and the military joined at the hip.
“But net assessment, as they teach you back in the schoolhouse, isn’t
only about looking outward; it’s also about knowing yourself and your
own place in history.”
A visual of two maps of the globe appeared, the first of British trading routes and colonies circa 1914, the second a current disposition
of U.S. forces and bases, some eight hundred dots spread across the
world.
“Some say we’re fighting, or rather not fighting, a cold war with the
Directorate, just like we did with the Soviet Union more than half a
century ago. But that may not be the right case to learn from. About
a hundred years back, the British Empire faced a problem much like
ours today: How do you police an empire when you’ve got a shrinking
economy relative to the world’s and a population no longer so excited
to meet those old commitments?”
A montage of U.S. Navy aircraft carriers in port appeared, the last
shot a lingering image of CVN-80, the new USS Enterprise, still under
construction.
“And, of course, if that is the case, you can’t keep doing things the
old way on the cheap. Take capital ships, the way navies back then, and
even today, measured force. With the Ford-class carriers taking so long
to build, although the U.S. Navy has nine CVNs, that actually means
four in service to cover the entire globe. And with the cost of keeping
our military in Afghanistan, Yemen, and, now, Kenya, well, we’ve had
to get used to working without them.”
“I’d rather be on this ship than a carrier anyway,” said Gupal. “Just a
bigger bull’s-eye for an incoming Stonefish.”
“Secure that mouth, Lieutenant, or you’re not even gonna last one
cruise on this ship,” said Riley, jabbing a titanium e-cigar in the air.
“Aye, aye, Captain,” said Gupal sheepishly.
Simmons, as the XO, was supposed to be the bad cop to Captain
Riley’s good cop, making the reversal of roles that much more amusing
to the crew.
“Lieutenant, all jokes aside, you are making my point. You’re right
that the DF-21E, the Stonefish anti-ship ballistic missile, is not really
about us,” said Simmons. “But I want you to think about the various
trends, the why, and then the what-next. So, what does the Stonefish
offer the Chinese?”
“Well, sir, it’s like a boxer stretching his arms out farther. Gives them
the ability to target our big deck carriers before we can get in range of
China,” said Gupal.
“Right, it gives them freedom of action. So if you’re Directorate,
what do you do with that freedom? And why, or even when? These
are the questions I want you asking. Just because you see the world
one way today does not mean it will be that way tomorrow. It’s pirates
today. What will it be next?” asked Simmons.
Captain Riley stepped over to Simmons. He smiled, but his body
language made it clear he was not completely pleased with the briefing. “Thank you, XO. The key, folks, is to assess these threats. There’s
dangers, but let’s not build these guys up to be ten feet tall. And if it
comes down to a boxing match, Big Navy’s spent literally billions on
the Air-Sea Battle concept, just for the Stonefish threat and more. In
any case, given what’s playing out on the Siberian border, it might be
better for the XO to brief the next Russian ship we see rather than us.
If anyone is going to war with the Directorate, it’s Moscow.”
“Yes, sir,” said Simmons. “Any questions?” He looked around the
room and chewed his cheek to keep from saying anything more.
Lieutenant Gupal raised his hand. “Sir, where does that leave us on
the patrol? How should we think about the Directorate forces here?
Friend or foe? Or frenemy?”
“Like I said, the Chinese are more likely to go to war with Russia
than us,” Riley replied. “And if the idea does cross their mind to tangle
with us, well, they just don’t have the experience to do it right. The
XO’s history lesson should’ve also mentioned that China hasn’t fought
a major war since the 1940s.”
“Neither has the U.S. Navy,” said Simmons quietly.
Silence followed. A few of the crew started fiddling with their glasses
in their laps, trying to look busy. Lieutenant Gupal, though, was too
green to understand that the silence wasn’t another opportunity for
him to gain notice. What worked at the Naval Academy was the wrong
call in the wardroom.
“XO, do you think the captain’s right about Russia and China,
though?” asked Gupal.
Simmons glanced at Riley before looking at Gupal.
“The Directorate has been making claims about their guest-worker
rights being abused by the Russians and how their government is not
beholden to the old borders set in treaties signed by prior regimes on
both sides,” said Simmons. “So if I was in Moscow, I’d potentially come
to the same conclusion the captain has. And the Russians seem to be
acting on that belief. The latest satellite photos showed the Russian
Pacific fleet has sortied from its base in Vladivostok, most likely to put
some range between it and the Chinese air bases to complicate any
potential sneak attack. It’s the right move. The history supports it.”
“And with that rare praise from the XO, dismissed,” said Captain
Riley. “We know where to get our sunshine when we need it.”
U.S. Embassy, Beijing
The ambassador loved parties. So did Commander Jimmie Links, but
for different reasons.
The truth was the parties were just an excuse. This farewell soiree
was in his honor — he was finishing up two years in the defense attaché’s office — but no matter the country the guest came from, no
matter the rank, no matter the clout, everyone in the room was there
to collect. Eyeglasses, jewelry, watches, whatever — all were constantly
recording and analyzing. Suck it all up and let the filters sort it out.
It was not much different from how the people back home did their
shopping, wide-casting for discounts.
Links watched a beautiful Chinese woman in her late twenties glide
by in a floor-length translucent SpecTran-fiber dress and noticed the
telltale strip of stiff-looking skin at the base of her neck. The new folks
joining the three-letter agencies didn’t have a choice anymore. The
human body, with the right technology, is an extraordinary antenna.
Fortunately, as a U.S. Navy officer who’d joined before the policy shift,
Links had gotten out of that one, at least for the moment. The Navy
wasn’t giving him a break; it was just that no one had figured out yet
if the chips would interfere with sensitive avionics or ship systems. At
some point, though, tradition would lose out to technology.
Someone tapped a glass, and the noise in the room hushed to a
murmur. Links looked at his vodka martini and eyed the lemon twist.
The question wasn’t whether it was a recording device, but whose.
“Together, let us raise our glasses on this occasion to acknowledge
our common interests and objectives,” said General Wu Liao, a Directorate air force commander who Links knew was about to announce
another wave of corruption purges. Links even knew the names of the
men who would be executed in three days, all because Wu’s driver had
left a window cracked open to smoke. That’s how good the collection
was.
“It is in a navy officer’s honor I toast. That is not something you
often hear from an air force officer of any country’s military.”
Polite laughter from fifteen different nationalities followed the joke.
“The joint China-U.S. exercises to help bring order to the waters
around the former Republic of Indonesia are a sign our future together
will be a strong one,” said General Wu. “As for our neighbors to the
north, I cannot say the same.”
Wu’s angry glance at a Russian officer standing in the corner shifted
the guests’ gaze and cut off any remaining laughter. The Russian nodded indifferently and casually moved a highball glass from one hand to
the other, as if he cared more about the temperature of his vodka than
the speech.
After the toast, Links walked over to the Russian. Major General
Sergei Sechin was a regular on the party circuit. He walked with the
confidence of someone who’d been in uniform for most of his life, and
he always smiled like he had just been told a bawdy joke. Sechin had
been in Beijing for over a decade, so he must have been very good at
his job if he was able to keep his own bosses happy while also riding
out the Directorate’s rise to power. Besides the violent purges of the old
Communist Party leadership, there had been more than a few deadly
traffic “accidents” involving the foreign intelligence community.
“Sorry about that,” said Links. “Poorly done by Wu.”
“The Directorate new guard, especially the core, like Wu, say they
don’t care what anyone thinks. But it makes them think only of their
own plan,” said Sechin. “The Communist Party had theirs too, and you
can see how it ended for them . . .”
“I am going to miss our uplifting conversations, Sergei,” said Links.
“And the smog, and the winter.”
A waiter passed with a tray of drinks, and Sechin deposited his and
Links’s empty glasses and snatched two more frosty vodkas.
“One day, we will all get past this unpleasantness,” said Sechin,
handing a glass to Links, downing his own vodka, and nodding for
Links to do the same.
“Za vas,” said Links. The waiter reappeared with two new glasses,
timing his return perfectly, likely another espionage professional at
work collecting.
“Perhaps you will play a role in that . . .” Sechin focused on his glass.
“Do you know what is America’s greatest export?”
Links’s eyes narrowed. “Biggest, or greatest? Sometimes they’re not
the same thing. Biggest by the numbers? Oil and gas. Greatest? Democracy,” said Links.
“No, no, no,” said Sechin. “It is an idea, really. A dream: Star Trek.”
He locked eyes with Links.
“If you say so.” Links wondered what the computer analytics that
parsed the transcripts would make of this conversation. Staring at his
now empty glass, Sechin continued in a serious tone. “Star Trek was a
television show watched by Americans during a time when my country and yours held each other, as you like to say in your nation’s defense strategy, ‘at risk.’ ”
“Can’t say I ever watched it,” said Links. “At least not the old ones.
My dad took me to a couple of the newer movies.”
“The vision was so positive, a crew from all nations sent out by a
world federation. An American, Captain Kirk, was their leader. With
him was a crew from around the world, from Europe, from Africa
— notable in that time of racial tension in your country. Also, and
perhaps relevant here, there was Mr. Sulu. He represented all of Asia,
which, because of America’s war in Vietnam, made this very capable
man a symbol of the peace to come.”
“Peaceful? Nobody like that here,” said Links, tipping his glass at Wu.
“I give you that. But that is not what I want you to remember. Most
important, just like you, an American officer, and I are friends,” said
Sechin, “the navigator was Pavel Andreievich Chekov, a Russian! Now,
this Chekov was not a real man, of course,” said Sechin. “But many
believe that the character was named after a brilliant Russian scientist
of the time, Pavel Alekseyevich Cherenkov. Do you know of him? He
won a Nobel Prize in 1958, when my country was as sure of its destiny
as Wu is of China’s.”
Sechin waved his glass to indicate the coterie around Wu. “My point
is that without Chekov, what really could Captain Kirk have done out
there in space? Our Cherenkov was the key to the future!”
Links caught the eye of the waiter, who brought another tray of
vodka.
“It’s coming back to me,” said Links. “But in the story, didn’t the
Federation begin only after World War Three?”
“Yes, yes, I allow you this,” said Sechin. “In any case, you should
know that though we work for different sides, we are not all bad.”
“There’s work,” said Links, placing their empty glasses on the waiter’s tray, taking two full ones, and holding one out to Sechin. “And
there’s friends. You’re a friend.”
“Yes, please remember that. In a few months’ time, when you are
back in your warm office in the Pentagon, fourth corridor, D ring . . .
Don’t look surprised, we know these things. When you return to your
friends in Naval Intelligence, think of me and think of Chekov. Promise me that.”
USS Coronado, Strait of Malacca
Simmons sat at the small desk in his stateroom and watched the daily
good-morning vid from his twins. While the Coronado sailed under a
night sky, Claire and Martin, six years old, complained about school
between bites of waffle. Their voices made his stomach tighten with
sadness.
“Good luck today with Riley,” said his wife. “It won’t be easy, I know
it. But we love you and can’t wait to get you back.”
His wife signed off, as she did every morning, with a kiss sent from
around the corner after the kids said goodbye. Then he was alone again
inside the ship’s gray hull.
He pulled himself up and walked down the passageway to the
bridge wing. Riley was there, smoking a real cigar. The bridge wing
was not the officially designated smoking area, but the ship’s captain
could smoke where he damn well pleased.
“Freighter, Directorate, freighter, freighter, Directorate,” said Riley,
pointing to the mix of ships preparing to move through the Strait
of Malacca tomorrow. “What do you see when you look at those
ships?”
“Going to be tight in the channel, sir,” said Simmons. “I think if the
Directorate crews can actually handle their ships as well as we think
they can, it’ll be fine.”
“That’s not all I see,” said Riley. “I see us and them. Working together. What was with the brief? You know how bad they need our oil.
In the end, we each know that we have the other by the throat.”
“By the balls, more like. But is that a good thing?” said Simmons.
“I see it like this convoy duty. They depend on us, and we depend
on them. Maybe in different ways, but it’s the same outcome. We’re interlinked, even with the Directorate. Plus, China’s holding, what, nine
trillion dollars’ worth of our debt?”
“And growing,” said Simmons.
“Right. They’re not our enemy, they’re our largest investor. Each one
of those ships out there,” Riley said, waving his hand expansively, “is
a reason not to go to war. People love making money. Especially the
Directorate.”
“Trade is just trade. You know how I made the comparison between
us today and the Brits a hundred years back,” said Simmons. “Well,
who was Britain’s biggest trading partner before World War One? Germany. Or if you prefer World War Two as a comparison, Germany’s
biggest trading partners just before the war were the very neighbors it
soon invaded, while the U.S. was Japan’s.”
“I don’t need another history lesson, Professor. The Directorate is
the Russians’ worry for now. We’ve got a few more weeks and then we’ll
be in Hawaii, which is an awful long way from whatever dustup starts
in Siberia. Worry about sunburn instead,” said Riley.
“Going to see John there?” said Simmons, changing the subject.
“Yeah, he’s flying out,” said Riley.
“That’s good,” said Simmons. “You guys going surfing?”
Riley paused and then wordlessly offered Jamie one of his precious
cigars and helped him light it. So now it will turn truly serious, thought
Jamie.
“Listen, make sure you hear this the right way: Do you understand
what you are doing by turning down command and requesting the
Pentagon job? I say this as a friend but also as your captain. If you don’t
fleet up, the entire Surface Warfare community will consider you dead.
Your career will be crucified,” said Riley.
Simmons took a deep draw from his cigar and exhaled.
“Lindsey’s got a bad case of what she calls seasickness, as in she’s
sick of me going to sea. The kids are okay with it, but they don’t know
any different. And maybe that’s the real problem.”
Riley started to pull again from his cigar, then stopped and threw it
overboard.
“Don’t you think the whole crew miss their kids and spouses and
dogs and all that shore shit? To do the job right, you have to give everything; that’s how it’s always been. You think my husband likes it?
He hates it too,” he said. “No technology we’ve invented shrinks the
distance.”
“I know,” said Simmons. “I thought I could pull off the balancing
act, maybe even had to, to prove I was better than my dad. But when I
watch those vids of my kids growing up without me, all I think about
is that I don’t want to do to them what my dad did to me.”
Riley’s face reddened. “The Navy put you here as my XO for a reason. You have what it takes. And if you turn down command, you don’t
just screw your career over, you screw me over too. I burn my powder.
I don’t ever get to do that again for someone else.”
The ship rolled to port, and Riley instinctively grabbed the rail.
“Jamie, you need to think this over one last time. You know where
I’m coming from. I have to think about the ship and the Navy. I’m going to hold the paperwork until we get back to San Diego. You use the
time until then to get your head on straight. Don’t sink your career
because you still have daddy issues.”
Simmons nodded. “Aye, Captain.”
He headed to his stateroom and brewed a fresh cup of coffee. The
aroma and salt spray on his clothes reminded him of his father. That
decided it; this cruise would be his last.
Yulin Naval Base, Hainan Island
Vice Admiral Wang Xiaoqian closed his eyes for a last moment of
calm, running his thumb over the surface of the heavy coin in his
palm. He could feel the eagle’s wings and make out the texture of a tall
ship’s masts. By military custom, he would need to have the challenge
coin from the U.S. Navy’s chief of naval operations ready to show back
to him when they next met.
The thump of the plane’s wheels touching down brought him to a
state of full alert. The four-engine Y-20 transport plane had been modified for VIP flights, but the long flight back from the United States had
still been taxing. The question was why the trip had been cut short,
and not knowing the answer worried him.
“Admiral, welcome home,” said his aide, waiting at the bottom step.
“And?” said Admiral Wang.
“There will be a meeting, but nothing more for my eyes. Your prebriefing is here,” said the aide, tapping a metallic-white envelope.
“Printed out.”
“So is this a bull’s-eye for me?” said Wang.
“Not for you,” said the aide incredulously.
“I appreciate your confidence, but unfortunately you do not have a
Presidium vote. At the very least, this meeting promises to be more exciting than my trip was. All the American admirals want is yet another
‘strategic dialogue,’ which betrays their inability to decide what they
really want as a nation, and of us. You are lucky to have stayed home.”
“Do you have any gifts for me to send along to your homes?” said
the aide. With the dollar so weak, Admiral Wang usually bought small
tokens for both his wife and his mistress.
“No, there was no time to shop,” said Admiral Wang.
“Yes, sir, I’ll take care of it,” said the aide, hearing the unspoken order to find appropriate gifts for the women in the admiral’s life.
The two climbed into the back of a Geely military SUV that drove
with its lights off.
“And what news of General Feng?” said Wang.
“First, they took him to —” the aide began.
“I do not need those details. Did they kill him yet?” said Wang.
The aide nodded.
“Good,” said Wang. “He thought that he could sell a hundred tons of
small arms to that beast who runs North Sulawesi at twice the agreed
price without us finding out. The perception of greed is what provides
our Indonesian instability program’s deniability. When Feng’s greed
became real, he became a liability . . . Let me see the papers they gave
you,” said Wang.
The SUV pulled up to a traffic circle just inside a cavernous hangar
built into the side of the mountain. The island itself was now no more
than a camouflage netting of dirt and stone above the Directorate’s
largest submarine and air base.
“They said not to open that until you are underground,” said the
aide.
“Did they?” said Wang, ripping open the envelope. “We are underground, by my definition. If I am going to be shot because General Feng
wanted a second apartment, I deserve to know as soon as possible.”
The aide fumbled to get a small red penlight out so Wang could
read the message.
“The entire Presidium? Here?” said Wang.
The aide nodded. “The jets keep coming and coming,” he said.
“And these others, whose are they?” said Wang. He couldn’t help
but notice that the parking area included eight new Chinese-modified
versions of the IL-76 transport plane and a single older one, an original
model of the Russian aircraft.
“I must apologize, the air force was not kind enough to share the
manifests, Admiral,” the aide responded, emphasizing Wang’s naval
title.
Wang chuckled at his aide’s flash of frustration, warming up as the
adrenaline that went with such uncertainty overcame the weariness of
the long flight.
The SUV drew to a halt, and Wang got out. He looked back inside
the vehicle at his aide, who hadn’t budged.
“I’m sorry, sir. I was told I could not accompany you any farther.”
“See what you can learn,” said Wang. “I will find a way to bring you
below. You deserve to be part of this . . . especially if they plan to shoot
me.”
“I doubt it will come to that,” said the aide as Wang got out of the
vehicle.
“We have fed the beast so long, at some point we have to set it off the
leash,” responded Wang. “Or it will bite us back.”
Wang strode over to a waiting electric cart, barely glancing at the
row of oversize diesel-electric military cargo trucks parked nearby.
The shielding and blast-proofing of the subterranean base seemed to
swallow all sound; not even his footsteps resonated.
The driver of the cart said, “Admiral, I am Lieutenant Ping Hai. It is
an honor to escort you.” He said it slowly, as if he had memorized it.
“Thank you, Lieutenant,” said Wang. “But I’d prefer to walk. All I’ve
done is sit for the past eighteen hours.”
“Sir?” said Ping, confused by the admiral going off the planned
script. “Walking here is very difficult.”
“Why don’t we give it a try?” said Wang.
Wang started following the luminescent markers at the edge of the
four-lane road that curved gently downward. After he’d walked ten
paces, the cart pulled alongside, its electric engine faintly humming.
With the cart his sole command responsibility, the young officer apparently could not fathom leaving it behind. The admiral glared at the
expectant lieutenant, who interpreted the look as a green light to begin
chattering.
“Admiral, I read your ‘Third Island Chain’ essay with great interest
last year,” said Ping. “It was very bold. Visionary. I did not find it controversial at all.”
Wang felt his desire for silence grow with every step. But he knew
the nervous lieutenant would keep talking no matter his response.
“A welcome assessment,” said Wang. If anyone ever needed a reason
for why the Directorate had ended the one-child policy, this lieutenant
was it, thought Wang. The young officer prattled on. His accent was
at first difficult to place, but the more he talked, the more his country roots showed. Hubei Province. Was sending this idiot chaperone
a message? Why was Wang’s own aide kept aboveground while a fool
like this was allowed to take him to the Directorate’s inner sanctum?
“Just stop,” said Wang. “I will get into the cart. You are right, there is
no time to waste.”
The lighting brightened to daylight levels as the electric cart entered
a waiting elevator that could have swallowed two fighter jets.
“Admiral, our journey ends here,” said Ping, capping a rambling disquisition on his strategic vision for force dispositions along the northern border.
“Thank you,” said Wang. “You have given me much to think about.
And for that, you deserve this.”
The young officer took the challenge coin Wang had gotten from
the U.S. chief of naval operations with reverence. He was, at last,
speechless.
Wang remembered an old adage: In wartime, even idiots can be
useful.
Presidium Briefing Room, Hainan Island
Wang discreetly allowed himself a single stim tab as he exited the
elevator. He normally avoided taking such performance modifiers,
knowing how they also tricked one’s emotions. But the flight had left
him exhausted, and he knew he needed to be as sharp as possible.
The quartet of naval commandos escorting him were assaulters,
big-shouldered beasts in their signature formfitting blast-resistant
uniforms. Their liquid body armor’s exterior looked as if it were made
from sharkskin. He took their presence as a positive, a reassuring sign
the navy’s influence remained strong here.
At the entry to the large briefing room, Wang began his scan, just as
he would study the horizon for threats while on a ship’s bridge. He saw
Admiral Lin Boqiang with a cluster of other senior naval officers. Lin,
the overall commander of the fleet, was among the most influential
in the Presidium, the Directorate’s joint civilian and military leadership council. At the other side of the room, a cluster of army officers
stood around General Wei Ming, the land forces commander. The two
services rarely interacted, even in meetings. To Wang, though, the difference was simple. Wei and the army had the numbers in China, but
as part of a force that dealt with distance, Wang and his fellow navy
officers understood politics and power better.
More notable was the number of civilian suits in the military command room. The Presidium members rarely met in person, the civilian and military sides protective of their respective turf. The original
deal had been hastily hammered out in a hotel conference room during the Shanghai riots, but it had held firm since, each faction having
autarchy to run its own economic and security spheres to maximum
efficiency, with a mutual goal of growth with stability.
Admiral Lin approached and greeted Wang with a haphazard salute
that had not changed since their academy days.
“I must apologize for cutting your trip short, but you can now see
that this is the general meeting you have long sought.”
“Yes, when I was first summoned, I thought I might come down
here and never be seen again, like our friend General Feng,” said Wang,
speaking every word with a purpose, mentioning the executed officer
to test the waters.
“While Feng’s diversions were lamentable,” Lin observed, “the goal
of your operation to destabilize the south was met. But now, the Presidium needs to hear your larger message. Your views have been most
persuasive inside our service, but the civilians need to hear from you
now.” He turned away from Wang and motioned to an aide to dim the
lights, the signal for the meeting to begin. The Presidium members
took their seats at a U-shaped table made from black marble.
The introduction was brief, focusing on Wang’s key role in reorganizing the Directorate’s command structure, clearly an attempt to
establish his trustworthiness for the civilians. Wang knew that his efficiency at purging the old PLA’s Communist Party apparatchiks in the
General Political Department was what had gotten him to this position, but he wished Lin had highlighted his reputation as a leading
thinker and a capable naval commander as well.
“I am an admiral, as you know,” Wang said as he began his presentation, “but today I would like to begin with a quote from a general: ‘On
terrain from which there is no way out, take the battle to the enemy.’
“That is from Sun-Tzu’s Art of War, written just before the Warring States period of our history. I first used that wisdom almost
twenty-five hundred years after it was written, citing it in my thesis
on Master Sun’s texts at what used to be called PLA National Defense University.”
The reminder of their ancient and recent past was another deliberate choice to set the scene for where he wanted to take them next.
Wang pulled an imaginary trigger with his right pointer finger, and
the smart-ring on it transmitted a wireless signal that initiated the presentation visuals his aide had sent ahead. Behind him, a 3-D hologram
map of the Pacific appeared. Glowing red lines moved across the map,
marking the history of China’s trade routes and military reach through
the millennia. The lines moved out and then back in. Toward the end, a
blue arc appeared, showing the spread of U.S. trade routes and military
bases over the past two centuries. Eventually the blue lines reached
across the globe. Then, as the decades closed in on the present, the
red lines pushed back out, crossing with the blue. Wang didn’t need to
explain this graphic; everyone knew its import.
“I began with Master Sun’s ancient wisdom to remind us that while
we all would like to think that we have regained our historic greatness,
in reality we face a situation in which there is ‘no way out.’ Indeed, the
Americans had an apt phrase to describe a situation like ours, where
your strength grows but your options become ever more limited: Manifest Destiny.
“Destiny drives you forward but ties your hands. Indeed, their own
great naval thinker Alfred Thayer Mahan foretold how their rise to
great power gave them no choice. As their economy and then their
military began to grow to world status, he told his people that, whether
they liked it or not, ‘Americans must now begin to look outward. The
growing production of the country demands it.’
“Must. Demands. These are words of power, but also responsibility. We must now face the demands that shape our own destiny. The
Americans’ destiny led them to seek land, then trade, then oil, but they
refuse to understand that the new demands of the age are now upon us
as well. Even though they no longer need the foreign energy resources
they once reached out and grasped, we must still endure their interference in our interests in Transjordan, Venezuela, Sudan, the Emirates,
and the former Indonesia.
“We most recently experienced this in our waters to the east, where
they interfered in matters that are far from them, but close to us.”
The map zoomed down to the South China Sea, and an image appeared of a U.S. Navy warship escorting a Philippine coast guard vessel that had been damaged in the Red Line skirmishes right after the
Dhahran bombing.
“As you will recall, we debated then how to respond to their navy
interposing itself into a regional matter, daring us to act. But for all
our arguments, it was a situation of ‘no way out,’ as Master Sun said in
his text. That it took place in the midst of our own domestic transition
meant we had no choice but to acquiesce.”
The image then shifted to scenes of the Dalai Lama speaking at the
Lincoln Memorial to a cheering crowd and then to the new U.S. president shaking hands with the last Communist Party foreign minister,
who in exile had somehow transformed himself into a human rights
activist.
“But their interference does not stop at the water’s edge. Their failure to understand our new strategic and domestic reality gives us no
choice, as it threatens what we in this room have built. Even now that
we are once more whole, their Congress threatens energy sanctions at
the slightest whim, waving about an economic sword like a drunken
sailor.”
The image plunged deep into a projection of the Mariana Trench,
then drove straight through the rocky walls of the side to reveal the full
extent of the COMRA research vessel’s find, laid out in glowing red;
after that, it pulled back to show its massive scale compared with the
rest of the world’s known gas fields.
“What we have found here determines not just our nation’s future
but the arc of the world economy and, thus, our ultimate security and
stability,” said Wang. “What we have located, in a place where nobody
else thought it possible and that we alone can reach, gives us a new way
to think about the future, a future where we chart our own course.”
A hologram of Xi Jinping, the old Communist Party leader, appeared behind him, accompanied by a recording of a speech he’d given
to the old party congress in 2013: “However deep the water may be, we
will wade into the water. This is because we have no alternative.”
The image of the long-dead president elicited a nervous murmur in
the room.
“Many of you are familiar with this speech, what Xi called the ‘Chi-
nese Dream.’ The old party leaders were wrong in many things, but in
this they were right. America’s rise came first with its ensuring control
of its home waters and then extending its global economic presence.
And then the country had no choice but to assume its new responsibilities, including protecting the system from the powers of the past
that would threaten it. I mentioned their thinker Mahan. Soon after
he laid out the new demands upon the United States, war with Spain
followed, as you remember, and the Americans reached across the Pacific, thousands of miles beyond their home waters, extending to the
Philippines, patrolling not just our ports but even our very rivers. Just
as Mahan told them, we similarly have no choice but to meet these
demands.”
Wang took in the room, searching for signs of understanding but
also dissent.
A civilian on the far side of the room took the pause as an invitation. Chen Shi was the chairman of Bel-Con, China’s top producer of
consumer electronics, which had been formed by the merging of dozens of firms during the most recent crisis. His role on the Directorate’s
Presidium, though, was an extension of his reputation as a strategist
and visionary in business, something that perfectly fit the Directorate’s
hybrid of military authority and market-inspired efficiency.
“Admiral, you began with a quote from the Art of War, so I will
match you: ‘Those who know when to fight and when not to fight are
victorious.’ ” He paused. “I do not see your logic here. We always have
choices. Does your old vision of power actually matter anymore in a
world where we can choose to buy anything, anywhere? These notions
you describe risk all that we have accomplished.”
Admiral Wang nodded. “Then this failing is mine, and mine alone,
if I have not made the case properly.” He turned to the map, pausing
to collect his thoughts. Along the wall, the naval commandos stood
unnervingly still and held their weapons at the ready. Wang smiled at
them and continued.
“All of us here who first formed the Directorate acted to pull order
back from chaos. We chose to act. But we acted because there was no
other choice in the end,” he said. “In turn, who can argue that this is
not the purpose of the Directorate? Thousands of years have brought
us to this point. We protected China from the party leaders who held
the country back, and we should not grow meek on the brink of the
next great step.”
A young woman’s voice cut through the room. “Desire and ability
are not the same thing, Admiral,” said Muyi Ling. Muyi was not yet
thirty, but thanks to her father’s wealth, she now ran Weibot, the largest manufacturing consortium. “Didn’t General Sun also say, ‘Avoid
overconfidence, as it will lead to disaster’?”
Damn those viz glasses. While the old man might have known SunTzu by heart, Wang doubted she did. He noticed the Directorate commando closest to him shift his weight slightly. Maybe they were not
naval commandos at all, despite the uniforms. Could they be from the
788th Regiment, which protected the Presidium? Were they letting
him hang himself, word by word, for threatening the status quo that so
many in the Presidium had profited from?
“That is always a concern. But as Sun also said, ‘Make no assumptions about all the dangers of using military force. Then you won’t
make assumptions about the benefits of using arms either.’ ”
She smiled, but he saw her eyes scanning her glasses rather than
looking directly at him. She was likely researching a retort. He realized
that he had to move the discussion beyond the level of trading quotations. Wang turned to the wider group.
“Of course, we are all aware of the reasons given for why it will never
be our time. Our population demographics are not optimal, they say.
Our trade routes are too vulnerable, they say. Our need for outside energy is too great, they say. These statements are all true. And they will
always be true if we turn our backs on our duty to make our destiny
manifest. The worst thing we can do is fear our own potential.”
His smart-ring finger clicked one last time, and around them played
the famous scene of the tank in People’s Square crushing the old Communist Party’s riot-control truck, the crowd of protesters’ initial looks
of surprise and then their celebration as they realized that the military
was on their side. He saw a few instinctively nodding their approval,
reliving the moment when they had remade China into their vision.
“I have abused your time, so I will end my presentation with three
questions. First, just as we acted then to meet the people’s true expectations of their nation’s leaders, we must ask, What would the people
expect of us now? Second, what do you expect the Americans to do
once they learn of our energy discovery? Third, and most important,
is a simple question of the arc of history: If now is not the time, then
when?
“You know the answers to these questions, and thus you know that
you, the truly powerful, actually have no choice.”
Admiral Lin appeared at Wang’s shoulder and placed a hand on his
back. Wang noticed that the commandos now surrounded them. Perhaps he had gone too far.
“Admiral, the Presidium thanks you for your views,” said Lin. “These
men will see you out.”
As Wang walked down the hallway, wedged between the commandos, he replayed the presentation in his mind. He could find faults with
his performance, but he was at peace.
At the elevator door, the commandos stood in silence. Wang wondered where they would take him next. Then he noticed that they were
tensing up as the elevator lights numbered ever closer to their floor.
The door opened and another armed phalanx emerged; these bodyguards were Caucasian in ethnicity and wearing civilian suits, but they
were clearly military. While the two groups eyed each other warily,
Wang watched how the elderly man in the middle didn’t bother even
to look up from the outdated computer tablet he tapped away on. Red
diamonds and purple hearts reflected in his traditional eyeglasses. He
was surprisingly fit for his age, but supposedly the old Russian spy was
addicted to memory-improving games, an effort to stave off what Directorate intelligence suspected was dementia. A strong body still, but
not the mind.
So, Wang realized, this had not been a strategy session but an audition. The Presidium had already made its choice.
ENDNOTES
Foreword
Page
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.cfm?fips=ch.
MARGARET VERBLE
Maud’s Line
(Excerpt)
ON SALE: July 14, 2015
”
Maud Nail lives with her rogue father and brother on one of the allotments the U.S.
government parceled out to the Cherokees when their land was confiscated in the 1920s.
Life in Maud’s world is tough, to be sure. Her prospects are slim, but when a newcomer
with good looks and good books rides down her section line, she takes notice. Soon she
finds herself facing a series of high-stakes decisions that will determine her future and
those of all her loved ones. This is a rousing first novel by an enrolled member of the
Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma.
1
Maud was bent over one row suckering tomato
plants and Lovely was bent over the next one. They were talking
about a girl Lovely had his eyes set on. But a cow’s bawling interrupted that. Maud unfolded and looked toward the river. Lovely
did the same. The bawling was loud, unnatural, and awful, and it
set them to running. They ran first toward the house, not toward
the sound, because neither had taken a gun to the garden. Maud
stopped at the steps; Lovely rushed in for their rifles. Armed up
and not bothering to talk, they both ran straight toward the pump
to get to the pasture below the ridge where the howling was coming from. If they hadn’t been fearful, they would’ve run fifty more
yards to the gate and gone through it. But they were scared and
hurrying, so they climbed the barbed wire just past the pump, and
Lovely snagged his sleeve, leaving behind a piece of blue cotton
waving like the flag of a small foreign country. Maud did worse
than that. She snagged her leg below the knee at the back, opening a tear deep at its top and three inches long. Maud was vain
about her legs and Lovely had only three shirts, but still they ran,
focused on the bawling, without minding their mishaps.
When they got to the cow, Betty was folded with both her
head and her rump sticking up. Between them, smack across the
ridge of her spine, were three wide, angry gashes. She was thrashing all over the ground. She’d flattened out a circle of weeds, and,
oddly, out of the center wound, a stalk of poke protruded. It was
a thick stem of poke and resembled, stuck out as it was, a spear.
That’s what Maud thought as soon as she saw it.
Lovely yelled, “Her back’s axed. We’ll haveta shoot her.” He
moved toward Betty’s head and raised his rifle. But then he just
stood, cheek on the stock, eye down the sights, finger on the trigger.
Maud yelled, “Pull it.”
But the end of Lovely’s gun shook like a leaf in a breeze. So
Maud raised her rifle, moved a step west to keep from shooting
her brother, and waited until she had a good look at an ear.
The blowback of skull and brain splattered onto Lovely’s overalls and shirt. He lowered his gun and looked down at his bib. He
said, “I’m gonna be sick.” Before he completely bent over, he threw
up fatback and biscuits over pieces of cow head.
Betty’s legs kept flailing. Maud shouldered her rifle again; said,
“Move farther back”; looked down her sights; and sent another
bullet into the white patch between the cow’s eyes. Then she cradled her gun in the crook of her arm, cupped her hand over her
mouth, and cried, “Betty, I’m sorry.” Her shoulders heaved. She
felt the blood trickle down the back of her leg. She looked at the
rivulet, laid her gun on the ground, and tore off a Johnson grass
blade. She plastered it over the wound and then sat in the weeds
and watched the cow twitching to death.
Tears watered Maud’s eyes and spilled onto her cheeks. Betty
was a tough Hereford with a big heart and strong legs and, the
year before, had climbed a fallen tree to escape the worst of the
flood. But any dead cow would’ve been a disaster. They’d lost all
but three of their herd to the water. To take her eyes and mind off
of Betty’s trembling, Maud looked over to Lovely. He was wiping
his bib with a leaf. She said, “Don’t worry about that. We’ve got to
save this meat.”
Maud sent Lovely off to round up their uncles, Blue and Early.
The men came back with Blue driving Great-Uncle Ame’s 1920
Dodge sedan. He maneuvered it into the pasture as close to Betty
as he could get, and the four of them strung her up to the sturdiest
tree around. They set to butchering, talking about the meanness
it took to ax a cow in the back. They gave Blue the hide to cure
and packed Betty’s meat in old newspapers and feed sacks. They
deposited those on the floor of the backseat and agreed they’d pay
Hector Hempel, the dwarf who ran the icehouse, two rump roasts
for storing the meat. The men drove off with the car loaded so
heavy it didn’t rattle.
Maud walked to the house. She first tended her leg and then
drew her dress and slip off over her head. At eighteen, she was fit,
dark, and tall like the rest of her mother’s family and most of her
tribe. She was more of a willow than an oak, and her figure and
personality had grown pleasing to every male within a twentymile radius, to some of the women, too, and to most of the animals. Maud carried that admiration the way eggs are carried in a
basket, carefully, with a little tenderness, but without minding too
closely the individual. She drew on another slip and dress, tossed
her and Lovely’s dirty clothes in a tub, and pumped cool water
over them until they were completely covered. She left them to
soak while she filled one of the front-yard kettles with water and
lit a fire under it.
While she stirred their clothes in the kettle, her heart sank
further than it’d sunk since the flood, and tears came to her eyes
again. Heat rose up to her cheeks, and the fire under the pot made
her shins hot. She poked the clothes with the pole and gave in to
crying and to some self-pity she didn’t much admire. She wanted a
washer with a tub and ringers. They were advertised all the time in
the papers. So were refrigerators, lamps that turned on with buttons, toilets that flushed in the house. She lifted her dress out of
the water with the end of the pole and dipped it again. She wiped
her nose with the back of her hand and forced her mind off of the
things she wanted. She turned it to the cold kind of cruelty that
would kill an innocent cow. She felt Betty’s twitching in the wound
on the back of her leg, felt her bawling all over again in her heart.
But she was recovered and hanging the clothes on the line
when the men got back to the farm. And although they were
noticeably tired from the butchering and lugging of meat, and
Lovely was still shaken from the whole ordeal, they pitched in
and scooped out the wash water, carried it to the garden for the
tomato plants, and set wood for a fire in the pit. Maud had saved
back enough meat to feed some of their extended family: Blue and
Early, of course; and her grandpa, Bert; and her great-uncle Ame
and his wife, Viola; and her aunt Lucy and her husband, Cole. She
didn’t save out any for her father. It was Saturday and late in the
afternoon. He wouldn’t crawl back until well into the night.
Blue left to clean up and fetch the others. But Early hung
around to eat his share of the beef. He was only twenty-six, and
his talk was about going to town, gambling, and people of the female persuasion. Maud found Early a lot of fun, and having him
to herself raised her spirits some. She teased him about his plans
for the evening and fed him the food that was ready, except for the
onions. She told him he needed to hold off on those out of respect
for the women.
Shortly after Early left, Blue came back in a wagon with his father, Ame and Viola, Lucy and Cole, and their baby boy. He pulled
the wagon close to the fire and hitched the mules to the rail. There
weren’t enough chairs for everybody to sit, so they ate from the
wagon bed, some in it, some standing around the tailgate. And it
was a feast — beans, onions, biscuits, hominy, the beef, lettuce, asparagus, and two pecan pies Lucy had baked.
While they ate, they talked about who’d murdered the cow. Not
that it was much of a mystery. The Mount boys, or men, John and
Claude, were the culprits. Everybody agreed on that because of the
sneakiness of the crime and because the Mounts had a history of
meanness that Grandpa and Great-Uncle Ame swore extended for
generations. The Mounts’ paternal grandpappy had once set fire
to his own dog and blamed it on his neighbor. One of their greatuncles had been the biggest allotment stealer in the Cookson
Hills. He’d locked three men in a cabin with a barrel of liquor and
wouldn’t feed them or let them out until they’d signed their papers
over to him. Then when they did, he wouldn’t even let them have
the rest of the whiskey. And the Mounts’ mama, Ame claimed in
almost a whisper, had more than a little Comanche in her.
So the talk centered more on what to do. Calling in the law
was out. Nobody around the wagon trusted the law nor had any
reason to. The law wasn’t set up for Indians. But the older folks
were against revenge on the practical principle that it multiplied
trouble, and the younger ones deferred to their elders by habit
and weren’t particularly hell-bent in their natures. Blue (according to Bert) had come into the world with an even disposition
and a mark on his head, now disappeared, that had determined
his name. Lucy was still a young wife who had been tamed by her
marriage. Cole was a married-in white; he respected his in-laws’
customs and folded to whatever they wanted.
As for the next generation down, Lovely took after his mother,
who’d been as calm as the surface of a pond at twilight. Maud
was growing more toward their mother’s way every day. However,
she’d been born with more of their daddy’s nature, and his temper
was hot. That was how he, as a boy, had come to be called Mustard. His last name was Nail, and as an adult, he was still bad to
fight. So even though his daddy had been mostly white, nobody in
Maud’s mother’s family knew of a fullblood in the state of Oklahoma with a more appropriate handle. Mustard Nail would want
to kill the Mounts, everybody agreed on that. So after Lovely and
Cole had doused the fire with dirt and the stars popped out as the
evening wore on, the talk turned to how to break it to Mustard
that his cow was gone.
“I think it might be best to lie,” Viola said.
“He’ll know she’s gone. And he spent five bucks breeding her,”
Lovely replied.
“That’s two cows, then,” Grandpa offered.
“Hector already knows we put her down ’cause her back was
broke,” Blue said.
“What did you tell him, exactly?” Lovely asked.
Early had already reported to Maud that Lovely had remained
laid out on the backseat of the car at the icehouse, resting from
the shock with his arm across his eyes. Maud wasn’t surprised in
the least. Her brother had always been sensitive. But it wasn’t the
fault of his name. It was commonly used for boys in their mother’s family, and none of the rest of them, five Lovelys in all, had
turned out to be anything but tall, unflinching, and good with a
gun. At nineteen, Lovely was tall enough, a couple of inches beyond six feet. And he could shoot fairly well when he could force
himself into pulling a trigger. But his temperament had caused
their mama, while still alive, to coddle him and had put him at
odds with their father. Mustard was hard on Lovely and occasionally claimed he had four girls rather than three girls and a boy.
Maud’s two older sisters were married and gone, and her mother,
Lila, was dead, so it was Maud who stood between Mustard and
Lovely. She did it with words and sometimes they worked.
Blue said, “Told Hector you had to shoot her, Lovely. Didn’t
say much else. He could see yer feet hanging outta the window.”
Lovely shooting the cow had been the story Maud and he’d
agreed on before he’d gone to fetch Early and Blue. And neither
had told their uncles the truth. “You think Hector’ll say anything
to Daddy?” asked Maud.
“Hard to tell,” Blue replied.
“I’ll caution him next time I go for ice,” Grandpa said. “He
knows Mustard like ever’body else.”
“I think a broke leg’s the best bet. She broke her leg. Had to be
shot,” Blue said, practicing the lie.
“That sure sounds better than a broke back,” Viola said. She
picked up her tin, spat into it, and wiped her mouth with a bandana.
With that agreed, the family gazed at the Milky Way, passed
Lucy’s baby back and forth, and talked about relatives who were
on the next farms over, away, or dead. They also talked about
Early, who, they figured, was taking money off of some fool drunk
he’d lured into cards. The conversation was sprinkled with laughter that kept Maud’s mind off of Betty, and the family didn’t split
up until the moon dimmed the stars and provided them light for
traveling.
Maud and Lovely went to bed not long after the others departed, and Lovely was asleep on his back when Maud, half awake
and listening to the wolves howl in the wild, heard her father’s
car stop at their first cattle guard and then at their second one.
She was on her side pretending to sleep when Mustard opened
the door and tripped on the threshold. He fell loudly on the floor.
After that, he gave out a groan. When Maud determined he wasn’t
going to stir, she got up, put a pillow under his head, and then settled into deep sleep.
She awoke in early morning light, looked at her father still on
the floor, and decided he didn’t seem that worse for the wear. He’d
managed to get home without visible bruises or swollen eyes, and
he wasn’t drooling. His left arm seemed a little crooked, but she
could tell from her cot that it was just thrown at an odd angle. She
glanced at her brother’s cot, determined he was still asleep, softly
set her feet on a plank, and stood up. She stepped behind a sheet
hung on a wire that blocked off a corner for privacy, pulled her
housedress off of a peg, and drew it over her head. She checked the
rag around her wound and saw a patch of blood dried in the shape
of a hammer’s head. She decided to leave the bandage in place,
slipped out from behind the sheet, and stepped to the kitchen. She
plucked her toothbrush from a cup, lifted the dipping pan from
the counter, and went out the kitchen door, closing it softly.
When she returned, Mustard was still on the floor, but Lovely
was up. Maud had set the kindling the night before, so she fiddled the fire to life and was frying fatback when her brother came
in from his morning time alone. She nodded toward the other
room. Lovely whispered, “Eggs,” and held up three fingers. He sat
down in a chair at the table and took up a newspaper that was two
days old.
Maud usually waited to eat until her father and brother were
fed. But Mustard hadn’t shown signs of stirring, so she ate with
her brother. The two were finishing off their second biscuits when
they heard a faint “Goddamn” from somewhere near the floor beyond the kitchen door. Maud got up with her plate in her hand,
set it in the dishpan, and laid another dish on the table.
Mustard made more noise than he did most mornings. The
grunts and groans came first from the front room and then from
out in the yard. Maud thought they were for effect rather than an
indication of any particular distress. Her father acted badly with
the same regularity as the rooster crowed at dawn. But he had
a conscience to him, so remorse usually followed soon after the
ache of alcohol or the burn of temper had cleared out and gone.
When Mustard finally got into the kitchen, he placed both
hands flat on the table and eased into his chair. “You should’ve
seen Charlie Pankins when I left him. Goddamn, he were a mess.”
Maud held up the coffee kettle. “You want some before your
eggs?”
“I believe I do.”
Lovely shoved a saucer toward his father without lifting his
eyes from reading.
Mustard scratched the back of his head. “We got our hooch
offin a Choctaw who was packing his load in a feed sack.”
Maud picked up the saucer, held it about four inches from the
table, and poured coffee into it. She set it down slowly next to her
father’s right fist.
Mustard said, “You might have to pick that up for me. I’m a little shaky.”
Maud turned back to the stove, settled the kettle, and picked
up the saucer in both hands as carefully as if she were cradling
the back of a baby’s head. Mustard slurped his coffee, wiped his
mouth with the palm of his hand, and said, “Yer the best.”
Maud held the saucer until Mustard drained it and poured
him another he was able to hold on his own. She knew she was
her father’s favorite, and this was even with her oldest sister looking more like him than his face in a pond. She said, “Daddy, we’ve
got some bad news for you. Betty broke her leg in the pasture.
Lovely had to put her down.”
“Say that again,” said Mustard.
Lovely looked up from his paper. “Had to shoot Betty in her
head, Dad. She was bawling as high as the moon.”
“You shot the goddamn cow?” Mustard’s face was turning red.
“He had to, Daddy. I saw her myself. She was lying on the
ground, unable to get up. It was a pitiful sight. Lovely put her out
of her misery.”
Mustard wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. He shook
his head. He sat there in silence until Maud slid eggs onto his
plate and picked out some fatback from a platter under a sugar
sack. Mustard ate with a smacking noise until Lovely turned a
page of the paper, and then he said, “One shot?”
“Two. She was tough.”
“Whatchya do with her?”
Lovely laid his paper down. “Took her to Hector.”
Mustard wiped his mouth with the back of his hand again. “I
believe I need a cigarette.”
Lovely’s chair scraped. He went to the main room and slid
back into his seat at the table with a cigar box. “Want me to roll
and light it?”
Mustard nodded and patted his breast pocket and then his
pants pockets. “My Banjo’s somewhere. Probably the other room.”
Maud said, “There’s fire in the stove.”
When Lovely finished rolling, he opened the oven door and lit
the cigarette on the wood. After Mustard had puffed it to a wet
butt, Maud sat down at the table, buttered a biscuit, and spooned
some plum jelly onto it. She held it out to her daddy. He said,
“Don’t mind if I do.”
Two mornings later, after Mustard and Lovely had gone off to
their jobs, and the dishes were done and the beds made, Maud
took a bucket to the pump, primed it, pumped fresh water, and
sat down on the platform over the well. She had a clean rag and
some Mercurochrome, and she was dabbing the purple medicine
onto her wound and wondering if it would leave a scar that would
mar the looks of her leg when she heard the sound of a team in the
distance. She looked out toward the section line. Coming down
it were a pair of horses and a wagon covered with a bright blue
canvas. The team was driven by a man she didn’t recognize at a
distance. Maud forgot about the possibility of permanent disfigurement; she even forgot about the tendency of Mercurochrome
to drip off the dipping stick. She sat there on the wood of the
well watching the blue canvas jog along until it stopped at her
uncle Gourd’s house. Maud knew her uncle wasn’t at home, but
the man called out. He called again. Then he turned the horses
toward her and snapped his reins. She hastily put the cap on the
Mercurochrome, tore the rag in two, and wrapped her leg with a
bandage smaller than the one she’d been using. She stood, threw
an arm around the pump, and watched the team, the wagon, and
the blue canvas grow bigger and bigger in the bright sun.
The driver was a man she’d never seen before. And with her
father at the feed store in Muskogee and her brother in their
neighbor’s field, and meanness fairly common, Maud wondered if
she should, out of precaution, go into the house, where the guns
were. But then she recalled Betty’s bellowing and felt fairly certain
that unless the stranger shot her dead at a distance she could holler loud enough that Lovely would hear her over at Mr. Singer’s,
jump on his mule, and be to her pretty fast. Then, too, there was
something about the blue of the canvas that prevented her from
moving. She found it reassuring or, really, more than reassuring,
because it was a pretty blue, deeper than the color of the sky and
brighter than a heron, a better blue, something new. She couldn’t
fathom anyone choosing such a blue for any reason other than to
please or to draw attention.
The man driving the team was wearing a bowler. That in itself set him apart in Maud’s experience. She’d seen bowlers only
on undertakers and in magazine pictures of men who were dancing lickety-split with girls who were flappers. Below the hat, he
had a clean-shaven face and wore red suspenders and a light-colored shirt. After he closed the second cattle guard, he took off
his bowler, waved it in the air over his head, and flashed a smile
that glistened like water hit by sunlight. Maud was drawn to the
smile like a jay to a piece of foil, but she was a little taken aback
by the wave. Was she supposed to wave in return? To a stranger?
That would seem forward. But she didn’t want to look country
and backward, so she raised her right hand and waved her fingers.
She kept her left arm slung around the pump.
The man pulled the horses up to the hitching rail about thirty
feet away from Maud. By then, his bowler was back on his head,
but not so as the brim hid his hair. It was deep brown, thick and
wavy. His skin was dark from the sun, but not, Maud thought, Indian. He was definitely a white man; his forearms below his rolled
sleeves were hairy. He said in a voice that wasn’t a holler, but carried perfectly well, “Looks like you might have some water to
spare.” Canteens were hanging on the side of the wagon.
Maud nodded. “You can fill up if you care to.”
“Just a cup for me, if you don’t mind. But Arlene and Evelyn
would mightily appreciate a drink.”
Maud cocked her head.
“My horses. I named them after my aunts.”
Maud laughed. By the time she’d stopped, he’d jumped off the
wagon and was walking toward her. He said, “Couldn’t call them
Sir Barton and Exterminator. They’re ladies.”
“I can see that.”
“And not too fast, either.” He took his hat off and scratched his
head.
“How did your aunts take to being honored?”
“Haven’t told them yet. Aunt Arlene got married and moved
all the way to Nashville. Aunt Evelyn is up in Springfield, Missouri. I was going to visit her last year, but then the floods came. I
had to stay put and hang on by my fingers.”
“Did you lose much? Or were you lucky?”
“Lucky. I live on high ground in Fayetteville. But it sure looked
like the end of the world. I bet it was bad around here.” He looked
away from Maud. “I see the watermarks there on the house.”
Maud glanced at the house, too. “If Grandpa hadn’t built her
on stones, we would’ve lost her. When the river started overcoming us, we moved the beds and chest into the barn. Hung the
beds by hooks from the rafters, put the chest and the drawers
on top of the stalls, and slept on the hay in the loft. Lost eleven
cows, though. Some of them drowned before we could rustle
them up. Ran the others up to the foothills, and they either got
lost or somebody stole them. The pigs we ran into the schoolhouse with everybody else’s. The chickens roosted with us. Our
dog drowned.”
The rains had started in the fall of 1926 and continued
through the winter. By April of 1927, it was pouring morning
and night, sometimes ten inches a day. The water had covered
eastern Oklahoma and had run almost all of Maud’s family out
of their homes. But according to the papers, it had also covered
every state from Kansas to Pennsylvania, killed hundreds of people, and swollen the Mississippi to a sixty-mile span at Memphis. The disaster had united the whole country and survivors
became friends in minutes. So it was not unusual for Maud and
the stranger to settle into a conversation about a mutual experience while he was sipping on a dipper of water and the horses
were drinking from the trough.
Maud was gathering bits of information about the stranger like
a wind rustles leaves into a pile and was sorting those leaves in her
head before she realized she didn’t yet have his name or know
why he had driven his bright blue covered wagon down their lane.
She was thinking about how to ask and not seem like she really
cared when he said, “By the way, my name is Booker Wakefield.
Please call me Booker.” He smiled. There were little creases in the
corners of his eyes. The eyes themselves were green, flecked with
gold. Maud couldn’t tell if those gold flecks were pure color or
sparkles of sunshine.
She said, “I’m Maud,” but didn’t give her last name. It embarrassed her. Her mother’s family name, Vann, sounded better to
the ear, and she’d always lived among her mother’s people. But
instead of lying about her last name, she added, “What are you
doing around here?”
“I thought you’d never ask,” he said. “I’m a peddler. At least in
the summertime. Gives me a way to see the world.”
“You don’t peddle from town to town?”
“The stores in towns have gotten so big and fancy I can’t compete. But not everybody can get to a store when they need one. A
lot of people still appreciate their goods coming to them. Would
you like to see what I’m carrying?” The peddler smiled wide,
handed the dipper back to Maud, and walked to his wagon.
He set his hat on the seat and drew the canvas up by pulling on
a rope strung across the top of the hull. His wares were secured
in place by netting, and he rolled the netting up just as he had the
canvas. The goods were stacked on shelves that receded like the
steps of a pyramid. On them sat bolts of denim and other cloth in
colors pleasing to the eye. There were pots and pans and skillets
of every size, suspenders, handkerchiefs, straw hats and fedoras,
Woodbury soap, rolls of toilet paper, toothpaste, shaving cream,
razors and straps, toothbrushes and pencils, coal-oil lamps, kerosene, and crystal radio sets.
Maud’s eyes got wide. And the peddler stretched his arm so
that his hand disappeared below the wagon seat. He brought out,
between his thumb and forefinger, a spool of red thread. He said,
“This is for the water. I think red may be your color.”
Maud was wearing a faded green dress, but red was, indeed,
the color she pictured herself in. It looked best next to her skin.
She ducked her head, but looked up and smiled when he dropped
the spool into her hand. He said, “Take your time looking around.”
At that moment, Maud didn’t have a cent to her name. There
was some household money hidden away from Mustard in a baking-powder tin behind the match holder in the cabinet in the
kitchen. But that money was family money for flour and sugar
and an occasional treat from a store in Ft. Gibson. Maud was
too upright to take family money and spend it on herself alone
or without talking it over. Her daddy operated that way and it’d
caused, over the years, hardship on the rest of the family. She said,
“I’ll just be looking. I went into town yesterday. Got all my goods
there. But thank you for the thread.”
He smiled, leaned against the side of the wagon, and said, “Let
me know if you see anything you can’t live without.”
More than anything else displayed, Maud desired the Woodbury soap. She’d gotten a bar for Christmas a couple of years back
and was convinced it really did produce skin anyone would love
to touch. She also liked the smell, which was, in her mind, as fresh
as spring air or an open rose. So she shied away from the Woodbury bars and went to the crystal radio sets. She put her finger
on top of a brown cardboard box labeled CRYSTAL EXTRAORDINAIRE, and said, “Do these pick up pretty well?”
“The best in the business. They’ve got these little earpieces
that bring music straight into your head and make you tap your
toes a mile a minute.” He reached for a box, opened the lid, and
held it below Maud’s nose.
She peered in. She had a crystal set and so did Lovely. The
static they pulled in was more irritating than pleasing, and the
earpieces didn’t rest comfortably in her ears. She said, “I’ve got
one that doesn’t pick up very well.”
“You might try one of these. I’ve got one all put together that I
use myself.” He closed the lid, replaced the box, and turned to the
seat of the wagon. When he did, Maud picked up a bar of Woodbury soap and sniffed it quickly. She’d replaced it by the time he
turned back around.
They were far away from any town with a powerful station,
but the closeness required for him to hand her the set and give
her instructions about how to fit the earpieces in her ears would
have overwhelmed a radio signal, even if WLS or WSM had been
just one county over. He didn’t smell like a white man at all. Or
not like the white men Maud was used to smelling. He smelled
more like aftershave lotion and leather. The smell made Maud’s
eyes lose focus.
He said, “Hear anything?”
She regathered her thoughts. “Two or three different stations,
all at the same time.”
He pointed northeast. “Turn and face that way.”
She did, and the sound settled on one station, but she couldn’t
smell him anymore. She turned back around, took the plugs out
of her ears, and said, “I’m really more of a reader, anyway.” She
handed him the receiver.
His eyelids drooped. He smiled. “In that case, I may be able to
tickle your fancy.” He put the receiver on the seat of the wagon.
“Follow me.”
They went to the other side of the pyramid. There, as before,
he rolled up the canvas and netting, only this time the steps were
filled with books. More books than Maud had ever seen outside
of a library. She gasped and took a step back to take them all in.
He said, “I’m a reader, too. At night, if I don’t have a place inside
to sleep, I bunk on my wagon seat, light a lamp, and read longer
than I should.” He picked out a book and handed it to her. “Ever
read this? He may be my favorite.”
The book was A Tale of Two Cities. Maud had read it, and all of
Dickens she could get her hands on. She’d also read Hawthorne,
Melville, Cooper, Poe, Irving, Howells, Twain, Hardy, and Austen.
She replied, “ ‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,
it was the age of wisdom . . .’ I can’t remember beyond that.” She
opened the book and read out the rest of the sentence.
“You have a mighty fine reading voice. Do you practice it?”
“Not much. I’m the baby of the family. I got read to.”
“How many people in your family?”
“I’ve got two sisters, a brother, and a daddy. My sisters are married and away; my brother’s just in the field over there.” Maud had
forgotten about fearing the stranger, but the reference to Lovely
brought that uneasiness back, and she momentarily wondered
again if she’d be wise to be afraid. But the lure of the books drew
her away from her skittishness, and she set to running her fingers
over their covers, pulling out this one and that, and conversing
with the peddler in a casual way, as though the books’ characters
were friends mutually known for the strengths and flaws of their
personalities.
Finally, the peddler pulled a book from the lot. “Have you read
this? It’s a little more modern.”
She took it from his hand, opened it, and read the title page.
“No. Is it any good?”
“I liked it. I think the author may be a genius. But not everybody agrees with me. His other two books are more famous. I
think this is his best.”
“What’s so great about Gatsby?”
“Well, he dreams who he wants to be and then makes something of himself.”
Maud decided right there she needed to read that book. She
was thinking about how to get it without spending any money
when the peddler said, “Like I say, a lot of people don’t take to this
book. But I did. Makes you want to go east in the worst way.”
It had never occurred to Maud to go farther east than St. Louis
or Kansas City, but she could tell the peddler — Booker, as she
was beginning to call him in her mind — was thinking about an
east that was different from either of those two towns and far out
of her reach, even in her wildest imaginings. She felt, at that moment, insignificant under the wide sky, and she was glad they were
on the side of the wagon where their backs were to the house. She
was suddenly embarrassed by living there. She closed the book
and said, “Well, then, maybe I should get it from the library rather
than invest in it.”
“Tell you what. I’ll trade you. If you have a book inside you
want to get rid of, I’ll exchange it for this one. Even trade.”
Maud looked up at him. Those gold flecks in his eyes glittered.
Did he know she didn’t have any money? Or did he want her to
read the book because he liked it? She couldn’t tell. “Wait here. I’ll
see what I have to spare.”
Maud had a stack of books under her cot that she’d gathered
over time and hoarded. Each one was a favorite she’d read again
and again. She pulled from that stack Moby-Dick, and she picked it
because, it being so thick, she’d read it fewer times than she had the
rest and it was less worn. She walked back to the wagon with the
big blue book in hand and exchanged it for the slimmer volume and
a copy of Arrowsmith, which she angled for on the grounds that the
Gatsby book was so thin compared to what she was giving up.
The transaction completed, and without much else to say,
Maud and Booker fell into an awkward silence that Booker broke
by asking for information about who lived around. Maud pointed
to the northeast and the west, named aunts and uncles and cousins, and pointed due north and named the Singers. “They have
the most folks on that farm and the most money for extras. The
man who owns it is Mr. Connell Singer. He likes to read. He has a
library and lends me his books.”
“Mr. Singer thinks highly of you then.”
Maud couldn’t tell if that was a statement or a question, but
she hoped that either way it indicated the peddler was looking
for information about her possible suitors. “He’s nice. And generous.” She tucked her head and smiled to convey the notion that
Mr. Singer was particularly generous to her.
“I see. Those are good qualities in a neighbor.”
“Yes, they are. Mr. Singer is the richest person around here. He
supplies potatoes to the entire East Coast. Ships them by railroad
all the way to New York City and Philadelphia.” Maud checked
herself after that. She wasn’t exactly sure where her neighbor’s
potatoes went; she just wanted to make it clear that she was familiar with rich people and cities in the East.
“I see. Well, this Mr. Singer, then, probably buys his wares from
catalogues and has his books shipped in. Is he a married man?”
“He was. Widowed now.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.” Booker bit his lower lip. Then he
looked to the sky, took a handkerchief out of his back pocket,
and wiped his brow. “I guess I better move on before the sun gets
higher.” He looked to Maud. “It’s been nice visiting with you.”
“Stop by when you’re this way again. Next time, I might not
have just been into town.”
Their parting was marked by niceties that didn’t add to Maud’s
store of knowledge about the peddler, and by the time his bright
blue canvas was rocking away down the ruts of the lane, she was
reckoning up all the things about him she wished she’d found out.
Was he married (she thought maybe not, he didn’t mention any
family beyond aunts), what did he do when he wasn’t peddling
(he’d said he only peddled in the summertime), was he from Fayetteville, Arkansas, or some other Fayetteville (were there other
Fayettevilles?), and how did he keep that blue canvas from fading
in the sun (that was a complete mystery)? She might have thought
about his marital status more than once.
When Lovely came in for his midday meal, Maud had been
reading and had forgotten to warm up the beans.
He picked up her book. “Where’d you get this?”
“Peddler came by. Got it off of him.”
“Was he driving a wagon with a bright blue canvas?”
“Yes. Did you see him?”
“Didn’t see him to talk, but you can’t miss that blue.”
“Did he go to Mr. Singer’s house?”
“Probably. He went back up the line to the highway.” Lovely sat
down at the table, picked up Arrowsmith, and started reading.
Maud hoped that Booker hadn’t gone to Mr. Singer’s, or if he
had, that he hadn’t found him at home. Mr. Singer was over seventy, and it would be clear he wasn’t a suitor. Maud gave that more
worry during her chores, but by the time her father got home in
the evening, she’d gotten far enough into her new book that she
had taken to disliking most of the characters (except for Nick) and
was wondering what Booker, who she now thought of entirely by
name, found so wonderful about the novel. She hoped his enthusiasm didn’t mean that he was only attracted to rich women and
fast cars.
It wasn’t until after the meal, when he’d finished reading his
paper, that Mustard interrupted Maud’s reading and musings. He
was sitting in the only chair on the porch, and both she and Lovely
had their backs propped against posts, their noses in books, and
fans in their hands. He said, “Whatchya reading?”
Lovely spoke first. “Arrowsmith, by that Lewis fellow.”
“What’s it about?”
“A doctor.”
“Quack?”
“Don’t think so. But maybe.”
Mustard looked to Maud. “Mine’s about a bunch of rich people,” she said. “They don’t have much to do. They run up and
down the road to parties.”
Mustard nodded and fell silent again. But even though he
generally was good about letting them read, Maud could tell he
wanted to talk. She said, “Anything in the paper?”
“Plans for the new Mississippi levees.” Mustard picked his
Banjo and a store-bought cigarette package out of his pocket. He
tapped the package on his lighter, knocked out a cigarette, and lit
up. After a couple of puffs, he started talking about a man who’d
come into the feed store trying to sell a litter of beagles.
Maud and Lovely closed their books. Not having a dog was a
problem. They wanted one for the company and to warn them of
snakes, and they agreed that any dog that could bark would do.
But Mustard wanted a Labrador. He didn’t have enough money for
a purebred dog, but he liked to talk about shooting ducks down on
the sandbar and eating dark duck meat all winter long. He mentioned the pros and cons of various kinds of dogs, described the
markings of the beagle pups he’d seen, and told dog stories until
dusk closed in and fireflies sprinkled the air with gold.
To Maud’s disappointment, they went to bed without any more
reading. But she consoled herself with ruminations on Booker until
after the moon rose and she could see the front yard lit through
the windows. She’d been asleep for several hours and was dreaming about hanging bright blue wallpaper when Lovely shook her by
the shoulder. He whispered, “There’s a peculiar light in the sky.”
She assumed he was talking about the yellow that comes before a tornado. She sat up in bed feeling some dread about having
to go to the cellar. Then she saw it was dark outside the windows
and the air was tinted only by moonlight. “What color?”
“Like city lights.”
“Where?”
“Northeast.”
“Above the trees?”
“Yeah. High. Come see.”
They tiptoed out to the porch. Maud followed Lovely to the
east edge. “Look,” he said.
The sky was yellow. But not tornado yellow. Maud said, “Fire.”
“Yeah. We better see if it’s coming toward us. And if anybody
needs help.”
“You sure it’s not somebody burning off stubble?”
“Could be. But it’s got to be late. Maybe two in the morning.”
“What were you doing up?”
“Taking a pee.”
“Should we wake Daddy?”
“You do it. He’ll take it better.”
Mustard agreed that fire was in the air, and the three of them
threw on clothes and shoes and piled into Mustard’s car, a 1919 retractable top Chevrolet that tilted and jiggled so badly that Maud,
in the backseat, held on with both hands to the rods supporting
the roof. When they turned off the lane onto the section line, she
held on with one hand, and peered around her brother’s head into
the night and the light ahead. Fairly soon, she began to smell the
fire in the air, and by the time they climbed the rise beyond a body
of water they called a “snake lake,” she could see the flames beyond the hood of the car. Passing through the cross of the section
lines, she tasted cinders in the air. Mustard yelled, “She’s gone!”
But neither of his children answered because they, too, could see
that the schoolhouse that sat farther up the section line, the one
they had both gone to, was completely engulfed in flames.
Mustard stopped the car in the middle of the road. They all
jumped out and quickly passed a few other automobiles and
trucks until they got to a cluster of people, one of several, watching the fire. Grandpa, Uncle Ame, and Aunt Viola were in that
group. Maud touched her great-aunt on the shoulder and was
quickly enfolded close to the older woman’s hip. Viola said, “Poker
woke us up barking like crazy.”
“Did anybody get anything out?”
“Don’t know.”
After that, there wasn’t much conversation. At first, Maud
worried the fire would get out of control and she watched for that.
But, fortunately, the wind was low and the schoolyard mostly barren. Men were shoveling its dirt over the runners. So after her
worry about spreading ceased, the fire had a hypnotic effect that
drew her into thoughts and images that arose without bidding.
She thought of teachers she’d been schooled by in that building,
of a day when she’d brought in purple flowers she’d picked on
the way, of a boy she had hungered after whose family had come
and gone suddenly, of running through hallways with cousins, of
a play in which she’d been Maid Marian and worn a curtain on
her head, and of her mother, still alive, leading her up the steps.
She found she was crying.
She wiped her tears, moved away from Viola, and threaded
through the crowd of people. Their faces were lit by the fire almost
as well as if the sun had been shining, but their backs were dark, and
their shadows mingled with the light in a way that made it seem like
the dirt was alive and moving. Most of the people in the river bottoms were there, and about half of them were kin to Maud; for that
land, at the time of statehood, had been parceled out to the Cherokees living on it already. Her great-grandfather, Sanders Cordery,
had settled in those bottoms at the end of the Trail of Tears. Maud’s
grandpa, Bert, had married one of Sanders’ daughters, Jenny. And
Jenny and all of her children, adult and minor, had been given allotments of land. One of Maud’s older sisters had been an infant at
the time of allotment, and the other a tot; they’d received land of
their own. But Maud, Lovely, and Mustard lived on Maud’s mother’s allotment. Maud’s aunts’ and uncles’ allotments were scattered
around them, some with houses, some only farmland or pasture.
Her grandpa, her mother’s younger siblings, Blue, Early, Lucy, and
Lucy’s husband and child lived together on Jenny’s land. At the
moment, Ame and Viola were hunkered with them, too, as Viola’s
house in the old Creek Nation had been lost to the flooding of the
Verdigris River. Most of the people around the fire who were not kin
to Maud were white and had moved into the fertile Arkansas River
bottoms whenever they could get their hands on Indian land.
Maud talked to her mother’s younger sisters, Lucy and Nan;
held their babies, one after the other; and watched the fire. But
she also craned her neck this way and that, thinking maybe, just
maybe, Booker might be there. Her good sense told her that nobody could easily drive a team of horses toward a fire, but she
hoped that maybe he’d come on foot. A lot of the people around
her had walked to get there. That was dangerous at night because
of the snakes, so nearly everybody was armed and had their dogs
with them. The lanterns they’d carried were clustered on the
ground in groups like the watchers.
After a while, Nan’s baby, Andy, got heavy, and Maud handed
him off to his older sister and threaded through the patches of
people, keeping one eye on the fire and the other on the crowd,
still looking (and trying not to seem obvious) for Booker. And
that’s what she was doing when she looked straight into the eyes
and beard of a man who was standing by himself, not staring at
the fire, but at her. John Mount. He flicked his tongue out in the
air, wiggled it around, and settled it on his upper lip. It and his
eyes reminded Maud of a snake. She turned fast and walked facing the blaze to another cluster of people that included several of
her former schoolmates. They were talking about what was lost
in the fire. They all agreed the building hadn’t been the same since
the pigs had been run into it during the flood. But still, the loss of
a school was a terrible thing, and several of the girls were weeping. Maud shortly got enough of that crying and threaded again
through the crowd, this time not so much looking for Booker but
trying to avoid John Mount and his kin.
She landed again with her aunts. And in the next group over
were some men, including her daddy and her uncle Ryde. It unsettled Maud even more to see them together. She didn’t trust either of them to not start a fight, and more often than not, they got
into trouble together. Maud noticed that they were facing away
from the fire and the other men, and that their heads were close.
She didn’t take that as a good sign, and she wondered what they
were talking about. She couldn’t approach them to eavesdrop
without drawing attention, but the sight of them together, clearly
not watching the fire, disturbed her so much that she set off looking for Lovely.
She found him farther back than the others, leaning against
the hood of a truck, talking with Gilda Starr, the girl he had his
eyes on. Gilda had gone to school with them in the early grades,
but her family had moved into town afterward. Still, Maud and
Lovely saw Gilda at dances, fairs, rodeos, and sometimes walking
the planks in front of Ft. Gibson’s stores. The last time Maud had
seen her to talk to at any length was in Taylor’s General Store on a
day that the rains had been so torrential they’d been trapped there
all afternoon. Lovely had been trapped, too, and Maud was of the
opinion that it was then when Gilda had grabbed her brother’s attention. She was attractive and good-natured, but above them in
station. So Maud, as she turned and walked the other way, hoped
Lovely wouldn’t get his heart broken. She was still pondering that
possibility and glancing sideways at the fire every so often when
she ran smack into a man’s chest.
She sprang back and stumbled before she realized it was
Claude Mount’s. Then she felt her face take on the heat of the fire.
Mount grinned and said, “You needn’t look so snakebit.”
“I’m not snakebit. You surprised me, that’s all.”
“You might watch where yer going.”
Maud thought Claude Mount had stepped into her path from
behind the cab of a truck, but she didn’t accuse him of that because she didn’t want conversation. She said, “I will,” and turned.
But he grabbed her by the arm, and said, “Hey, Maud, don’t ya
have time to jaw with yer neighbor?”
“Take your hand off my arm.”
“No offense meant.” Mount held both hands up next to his
ears like he was surrendering. He wasn’t that much taller than
Maud, but he was powerfully built and had a full beard. The hair
on the top his head was stringy. He smelled like he’d been wrestling hogs.
Maud said, “No offense taken then.” She turned to go again.
“I hear tell yer uncle Ryde is accusing my brother of breaking
the back of one of yer cows,” Mount said, in a voice loud enough
to be heard at a distance over the sound of the fire. Maud looked
to see who else was within hearing range. Then she turned to him
and said, “I don’t know about that. But somebody did.”
“Well, it wasn’t John. I can tell ya that. He were with me.”
“That’s a fine recommendation.”
“It ain’t natural for full brothers to be working together?”
“Depends on what the brothers are working at.” Maud looked
around. She didn’t want to stay in a conversation with Claude
Mount, especially that far away from the fire. Most everybody
was still turned toward it with the roar in their ears.
“Minding our bizness like ever’body else. You tell yer uncle
Ryde the Mounts don’t take to false accusations.”
Maud saw a gun in a holster below Claude’s belt. But she didn’t
see it as adding to his threat. He was frightening enough without
a gun, and the Mount brothers were prone to sneaky violence, not
the shoot-you-in-the-chest kind. Besides, to have come without a
gun would’ve been stupid. Cottonmouths were as thick as thistles
down where the Mounts lived. She said, “I’ll tell him if I see him,” a
statement she had no intention of fulfilling. Telling her uncle Ryde
would make him even more prone to pick a fight and drag her
daddy smack into the thick of it. Not that he needed dragging. In
fact, Maud knew, it was just as likely that he’d be leading.
She walked off, and as she did, just by habit, shook her hair. It
was long and black, and she shook it often for all sorts of reasons.
That time she shook it to shake off the smell of Claude Mount.
But it provoked a sound from Mount that was animal and unmistakable in intention, and that frightened Maud so much that
she felt that she, like her cow, had been assaulted in the back. Her
muscles contracted around her spine, and her legs extended to
their fullest stride without running. She walked straight to her
aunt Nan, took Andy again, and stood there watching the blaze
until she was carried away into its depths.
By the light before the dawn, the fire had lost its height and
most of the building had fallen. Volunteer firemen from Ft. Gibson had arrived in a fire truck with hoses they didn’t bother distending. Whenever it looked like any arm of the fire was going to
run away, somebody shoveled dust over it, threw on it a bucket
of water they’d drawn from the truck, or took a wet feed sack and
slapped it out. People were beginning to tire, and Maud was starting to find Andy heavy again. She passed him to his sister and
walked toward a spot where she could see if Lovely was still talking to Gilda without having to go past where Claude Mount had
been. It was during that walk that she overheard some man she
barely knew say the word peddler.
She stopped, folded her arms under her breasts, and turned
toward the fire. Three men were in a conversation with one
woman. They were all white and the woman was doing most of
the talking. She was answering the men’s questions, relating the
details of a visit Booker had made to her place. Maud wasn’t ex-
actly sure where that was, but she thought it was a little house
between the highway and Ft. Gibson. The men wanted to know
if the woman found him strange in any way. Where was he from?
Did his manner seem shifty? It was clear to Maud the woman was
enjoying the attention, and she talked at length about his visit. As
for shifty, he’d cheated her on some cloth and she’d noticed he
was carrying a lot of kerosene on that wagon.
At the mention of kerosene, Maud turned and stopped her
pretense. She said, “I visited with the peddler. He seemed like a
good Christian to me.”
One of the men spoke. “How do you know that?”
“He tried to peddle me a Bible, but I already had one. So he
read some scripture to me. He had a fine reading voice. One
whole side of his wagon is taken up with books.”
“Most of those were novels,” the woman said.
“Some of them were. Some were schoolbooks, some were Bibles. He had all sorts of books. He’s an educated man, as far as I
could see.”
One of the men smiled at Maud. “That helps clear up some of
the suspicions about him, I guess. Thank you for your remarks.”
He touched the brim of his hat.
The woman said, “I wouldn’t be too quick. He’s here this
morning and then tonight this.” She gestured toward the fire. “It’s
not like many strangers come through.”
“What makes you think somebody set the fire?” Maud asked.
“We were just speculating,” another man said. “Most fires start
in winter.”
Maud couldn’t deny that. “Well, I can tell you, I spent a good
deal of time going through his wares and buying books from
him, and he’s a fine man with a good family. Named his . . .” She
realized she had gone too far. Anybody would find naming your
team after your aunts funny, even people who obviously had no
senses of humor. She finished the sentence by mumbling.
One of the men said, “I didn’t quite get that.”
Maud said, “Named all the books of the Bible in the old part.
Just rattled them off. It was impressive.”
She left after that and resumed her search for Lovely. She saw
him still standing with Gilda, decided she’d waited long enough,
and marched over to them. The three of them were still talking
when the sun hit the rim of the earth and, at the same time, a
Packard rolled down the section line at a creep. Maud, Lovely,
and Gilda all recognized the car, as did everybody else, and when
it rolled to a stop, one of the men standing close to it walked over,
spoke to the driver, and then opened the door and held it. A slim
man with a white goatee and moustache and hair to match appeared from inside the car and walked with a cane toward the fire.
Gilda said, “I was wondering where he was.”
“Did he just now show up or is he coming back, do you think?”
Maud said.
“It takes him a while to get organized,” replied Lovely. “He
hasn’t been feeling well.”
The old man, Connell Singer, took several steps toward the
fire, spread his stance, and planted his cane. The man who had
opened his door had been treading behind him and stopped behind his shoulder. That man made a motion with his hand that
was clearly for the purpose of calling other men over, and they
came, a single man at first, and then several others. They stood in
a half arc around Mr. Singer, leaving an opening so that his view
of the fire, what was left of it, was unobstructed. Maud couldn’t
hear a word of what was said. But she witnessed arms extending
into the air and enough general gesturing to be able to tell that the
men were giving Mr. Singer a full description of how high the fire
had climbed, where the walls had fallen, and how the runners had
been stopped in their paths.
Maud shortly got bored with watching a conversation she
couldn’t hear and that she felt confident was passing on information she already had, and she turned again to the fire. In daylight
and dying, it looked less magical and more like a big mess that
would take a lot of work to clear. Little patches of flames were
still dancing, but they were separated from one another and resembled fires that might be used for roasting or camping on the
river. Smoke rose from most of the wood, and some of it, Maud
thought, would burn for days unless rain came. She was looking
at the sky for any sign of that and recalling when rain clouds were
the last things she wanted to see when Gilda said, “Mama’s waving to me. I better get going.”
Maud said, “We better go, too. I’ll round up Daddy. Good to
see you.” She left quickly so that Lovely and Gilda could privately
say whatever they wanted in parting, and as soon as she got out
of earshot, she stopped and searched the clusters of people still
standing around. Her aunts were gone, and with them, her cousins. Neither did she see any of her uncles or her grandpa. She
turned and took a few steps, looked toward the cars and trucks,
and didn’t see her daddy’s. She thought maybe she wasn’t looking
in the right place, had disremembered in the excitement where
they’d parked, so she looked this way and that until she’d focused on every car there and realized that her father’s really was
gone. Then she turned back toward Lovely and saw him walking
Gilda toward her family. She decided that might be interesting to
watch and, suddenly feeling weary, looked around for a place to
sit down. There wasn’t any sitting place except in the dirt, so she
stood.
The parting took longer than Maud expected. Evidently,
Lovely and Mrs. Starr had found something to talk about, and
Maud was thinking about ribbing her brother about that on the
way home when her eyes again drifted over to the cluster of men
around Mr. Singer. Three of those men were the same ones who
had been talking about Booker, and the woman they’d been talking to was also with them. Maud knew there was only one thing
that would draw that woman into a conversation with Mr. Singer
and a whole group of men, and she suddenly felt the same way
she felt whenever she found a snake in a hen’s nest. She backed
up from where she was standing and frantically looked around
for any kin. She spied Early far across the fire, standing with his
cowboy hat shoved forward on his head and scratching his back
with his elbow in the air. Beyond him, she saw no other kin except
Lovely. He was still talking to Mrs. Starr. Maud couldn’t imagine
what he could think to say that would take that long, and she suddenly felt a grinding irritation with him. She looked back to the
group standing around Mr. Singer. The woman was nodding.
Maud was transfixed by that conversation. She couldn’t join it,
but she also couldn’t leave while it was going on. She stood there
and fumed, smelled the burnt wood in her nose, and tried to will
Lovely to get out of his idiotic conversation and walk toward Mr.
Singer. She glanced repeatedly his way and then again back at the
group around her elderly neighbor. Eventually, she saw the backsides of the Starrs as they walked away; but Lovely, the idiot he
was, walked over to Early and started talking with him. Neither of
them looked in her direction, and instead of crossing to the other
side of the fire to join them and maybe picking up a little of the
conversation still going on around Mr. Singer, Maud stayed where
she was until Mr. Singer turned back toward his car. Then she
turned away from it all and started walking home.
Maud had only gotten as far as the Beechers’ place on the near
side of where the section lines crossed when she heard Lovely’s
voice calling her name. She kept walking without turning. She
heard him running. Finally, he shouted, “Hold up, will you?” so
loudly that she couldn’t pretend she hadn’t heard him. She slowed
her walk and threw a look over her shoulder that she hoped telegraphed displeasure. When Lovely caught up to her, he panted,
and said, “What’ve you got a bee in your drawers for?”
“You took too long. We’ve been up all night. Can’t you think of
anybody but yourself?”
Lovely drew his chin in and pulled to his full height. But he
didn’t snap back. He fell into a pace that matched Maud’s and
walked in silence at her side until she couldn’t stand it any longer.
She said, “Where the heck do you think Daddy went off to?”
“Work?”
“I doubt it. He left too early for that.”
“Maybe he’s home, trying to get some sleep?”
“Could be, I guess. It’d be nice if he’d thought to take us
with him.”
“Nice? Dad?”
The reminder of their alliance against their father put Maud
in a little better mood, but it wasn’t better enough to confide in
Lovely her fears about Booker; if she did, he’d recognize that her
interest extended beyond the realm of justice. She didn’t want to
have that discussion, so she said, “Are you courting Mrs. Starr or
her daughter?”
Lovely didn’t rise to that bait. He replied, “I wonder where the
schooling will take place come fall?”
“Mrs. Benge’s, probably.” Maud named the closest school on
that side of the highway, the one on the bayou.
“Ft. Gibson’s would be nearer.”
“Maybe there then. I don’t really know.”
“I know you don’t know. I was just making conversation.”
“Well, make it about something interesting. Did you get Mrs.
Starr’s blessing?”
“Wasn’t looking for it. Was just listening to her tell how they’d
been awakened in the night by the sound of cars starting. Evidently, they’re light sleepers.”
Maud didn’t care what kind of sleepers the Starrs were, but she
did recognize that her brother’s mention of the sleeping habits of
Gilda’s family was more connected to thoughts of beds than to a
concern for their health. She said, “Did you make any progress on
the daughter?”
“Taking her to the dance Saturday night.”
“What dance?”
“The one in town. Down on the corner. Gonna be fiddling.”
“How are you getting in?”
“Early’s gonna take me on the back of his horse.”
Envy wasn’t a large part of Maud’s nature. But it’d been a long
night, and worry over Booker hadn’t left her. As she looked down
the long dirt road that led straight to more dirt then to a wild
of cane and tangled scrub and eventually to the sandbar and the
river, she felt the same desolation she felt the day Betty was killed.
The thought of a dance with fiddling and lanterns and people
dressed up in clean clothes without her being there was almost
too much to bear. A tear formed in her left eye, the one closest
to the sun, and she wiped it away with a flick of her wrist, hoping
that Lovely hadn’t seen it.
If he had, he didn’t mention it. Maud took a deep breath, set
her jaw, and distracted her mind by thinking about the chickens
she needed to let out and feed and then about whether or not her
father was at home in bed. That thought sent her eyes search-
ing the dirt for tracks that might have been laid that morning.
But there had been more traffic than usual on the road, and she
couldn’t distinguish new tracks from old. She walked on in silence
before Lovely finally said, “Gilda thinks a lot of you.”
Maud knew Lovely had just made that up to get her into a
conversation about his girl, and by that time, she’d reined herself in enough that she didn’t begrudge his romantic interest. She
kept the conversation going in the direction he wanted all the way
down the line until their house came into sight and she could see
that their father’s car wasn’t there. She said, “Where do you think
he’s off to?”
“Work, I hope.”
“What do you think the chances are?”
“Maybe pretty good. He’ll want to tell everybody about the
fire.”
Maud hoped Lovely was right. But her father wasn’t an eager
employee. He avoided taking orders like a calf avoids a rope, and
his skittishness didn’t endear him to his superiors. Over the years,
he’d had a number of jobs — construction work, road building,
even a little grave digging — but he’d always wound up in a fight
with somebody, often his boss, and either stormed off after a brawl
or, more often, wound up on the ground knocked out and dirty.
Mustard usually got the first lick in, but not always the last one.
Maud let out the chickens and fed them while Lovely milked
the cow. Then they both sat to breakfast, ate quickly, and Lovely
left to clear timber. Maud tended to her other chores, changed
the bandage on her leg to a smaller one just to keep dirt out of her
wound, and then walked down the lane and back up the section
line to her aunt Nan’s. She found Nan on her back stoop churning
butter in the shade of a tree, and Maud took over the churning to
give her a rest.
Nan was about the same age Maud’s mother had been when
she’d died, so Maud was partial to her, and Nan gave Maud what
mothering she could. They talked at length about the fire, recounted how they’d become aware of its burning, what they’d
done to get there, who’d said what to whom, and what they
thought of the flames, the smell in the air, and the charred remains of the school. They wanted to return to the ruins, but Nan
didn’t have the energy to round up her children and Maud was
too tired to walk the road in the sun alone. So they took turns
churning and talked about their imaginings of the fire’s site in
broad daylight and their hopes for a new school. In the midst of
that talk, Nan mentioned that Ryde hadn’t come home.
The butter was setting up. Nan took over the churning to finish it off. Maud flexed her fingers to get her hand back into pliable
shape and said, “Daddy didn’t come home, either. At least not as
far as Lovely and I could tell.”
Nan pursed her lips.
Maud said, “I saw both the Mounts at the fire last night.”
“They’re bad’uns. You stay away from ’em.”
“I’m trying. You heard about our cow?”
“Yeah. You can bet it was the Mounts. They been acting like
that since the river was laid in its bed.”
“We hadn’t really wanted Daddy to know it.”
“Something like that’s hard to keep. As soon as Ryde heared it,
he was ready to take off after ’em.”
“I think he told Daddy. I hope they didn’t take the law into
their own hands.”
Nan kept churning. Maud looked off into the distance at the
hills on the horizon. Eventually, Nan spoke. “Nothing would surprise me.”
Maud looked down at the dirt between her feet. A thing like
an axed cow could get a lot of people killed. She recalled Betty
writhing in the weeds. A shudder ran down between her shoulders and through her body to her breasts. She wiped a bead of
sweat from between them. She wanted away from the violence as
much as she wanted indoor plumbing and brighter light to read
by at night. She applied her moist thumb to the dust on the toe
of her left shoe. Worrying wouldn’t fix what was out of her control, and she hadn’t yet spoken a word about what else was on her
mind. She said, “Did that peddler with the blue covered wagon
stop here?”
“Sure did. I bought some cloth with my egg money.”
Maud didn’t want to talk about cloth, but she knew how the
conversation was supposed to progress. She prompted Nan to tell
her the color and what she was going to make the material into.
Only after she’d heard that, did she say, “Some white woman at
the fire was accusing the peddler of starting it and cheating her,
too.”
Nan cleared her throat. After a while she said, “That’s Miz
Pratt yer talking about. I heared her, too. She ain’t never in her life
got the good end of a deal.”
Maud felt relieved. That Booker could be a cheat hadn’t set too
well with her. She said, “What did you think of him?”
Nan let up on the churning. “He’s a good-looking feller. Did ya
buy from him?”
Maud told her the titles of the books she’d gotten in trade and
then added, “Do you think he’ll stay around long?”
“Well, Maudy-Baby, he’s a peddler.” Nan started churning
again.
Maudy-Baby had been her mother’s name for her, and a lump
came up in Maud’s throat. In the dust at her feet, she imagined
her mama dying in the yard, twisting on the ground. To get that
image out of her head, she nudged her aunt with her shoulder. “I
know. But he sure is pleasing to the eye.”
Maud played with the baby while Nan patted the butter into
molds, took the noon meal with her aunt and cousins, and walked
home, having secured a ride to the dance. She was lost in thinking
about the fun of Saturday night when she walked through their
first cattle guard and realized that the gate was open and lying
on the ground. She felt certain she’d closed the guard behind her
when she’d left. And, that morning, Lovely had taken a sack meal
to the field because he was late getting started. There wasn’t a car,
wagon, or horse ahead at the house. She looked to the front pasture for the cows and saw Carrie, the milk cow, and her yearling
lying in the shade of a pecan tree. She pulled the gate up off the
ruts into place and looked to the second cattle guard. That gate
was down, too. Her heart suddenly thumped fast. She felt stupid
for leaving home without her gun. She looked hard at the house.
It was two rooms of unpainted boards resting on stacks of
sandstones. When it had gotten so crowded that her grandpa
and the rest of the family moved to another house, they’d left her
close family in that one, and her uncle Blue and her daddy had
built a porch across the front and the west side. Its tin roof was
supported by five posts, four of which were visible from the lane.
The house seemed empty, its two front windows like blind eyes,
its two doors like cave mouths. She looked to the yard. It was
a few patches of grass, a lot of dirt that she kept swept with a
broom, and a line of sandstones winding from the porch steps
to the pump. Some chickens were scratching around. But what
Maud’s eyes rested on was a tall and broad live oak tree. Its foliage was lush and many of its branches dipped to the ground.
During the hottest days of summer, she retreated to its shade, and
when she looked out from its cover, the rest of the farm appeared
as separate as another country. Maud, as accustomed as she was
to hiding beneath the branches and leaves of the oak, recognized
the possibility that it could be concealing somebody as well as
the house. At the distance she was from both, only a marksman
could hit her. And although she didn’t really believe she was likely
to get shot in her own lane, stranger things had happened, and
she did think it was within the realm of possibility that somebody
who she couldn’t see or sense was watching her. She looked in the
dirt of the ruts for footprints, saw her own, and recognized Lovely’s. But Lovely, even if he’d come back, wouldn’t leave the guards
down any more than she would. She looked for tire tracks and
for those of wagon wheels. There were several sets, but she had
stepped on many of those and none had rolled over her prints.
She turned and reopened the first cattle guard and looked for
prints beyond it. The same confused pattern speckled that dirt.
She pulled that gate closed again. Then she walked back up the
section line, watching the house and the live oak on her left as
long as she could.
She went back to Nan’s. Two of her cousins were playing in the
yard. She spoke to the girl. “Renee, did a wagon or car come by
while I was in the back with your mama?”
“None that I noticed.” The child was flat faced and brown
headed.
“But you’d see one, right? You were in the front yard most of
the time?”
Renee held a stick in her right hand. Words she’d drawn in
the dirt to teach her little brother to read were between her and
Maud. “I guess so. That’d be hard to miss.”
The house sat so close on the line that dust was always a problem. There wasn’t any noise in the bottoms beyond the buzz of
insects, chicken arguments, cow complaints, and the sound of
Mr. Singer’s tractors. Lately, those hadn’t been in any of the fields
close around. Probably, a car or a wagon would’ve been heard by
all. Maud said, “How ’bout a horse?”
Renee squinted. “Looking for company?”
“No. Just wondering. Go back to your words.”
“You wanta play with us?”
“I’d love to. But I gotta . . .” She didn’t know what she was going
to say until she added, “Catch up with Lovely.”
Maud didn’t have to walk far before she saw Lovely in the distance between a stand of trees and a potato field, using a mule to
move limbs into a pile. Mr. Singer had hired him to clear the trees
for planting because the woods bordered both on their mother’s
allotment and their grandmother’s.
Lovely looked up while Maud was still walking the road. He
started unhitching the mule from the limbs before she got to him.
When she was within talking distance, he said, “You want to ride
her back with me?”
Lovely threw his tools in a pine box sitting on two stumps
under the trees. He threw the ropes over the animal’s back and
led her to another stump. He mounted first and pulled Maud up.
They were on the section line before she said, “We may have a
problem at the house.”
“What kinda?”
“I went to visit Aunt Nan, and when I got back, the guards
were down on the ground.”
“Both of ’em?”
“Yep.”
“You think I need to stop at Aunt Nan’s?” Lovely said, over his
shoulder.
“Might oughta.”
Lovely kicked the mule in the side. He often brought the ani-
mal home rather than return her to Mr. Singer’s for the night, and
so there was no worry about being considered mule thieves, and
as they clip-clopped along, Maud described her fear of going up
to the house with the gates on the ground. Lovely had a handgun in the saddlebag he carried to the field, and when they got to
Nan’s, Maud slid off of the mule and borrowed a rifle.
They rode as far as the intersection of the section line and
their lane, and stopped at their uncle Gourd’s house. Gourd was
laying out with a woman, and when he got one of those, he could
be gone a whole season or until the woman, whoever she was,
threw him out. So they tied the mule to Gourd’s porch post and
went inside. When they came back out, Lovely untied the animal and mounted her from the porch, and Maud slipped off the
planks, went behind the house, and scooted down the ridge, carrying the rifle in her left hand. She used her right hand to grab on
to weeds to manage the incline. On flatter land, she took the cow
path below the ridge west toward the house.
Maud had climbed through the fence and was leaning against
a large tree just under the ridge with her rifle pointed when Lovely
came out on the porch and shouted her name. She recognized the
shout as urgent, but not terrified, and she laid her gun on higher
ground and used roots as steps. She stepped high until she got out
of the weeds. Lovely was still on the porch when he said, “We’ve
got a problem in the kitchen.”
“What kind?”
“A dead dog.”
“In the kitchen?”
“On the table.”
“That’s just meanness,” Maud said.
“You betcha. Shot in the head and slit in the throat. It’s a mess
in there. One of us will have to clean it up.”
Maud figured who that was likely to be. “I guess I better take a
look.”
“It’s pretty bad. I’ve already seen it.”
Maud felt like she might, on the strength of that remark, get
out of having to bury the dog. And she wasn’t above using her
gender to her advantage. She said, in a voice that was a little less
assertive than she usually used with her brother, “How bad?”
“There’s blood everywhere.”
“What kind of dog was it?”
“Dog, dog.”
“It’s the Mounts’ doings.” Maud leaped to that conclusion
without even drawing a breath, and for a few minutes, she and
Lovely distracted themselves from the carcass in the kitchen by
discussing their neighbors. They took into account that they’d
found Betty in the Mounts’ pasture, or what the Mounts called
their pasture, which was really just scrub in the wild between real
pasture and the river. And they took into account a fistfight Mustard had had with Claude Mount during the last election. They
also counted in the real possibility that Mustard and Ryde had
done something in the early morning light to settle the score
with the Mounts over axing Betty’s back. But then they figured it
might be just as likely that the Mounts would’ve gone after Ryde,
and they knew no meanness had taken place at their aunt’s. So
they left it at that, and Maud asked, “Do you think they actually
killed it in the kitchen?”
“Don’t know. I can’t see them bringing it into the house to
shoot it. But there’s a lot of blood for them to have kilt it somewhere else. I got some on me.” Lovely held up his hand and spat
on it.
“Why are you spitting on yourself?”
“I got a thistle poke.” He massaged his palm with his thumb
and then swiped his hand on his overalls.
“I’ve told you to wear gloves a thousand times.”
“I was wearing gloves. It poked me through one.”
Lovely looked toward the river. The sun was past four o’clock.
“If Dad doesn’t stop off somewhere, he could be home in an hour.”
“We better get to digging, then.”
“Let’s dig in the garden. We can make fertilizer.”
“Do you want to drag it out, or do you want me to?”
“Well, I’ve already seen it,” he said. “And it didn’t get to me like
Betty did. I’ll drag it out. You get the shovels.”
They dug a hole three feet deep and a foot longer than the
dog. While they threw dirt, they talked about whether the dog
belonged to somebody or was one of the feral ones that lived in
the wild of the river, roamed the sandbar, and sometimes took up
with the wolves. It was a dog they’d never seen. But dogs and cats
turned up around the house on a regular basis, and if their father
hadn’t been so particular about the kind he wanted, they could’ve
had their pick of a half dozen or so. This dog was mostly black
and a little long-haired, but not speckled with burrs. Lovely had
dragged it to the garden wrapped in the only tablecloth they had,
and with a good bit of regret, Maud agreed to bury it in that cloth.
Lovely shoved the carcass into the hole with his boot. It raised a
little dust when it hit the bottom. He said, “Should we say something over it?”
“Like what?”
“Don’t know. It might’ve been somebody’s pet.”
Maud looked around. Sunflower stalks were growing at the
north end of the garden. They weren’t yet blooming, but they had
the makings of buds. She walked over to them and broke a stalk
off. She walked back to the hole, knelt, and laid the stalk on the
tablecloth.
By the time Mustard got home, Maud had Lovely’s overalls
soaking in cold water in the kettle in the yard and the kitchen
looked as usual except for the bare wood of the table. Mustard
came in weary but carrying news of various conversations about
the fire. He reported on arguments about its origin and was halfway through his meal before he rubbed his thumb along the grain
of the wood, and said, “Cloth on the line?”
Maud was at the stove picking a biscuit out of the oven. Lovely
was at the table with his father. He cleared his throat. Maud
straightened up, dipped some beans onto her plate, and said,
“We’ve got a little problem, Daddy.”
Mustard grunted.
Maud sat her plate down and slid into her chair. “Do you want
a cigarette?”
“Not through eating. What’s the problem?”
“Well, I went visiting Aunt Nan, and when I got back, the cattle guards were down.”
Mustard had hominy on his knife. He threw his head back and
dropped several kernels into his mouth. Then he waved the knife
in front of Maud’s face. “That reminds me.” He pointed the knife
at Lovely. “You kids lied to me about Betty. Her back was axed. If
you wasn’t so big, I’d whip the tar out of you both. As it is, as soon
as I finish this meal, I’m gonna kick yer butts.”
Maud and Lovely glanced at each other in a communication
they’d used since before their mother’s death. It was barely noticeable to anyone else, but it said between them, Don’t run. He’s
just bellowing.
“We’re sorry about that. We didn’t know how to break it to
you, and she had to be put down, no matter.” Maud rubbed her
thumb over the headdress of the Indian on the Calumet bakingpowder tin they used as a pencil holder. She was glad the tin had
been on the floor and unsplattered with blood after the dog had
been left on the table.
Mustard pinched the end of his nose. “I can’t for the life of me
figure out why anybody would want to protect the Mounts.”
“We were protecting you, Dad.” Lovely spoke. “If you stormed
off and shot one of ’em, then where would you be? In jail, we reckoned.”
“Somebody would have to catch me first. Haven’t you got any
faith in me?”
“We do, Daddy. But you’ve been known to fly off the handle,”
Maud said.
“Somebody bring me an ashtray.”
Lovely got up, went to the front room, came back, and settled
a clear glass ashtray on the table. Mustard took his Banjo, a pouch
of tobacco, and papers from his shirt pocket. After he’d rolled his
cigarette and taken a couple of puffs, he said, “Ryde figured three
hogs to a cow. But then I told him she was carrying, so we upped
it to four.”
“When did you do it?”
“While everybody was watching the fire. Any attention grabber can be an opportunity. Remember that.”
Maud and Lovely were used to Mustard’s parental advice. It
included “Cut up, not crossways,” “Hit ’em before they know yer
mad,” and “Stomp ’em if you can; yer a lot less likely to break a
hand.” They saw his recommendations as signs of affection but
tried not to dwell on them. Maud was imagining the dead hogs
when Mustard added, “Shot ’em in the head and then cut their
throats for good measure. Little hogs, though. Not big-hog season.” He said that with a tone of regret.
“Well, they got even,” Lovely said.
“How’s that?”
“Killed a dog and threw it on the kitchen table.”
Mustard pursed his lips and trimmed the ash off the end of his
cigarette. “Is that it?”
“It was pretty bad, Dad. Shot it in the head and slit its throat.
Blood was everywhere. Ruined the tablecloth and Maud had to
soak steel wool in vinegar and use it on a spot on the table where
the blood leaked through.”
Maud moved a plate. “Didn’t get it all. I think it’s gonna have to
be sanded.”
Mustard extended his hand and fingered the spot. “I can take
care of that.”
Lovely reached for the honey pot, dipped a spoon into it, and
let the honey drip onto a biscuit. Watching the honey’s slow move,
Maud recognized that she’d been expecting storming and threatening. Maybe her father figured one dog against four hogs and
thought he’d gotten the better of the Mounts? She didn’t want to
encourage more retaliation, so she said, “Thanks, Daddy. It wasn’t
really all that bad. Was it, Lovely?”
Lovely was as practiced as Maud at settling Mustard’s temper,
and he hopped back into the conversation with “Naw. We used
the tablecloth to lug him to the garden and buried him there. He’ll
grow fat onions next season.”
Mustard lowered his eyebrows and winced. Then he took a
long drag and stumped his butt out in the tray. “The Mounts generally go up in their meanness, not down. Keep yer eyes wide fer
something sneaky. One dog fer four hogs ain’t exactly enough.”
2
Maud often found her uncle Ryde as difficult as
a cow with a twitchy hind foot. But she conceded that he was the
best square-dance caller around. Her job on the way to the dance
was to protect his fiddle from his children. She rode in the back of
his buckboard on a quilt with her cousins, Morgan, Renee, Sanders, and Andy, holding the instrument in her arms as if it were a
baby. The sun was still shining on the potato plants and Maud’s
back was against the west planks of the wagon bed where she was
trying to stay squeezed into a little patch of shade. When they arrived at the schoolhouse rubble, Ryde stopped his horses in the
middle of the line. He said fire was still burning under the ash and
the only thing salvaged from the building was a book that had
been locked in the safe because it was dirty.
“What was its name?” Maud asked.
“Don’t know. It’s about a bunch of people walking to church,
telling each other tales. Some of ’em stories will scald you bald.”
When the wagon started rolling again, Maud’s mind stayed on
the dirty book. It tickled her to think about people telling naughty
tales on the way to church, and she decided that if she saw Booker,
which was her primary wish, she’d ask him if he was familiar with
the book. As the wagon rolled along, the combination of naughtiness, literature, and Booker focused Maud’s attention like pollen focuses bees. She clutched the fiddle so tightly that it made
creases on her arms.
When Ryde pulled up at the dance corner, Maud was relieved
to turn the instrument over and eager to walk the streets with
Nan and her children. The town’s two drugstores, two cafés, and
the Golden Rule Grocery excited her, but her favorite place of all
was Taylor’s General Store. And that was where she, Nan, and her
brood headed to first. Once they got there, Morgan ran off to play
with other boys, and Renee was charged with minding Andy and
Sanders out on the front porch. Maud and Nan went inside and
marveled, fingered, and yearned so much that Maud temporarily
forgot about looking for Booker. It wasn’t until they reemerged
into long afternoon shadows that her mind once again veered to
her main mission. By that time, the streets were filled with wagons, horses, mules, automobiles, and people. Maud parted ways
with Nan, walked in and out of stores on Lee Street, spoke with
people she hadn’t seen in a while, and let a boy she knew from
school buy her a Coca-Cola. After finishing the soft drink, she extracted herself with the promise of a dance and with the excuse of
needing to give Lovely a message from her father.
Maud didn’t really think Lovely and Early had yet made it
into town; Lovely hadn’t started washing up when she’d left, and
Early would want to make a late appearance so he could make the
women wait. As for Mustard, Maud didn’t think he’d take the occasion to slip down to the Mounts’ to extend the feud because,
for the moment, he had the upper hand. She figured he’d spend
the early part of his evening near his bootlegger’s and come to the
dance shouting drunk but before he was falling down.
She did keep her eye out for the Mount brothers so she
wouldn’t be taken by surprise again. But with the town filling up,
it was hard to scan the crowd well enough to be certain someone
wasn’t coming up on her from behind or at her from a catty-cornered direction. She stayed mostly on the planks in front of the
stores, looked in windows for items that struck her fancy, and
talked to girls she knew, and to more boys, too. She’d promised
several dances and had gossiped about a friend’s upcoming marriage when, from down the street, she heard the fiddlers tuning
up. She loitered some more, went into and out of Berd’s Drugstore without buying anything, and wound toward the dance corner looking for the bright blue canvas that was to her mind the
prettiest thing ever set against the sky.
Near the corner, she walked the length of the Pierce building,
hesitated for a moment, and then peered through its two arches
to the fiddlers’ stage. Above it, men were hanging lanterns and behind them were two rolls of blue sitting atop the hull of a wagon.
The rolls sucked Maud’s breath into her chest. Her heart began
to flutter like a bird that wants out of a cage. She spun around
and put her hand on one of the stone columns that supported
the second story of the building. Her other hand she drew to her
breast. She needed a plan to get over to the wagon. She couldn’t
think of one; her wits had suddenly scattered. So instead of walking toward the bright blue, she crossed the intersection, brought a
buckboard to a halt without noticing it, and walked entirely in the
opposite direction. She passed clumps of blanket Indians sitting
on the curb wearing black hats with feathers, passed their wives
and children parked in groups not far away, passed a small house,
and walked even farther up the road until it bordered a long, deep
lawn in front of the Nash Taylor mansion.
Mr. Taylor had been dead since Maud was a little girl. But his
grandson (who was also Mr. Singer’s son) lived in his grandfather’s
house and ran the general store that still bore the Taylor name.
The home was the grandest Maud had ever seen, even bigger and
better than her Mr. Singer’s, and although she’d never been inside, she’d toyed in her imagination with the home being her own
from the first time she’d laid her eyes on its two-story center section and double front porches. She didn’t actually hope to live in
that house, but she hoped to live in one just like it. And whenever she glimpsed the home, she used it as a guide, much like a
sailor uses the brightest stars in the sky. She sat down on one of
the sandstone slabs in the front lawn and positioned herself at an
angle so that she could see the house without appearing to watch
it, see the road, and also, in the far distance, see a corner of one of
the blue rolls over Booker’s wagon. The house and the blue canvas anchored Maud while she tried to plan.
She was still cogitating when she heard the first tune, “When
the Red, Red Robin Comes Bob, Bob, Bobbin’ Along.” After only
a few bars, she bolted up with the notion that she needed to retrace her steps quickly and get to Booker before other girls started
swishing their skirts around him. The very thought of him clasping some girl’s forearm and twirling her around made her feel as
frantic as if she’d found a thief in the house. She passed the clumps
of blanket Indians so quickly that she didn’t smell the smoke from
their pipes and cigarettes, nor did she realize that she’d stepped
right into the middle of a penny-pitching contest that stopped to
let her go by.
When she got to the dance corner and saw all the men, women,
and children standing at the edge of the square just tapping their
toes and not yet dancing, she felt foolish. She knew as well as anyone that nobody danced the first dance and that all parties had
to get started by some brave couple who took the floor (or the
watered-down dust) and showed off enough to erase everybody
else’s embarrassment. Her uncle Ryde yelled out, “Who’s gonna
claim this ground?” and Maud craned her neck to see one of the
Benge boys and his new wife step into the patch. The Benges were
kin to nearly everybody standing around the dirt square and the
new couple was, Maud agreed, the most attractive in town. So
by the time the fiddlers started “Red Robin” again, four squares
of couples had moved into position. Booker wasn’t in any of the
squares, and the crowd in front of Maud had thinned out enough
that she could see the onlookers on the two other sides of the
patch as well as she could see the stage where Ryde and the other
fiddlers were. She scanned the crowd. Booker wasn’t in it.
About that time, she felt a tap on the shoulder. Jimmy Foreman, a good-looking, skinny boy she’d known most of her life, led
her into the dirt. They joined a new square and danced two more
dances before Jimmy was cut in on by Henry Swimmer and Henry
was cut in on by John Leeds. Maud decided that she looked better
on the floor than she would’ve looked standing around it and that
dancing was the best place to be appreciated by Booker. She figured he must be looking on, even if, as her eyes searched the rims
of the dance patch, she couldn’t locate him. The light was now entirely cast by lanterns. Maud couldn’t make out the blue except in
her imagination. But she could see a canvas roll. Booker’s wagon
was still there.
And it continued to be when the fiddlers broke and the dancers went off in clumps to drink lemonade or stronger brew sold
out of the trunks of cars. But Maud, instead of availing herself
of any refreshment, took the break as an opportunity to do what
she’d been wanting to do for at least five dances. That was to
go to Booker since he wasn’t coming to her. But as soon as she
reached an angle where she could see the wagon and its owner
well enough, she realized that Booker was there to sell, not to
dance. She felt foolish for having spent so much time thinking
anything else. He was beside his wagon, holding a pot out to a
woman she couldn’t place. But she could tell from a distance that
Booker was reciting the advantages of that particular pot over all
others on this Earth or any other planet.
Maud felt a jab of jealousy. She fought an urge to stride over to
the wagon, grab that pot, and buy it herself. To contain that feeling, she looked around at the people who had wandered in back
of the stage, and she saw, at a distance, Billy Walkingstick. He was
talking to two other boys she knew, but she also knew she could
lure Billy into anything, even a briar patch. So she walked in a direction that would both avoid the wagon and catch Billy’s eye, and
sure enough, like a bass following a lure, Billy disengaged himself
from his friends, and shouted, “Hey, Maud, don’t be highfaluting.”
Maud replied, “Oh, Billy, you surprised me. I didn’t know you’d
taken up square dancing.”
Billy said, “Haven’t. Didn’t have anything better to do. You
been dancing?” He fell in next to Maud.
“A bit,” she said, and kept walking. But then she suddenly
stopped. “That peddler over there has something I want to look at.”
“What is it?”
“Several things. Women like to look. You know that.” She took
off toward Booker’s wagon.
Billy dropped his cigarette, crushed it with his boot, and
caught up with Maud in a couple of long strides. She was pleased
he did. His puppy eagerness and Indian good looks made him the
perfect escort to be seen with.
She went straight to the Woodbury soap. She picked up
a bar, read its wrapper, and held it close to her nose for a sniff.
Booker was making change with his back to her. She was afraid
he wouldn’t turn her way until she sniffed the bar silly, so as soon
as that transaction was completed, she said, “How much did you
say this was?”
Booker turned around slowly. He looked at Maud’s face and
then at the item she held in her hand. He stretched his hand out to
hers, brushed it slightly, and said, “Let me see.” He turned the bar
over and found 5 C marked on the back. He said, “A nickel, normally, but for you, two cents.” He touched the rim of his bowler and
smiled. Then he turned to Billy. “Howdy. Are you Maud’s brother?”
Maud spoke quickly. “No, a friend. This is William Watie
Walkingstick. He goes by Billy.”
Billy brought the fingers of his left hand to the rim of his cowboy hat and inserted his right hand into his front pocket. “I’ll pay
full price for that.” He drew out a nickel.
Booker took the coin with one hand and delivered the bar to
Billy with the other. “Glad to do business with you, Mr. Walkingstick. Fancy anything else for your girl?”
Maud made a noise that was more of a catfish growl than a
word. Both men jerked a little and looked to the source. Maud
knew she was turning red. She hoped the dark of the night and
the dark of her skin were combining to protect her. “Thank you,
Billy.” She held her hand out for the bar. To Booker, she said, “He’s
one of my oldest friends. Fishes with my brother.”
Booker said, “I see.” Maud hoped that he both did see and
didn’t. And she was trying to sort out some kind of response that
would straighten things out but not give her away when Billy said,
“You sell soft drinks?”
“No, they’re not in my line.” Booker shook his head.
Maud said, “He mostly trucks in books. Booker, would you
show Billy your books?”
Booker held out his arm toward the side of the wagon facing
the back of the stage. “What kinds of books do you like to read?”
“Whatchya got?”
Booker, in a singsong cadence that spoke of practice, recited a
litany of books, and Billy’s eyes took on a glassy gaze. But shortly
into that, to insert herself back into Booker’s attention and also to
get Billy off the hook, Maud said, “My uncle was telling me about
a book that escaped the fire. Did you hear about that?”
“Heard about the fire. Hard not to.” Booker had a smile on his
face.
“I meant did you hear about the book?”
“No. I assumed all the books were burnt. I went by there the
day afterwards. It was a mess if I ever saw one. You can even see
the pile from the bridge.”
“You’ve been over the bridge?”
“Went to Muskogee. Had to pick up more goods at the railway
station.”
“I’m surprised you didn’t stay over there.”
“I did for a couple of days. But I wasn’t having much luck competing against the stores.”
Billy said, “How much will ya take fer this book here?”
Maud had forgotten about Billy. And she’d never known him
to read a lick. She said, “What is it?”
“Lasso tricks. See here?” He held out a page illustrated with
several pair of hands and ropes in different positions. “It shows all
the angles.”
Maud pretended interest in the pictures, and Booker named a
price. Billy pulled more coins out to pay and then stuffed the book
into his right hip pocket. Maud couldn’t see a graceful way back to
the original conversation. Worse, she didn’t see any way to dump
Billy without looking heartless, and she knew males sometimes
sided with each other in their sympathies even if they were rivals. She didn’t want to look cruel, but she didn’t want to leave. So
she was stuck. And she was fishing around for something to remark on when a commotion arose on the other side of the wagon.
Booker said, “Excuse me,” and stepped away.
Maud was still on the book side of the rig, her view blocked by
the pyramid, when she heard an official-sounding voice: “Are you
Mr. Booker Wakefield?”
Both she and Billy moved toward the voice, and Booker said,
“Yes, sir. What can I do for you?”
“You can come with me.”
Maud knew the sheriff. And she was about to say, “That’s just
stupid gossip,” when Booker said, “What for?”
“It’s about the school burning.”
Booker rubbed the back of his neck. Then he laid his hand on
the edge of his wagon and gripped it, his elbow stiff. “Do you have
probable cause?”
The sheriff said, “Do ya want to come peacefully, or should I
persuade you?” He put his hand on the butt of his gun.
The crowd had grown thicker. The faces were lit by lanterns.
Most were women of childbearing age with little ones at their
skirts. Husbands were sprinkled around in groups behind their
wives. The deputy was at the sheriff ’s right shoulder. Booker said,
“I need to close up. I can’t leave my wares.”
Maud felt heat rising up beneath her dress and her slip, and
with it, the urge to blurt out, “That silly woman just wants attention.” But she realized that accusation would only complicate the
situation and that she didn’t have any proof except her intuition.
Besides, she knew it made matters worse that she was there, that
men hated to be humiliated in front of women. She felt embarrassed for Booker and wanted to back away, to disappear, and then
to reappear again, maybe at the jail, to save the day. But she also
recognized that was a foolish desire. Heroic moments happened
only in the pages of books. She touched Billy on the arm and jerked
her head as a signal to step away.
They moved outside of the ring of light, and Maud watched
without speaking as Booker, in silence, rolled down the netting
over his goods, rolled down the bright blue canvas, killed his lanterns’ lights, and hung the lanterns on hooks on the side of his
wagon. By the time that was done, most of the crowd had dispersed and one child’s voice was yelling in the distance, “They’ve
arrested the drummer!” Only the glow of the dim yellow lights of
the dancing patch remained in the air. But that was light enough
for Maud to see Booker look in her direction. As though they
were alone in the world, he shook his head. She nodded and
mouthed the words I know. Then he climbed into the seat of his
wagon, picked up the reins, and after the sheriff climbed in on the
other side, flapped them, and clucked at his horses.
Maud said to Billy, “There’s no justice in that. Some ignorant
woman accused him and the sheriff needs someone to pin the
fire on.”
“What makes you so sure he’s innocent?”
“I don’t have to be sure. They have to be. That’s how the law
works.”
“Really?” Billy looked at Maud sideways.
“Well, no. But that’s the way they tell it.”
“They tell a lot of things, Maud. None true as far as I’ve ever
seen.”
There was no denying he was right. So she and Billy walked
in silence around the back of the stage, up the side of the dance
patch, and into the light again. Billy didn’t ask Maud to dance,
but a couple of other boys did. She turned them down, watched
Lovely dancing with Gilda through two songs, and then she and
Billy walked down Lee Street into the dark. They made a stop at
the back end of a car. Then they sat on the front steps of a lawyer’s
office, drank choc beer, and smoked cigarettes. Eventually, they
fell to necking as, even to Maud, that seemed to be the only thing
left to do.
She awoke the next morning thinking about Booker in jail. Her
father had spent many a night with the sheriff and was, in her
estimation, safer behind bars than out. So while still on her cot,
she convinced herself that a night on a feather mattress probably
hadn’t produced any hardship on Booker beyond humiliation and
that the danger to him would pass for lack of evidence. Booker’s
being guilty didn’t even cross Maud’s mind.
When she finally got up and let the chickens out, they scattered like shot from a barrel. She pumped water, went back in, lit
the fire, and started making biscuits. Her father was still snoring.
Lovely came in the kitchen door from his time outside. He slid between the wall and the table and said, “How’d you get home?”
“With Aunt Nan and Uncle Ryde.”
“Where’d you go?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, you disappeared. You were dancing and never came
back.”
Maud turned from the cabinet, flour on her hands. “I did come
back. I watched you and Gilda for quite a while. Make any progress?”
Lovely looked to the other room and then back to Maud. “I
think I did.”
She turned back to the counter and took up her rolling pin,
thinking Lovely would keep talking. But he didn’t. So, finally,
while cutting biscuits, Maud’s curiosity overtook her, and she
said, “What makes you think you made progress?”
“She danced with me all night. Even when Charles Howell
headed to cut in, she waved him off.”
“I thought she dated Charles in school?”
“She did.”
“What else?”
“What do you mean, ‘What else?’ ”
Maud was cutting the dough quite deliberately. She twisted
with added pressure. “This is like pulling teeth. What else makes
you think you made progress?”
Blood came up into Lovely’s ears. “Not what you think.”
“How do you know what I think?”
Lovely looked to the other room again. Then he said, “Are you
gonna take forever with the biscuits?”
“You may not get any biscuits unless I get some details.”
“A decent man doesn’t tell.”
Maud looked around at Lovely, widening her eyes for effect.
She slipped the biscuit pan into the oven and then sat down at
the table. She looked to the main room, confirmed that her daddy
was still asleep, and said in a whisper, “You didn’t . . . ?”
“I did not.” Lovely acted indignant.
“Don’t pretend.”
“I’m not pretending. We didn’t.”
“I didn’t think you did. But don’t pretend you didn’t want to.”
“I’m not pretending anything.” Lovely spread his hands.
“Then what was ‘A decent man doesn’t tell’ all about?”
“I was just piquing your interest. I know how you like to run
your imagination.”
“I do not!”
“Then why are you asking?”
“That’s half the fun of a dance. Talking about it later.”
Lovely shook his head and swatted the air like he was going
after a fly. He looked once again toward his father’s bed and then
leaned into the table. “The thing is, Gilda’s a Christian. She won’t
do anything but kiss.”
Maud straightened her back and looked at Lovely with a wrinkle between her eyes. “There’s nothing wrong with not being
fast.” She bit her lower lip. While still on her cot, she’d begun feeling guilty about necking with Billy. Not about the necking itself,
which they’d done before, but about necking when Booker had
been carted off to jail, and about necking after meeting Booker
at all. She told herself that had she not known Billy expected it,
had she not been light-headed from the cigarettes and beer, if it
hadn’t been dark, and if she hadn’t been feeling like she was ready
to burst, she never would’ve done it. She was hoping that none
of that showed on her face when Lovely added, “She gave me her
Bible to read.”
“Her Bible? She brought it to the dance?”
Lovely put his head in his hands. “No. We walked over to her
house to get it. All the Starrs are Christians.”
Maud smiled. “Not all of them. Some are outlaws. The rest
have to look respectable just to live down their bank robbers and
killers. Don’t worry about it.” She got up, opened their little icebox, took out some fatback, and started slicing it. After she’d
slapped several pieces into a skillet, Lovely added, “I think I’m
gonna read it.”
“You should. It’s got interesting stories.” Maud’s mind swam to
Jonah and the whale. She’d learned the tale in school, and it had
captured her imagination the same way Moby-Dick had. Maud
didn’t feel any particular animosity against individual Christians
as much as she was inclined to see the hypocrisy in their religion. Beyond that, she was too mixed blooded to have any truck
with the Keetowahs, and there weren’t any other faiths around. So
she hadn’t given religion much thought beyond recognizing that
powers in the universe, like the river and the sun, were mightier
than humans and had to be reckoned with. She did hope there
was a force that would propel her into a better life, but she felt like
that could only be a combination of pleasing looks, some education, and her wits.
About that time, a grunt came from the next room, and the
conversation about the Bible died. But as soon as Mustard slid in
at the table, he was eager to swap news. He’d arrived in town with
some of his running buddies as the band was closing up and a fight
was being organized on the dance square. He’d laid a bet on who’d
win, and he reached into his pants pocket and drew out several
large bills. “By damn, don’t ever bet against an Indian if he’s fighting a white man. If the Indian’s sober, you’ll lose ever’thing ya got.
I’m gonna get my dog with these winnings. Lovely, after breakfast,
we’re gonna build us a dog house and pen. We’ll use them boards
and wire we salvaged from the roosters’ coops.”
Maud did her chores while they hauled from the barn wire and
boards that had, before the flood, been fighting cocks’ pens. The
posts were still standing, and as they strung the wire, she sat in
her daddy’s chair holding Arrowsmith and thinking about Booker
in jail. When Mustard left to ask Blue who he knew with a ready
litter, Maud was so busting to talk about Booker that she blurted
out even before Lovely’s butt reached the stoop, “The sheriff arrested the peddler for setting fire to the school.”
Lovely had heard that. “Does he have any evidence?”
“Only vicious gossip. And him selling kerosene.”
“He’s a stranger,” Lovely added.
That was, of course, the root cause, at least in Maud’s estimation. She knew there were strangers in No Man’s Land where, for
all of her life, they’d come from every corner of the continent to
make money in wheat. She also knew there were strangers in the
central part of the state where oil was gushing, and in the Osage
oil fields in the Outlet. But around the bottoms and Ft. Gibson,
strangers came only to dig potatoes. And it was too early in the
season for them to start dribbling in.
Maud and Lovely chewed on the possibilities facing Booker,
and as they did, the urge grew in Maud to walk into town, go into
the sheriff ’s office, and testify that she . . . well, that was just it. She
couldn’t provide an alibi; she couldn’t even be a character witness
for someone she’d talked to only twice. But Maud knew, in the
way women do, that the stranger in the bowler carrying the books
on his wagon was the most interesting man she’d ever met. She
had a pulling on her heart that was taking it out of her body into
a space she didn’t have a name for yet. Maud was so in tow to that
tug that Lovely’s attempts to bring the conversation around to
Gilda felt like the irritating tap, tap, tapping of a woodpecker. But
at the same time, she didn’t have anything to say about Booker
that she hadn’t said ten minutes in the past, and she didn’t want to
share with Lovely feelings that she couldn’t even describe to herself and that were also private beyond any she’d ever had. So not
on Lovely’s first attempt, but on one soon after, she gave in, pulled
her mind back to the porch, and talked over with him everything
they knew about the Starrs. They were trying to work out exactly
how Gilda was related to one of the Starr outlaws, Henry, when
they heard the sound of a car. They turned toward the section line
to see who was coming and were disappointed when they saw it
was only their father.
But Mustard was in a fine mood, and he brought more news.
Blue knew of someone who had a litter of three-week-old Labs
and he thought there were four not spoken for. Mustard had a
name and a number he was planning to call the next morning
from the feed store. The three of them fell into talking about the
dog and how Mustard was going to train it, and into anticipating ducks, geese, and all sorts of good birds to eat. It wasn’t until
they’d finished that talking, had eaten supper, and were back on
the porch that Mustard, between puffs of a cigarette, said, “Blue
saw John and Claude Mount in town last night. They was selling
whiskey and drinking at the fort.”
Maud said, “I didn’t know Uncle Blue still drank.”
“He don’t. He was over there sparking some woman. But when
he seen the Mounts and their gang, he came in and sparked closer
to town.” Mustard took a long, last draw, crushed his cigarette beneath his boot, and added, “John Mount had already been fighting. Blue said his right hand were bandaged.”
The next morning, after Maud had done her usual chores and
both of the men had left the house, she filled a tub with water,
shed her clothes, and bathed with the Woodbury soap behind a
corner of wood erected for privacy out next to the pump. Midmorning wasn’t her usual time for a bath, but Maud had determined she was going to put on her hat and walk into town and see
what she could learn about Booker. Shortly afterward, she passed
Nan’s without stopping, passed the lane that led to where her
grandpa and his brood were living, and didn’t even yell to Lovely,
whom she saw in the distance struggling with the mule and a tree
stump. But as soon as the ruins of the school came into sight, she
focused on them, and when she got up to them, she circled the
mountain of rubble, found a little piece of wood that was burnt
only on one end, picked it up, and carried it away in her hand. She
was almost to the highway when she looked northwest toward
Mr. Singer’s potato barn and house. There, as clear as smoke signals on the plains, was a bright patch of blue. She clutched her lit-
tle piece of wood tighter, brought her fist to her heart, and headed
toward the blue like a hard rain falls to earth.
As outbuildings go, the potato barn was the most substantial
structure in the bottoms. Its two long stories of brown brick had
small windows close to the roof and two tall, wide doors on either
side in the center. There was a potato stand several paces in front
of the building, and Maud had, on occasion, bought potatoes at
that stand. But she’d never been inside the barn. It was for the
storing and sacking of huge amounts of potatoes all year round,
and Maud found the odor of potato multitudes overwhelming.
However, potato stink was the last thing on Maud’s mind. Even
the building shrank. The only thing she saw was the blue — that is,
until Booker walked out of the barn with a sack thrown over his
shoulder and followed a woman to her car. The woman opened
the back door and Booker laid the sack in. Then he shut the door
and stood next to the car, clearly in conversation. Seeing him talk
like that both relieved Maud and infuriated her. How dare he be
out and around and talking to some woman when she’d been worried sick about him.
She hadn’t set out to buy potatoes, and although she had
money for food back at home, she hadn’t tucked any into the little pouch pinned inside her slip where she carried her valuables.
She didn’t have a cent on her. And besides, they had planted their
own potatoes. Booker had surely noticed their garden when he’d
driven down their lane. So Maud marched through a potato field,
heading straight toward Booker without the strength to turn
around, but also without any money or any excuse to be out there,
without anything except a piece of partially burnt wood in her
hand, a hat on her head, and a will to get to Booker as fast as she
could without looking eager.
While she was walking, another car pulled up to the stand.
Booker went over to it and talked to somebody sitting inside.
Then he walked back to the potato barn and came out with a sack
on his shoulder again. It was when he turned toward the car that
he saw Maud. He raised his free hand. His smile made Maud forget the predicament she was in. She slowed her walk so that she’d
arrive after the car left.
By the time they were face-to-face, Maud didn’t make any pretenses. She said, as honestly as she had ever said anything in her
life, “I’ve been worried sick about you.”
“I’ve been worried about myself. Mr. Singer sprang me. But the
sheriff says if I leave these parts, he’ll come after me with a warrant.”
“What’ve they got on you?”
Booker rubbed the back of his neck. “Not much that I know of.
Some woman says I was acting suspicious, and she thinks I gave
her a raw deal on some cloth she bought. Evidently, it had a flaw
down in the bolt. If we’d unrolled it to the end I would’ve caught
it, but she wanted to make curtains out of it, and I was trying
to give her a deal and not be left with just a remnant, so . . .” He
shrugged his shoulders. “Lesson learned, I guess.”
“I saw that woman. I don’t know her. But she was talking to
some men at the fire.” Maud wanted to tell Booker that she’d
taken up for him, but she knew full well that most men didn’t like
being defended by a woman. So she held that back. She said instead, “Mr. Singer’s given you a job?”
“Fortunately, I made a better impression on him than I did on
that woman. He doesn’t much like her, and he figures I can sell,
and I can. So he has me selling potatoes and is letting me sell my
own wares to anybody who stops. You were right. He’s a nice man.”
That remark caused Maud to recall that she’d tried to make
Booker think that Mr. Singer was a suitor. She felt heat rise up her
neck. She placed her hand on the top of her hat and shifted it so
that it covered her face a little more than it had. Before she could
think of what to say next, Booker added, “I guess I’ll be around
these parts for a while. That might not be all bad.” He took a deep
breath.
Maud looked past Booker at the potato barn and then down at
her shoes. “No, it might not. You could get to liking it.”
“I already like it. But I have a real job back in Arkansas.”
Maud looked up. “What might that be?”
“I’m a schoolteacher.”
“A schoolteacher? What do you teach?”
“All sorts of things. English, geography, math.”
Maud felt like she was being pulled along by a strong river current. “A schoolteacher,” she said, like she might have said a pharaoh or a president.
Booker smiled. The smile went all the way up to the gold flecks
in his eyes. He said, “Do you mind if I come calling?”
Maud ducked her head. “No, I don’t mind at all. I can try to
make up for the sheriff ’s lack of hospitality.”
“I’d sure appreciate that. A little kindness goes a long way.”
At that moment, a horn honked. A car neither one of them
had noticed had pulled in off the highway. The man behind the
wheel was someone Maud had never seen. He yelled, “Do you
know how to get to Tahlequah?”
Maud pointed and said, “Take the highway in that direction.
It’s twenty miles.”
The man said, “What’s in that rig over there?”
Booker said, “Wares. I can show them to you.”
The man said, “Don’t mind if I do. I need to stretch my legs.”
He opened the door and unfolded out of the car.
Booker turned to Maud. “When and where?”
Maud wasn’t ready to have Booker meet her father. She didn’t
really want to share him with anybody at all. And there wasn’t
anything in the bottoms except farms and a couple of snaky lakes,
the burnt school building, and two cemeteries. One of those was
so close to the snake lakes they couldn’t visit it without guns. But
the other one was farther away from the cottonmouths. She said,
“Tonight. See that stand of trees over there. That’s our family’s old
cemetery. I’ll meet you there.”
“You’re not superstitious?”
“I am that. But I’m not afraid of my family. Not of the dead
ones, at least. After eating but before the sun sets. It’s snaky on
down closer to the river after that.”
The man said, “How much for these suspenders?” and Booker
turned around. Then he turned back. “About six,” he said.
Maud left her father and her brother whittling and reading on
the front porch, and walked, with a newspaper in one hand and
a snake stick in the other, down the lane and up the section line.
She left the paper with Nan according to a plan she’d made with
her aunt after seeing Booker that morning. Beyond Nan’s house,
where the section lines crossed, she headed through the potato
fields on a path that gave her a good view of where she was walking because, although the cottonmouths weren’t as thick beyond
the snake lakes as they were below them, the largest lake wasn’t
far from her. She watched the dirt in front of her and to her sides,
and couldn’t help but think about her mother’s death. That particular snake had been hiding from the sun under a rosebush. Her
uncle Gourd, newly home from the Great War, had been sitting
on his front porch when he heard her scream. He saw her run in
a circle and fall. When he got to her, he cut her ankle, sucked the
blood, and spit it out again and again. But her mother went rigid
and died before Gourd got her into the house. Maud hadn’t seen
the death herself. She’d been in school. Her aunt Lucy had come
to her classroom door along with her principal. She had gotten up
from her desk and slowly walked toward the door frame, knowing
from Lucy’s face, and mostly from her presence at all, that something terrible had happened, something that was going to change
everything forever. And so it had. Once her mother was buried,
her father chopped down the bush with a hatchet and went on a
bender with Gourd that lasted so long it seemed like it was going
to be permanent. Only when he eventually sobered up and stayed
that way for three weeks did her aunt Lucy and her grandfather
move back to their house on the other side of the swale.
That was nearly half of Maud’s lifetime in the past, but she still
carried that sadness and didn’t want it on her date with Booker.
She regretted suggesting the cemetery even though it wasn’t the
one her mother was buried in. So she tried to shake all of that out
of her head and simply watch the ground for snakes. When she
did finally raise her eyes, she saw Booker riding to her on the back
of one of his horses. She veered out of the potatoes to the section
line and stopped to let him come to her. He pulled up about fifteen feet away, took his bowler off in a flourish, and said, “Would
madam like a ride?”
“Madam would. Where’d you get the saddle?”
“Brought it with me. Keep it between my shelves. I sleep in
there, too, when the weather’s bad.” He dismounted.
“You’re teasing me.”
“No, I’m not. There’s a little house in there. Right between the
shelves.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“Well, I’m telling the truth. Do you know how to get up on a
horse or do you need some help?”
“I’m mostly Indian. What do you think? Look the other way.”
Maud handed Booker her snake stick, grabbed the horn, and put
a foot in the stirrup.
When she was astride, he said, “Do you want to keep this
stick?”
“I sure do. It’s my snake stick.”
“You carry a stick around to beat snakes to death?”
“No, silly. I carry a stick around to rustle snakes up and scare
them away. Are you going to get up here with me or are you just
going to walk around not even knowing how to protect yourself?”
“I need protection from two-footed creatures.” He smiled.
“We better find a stump. I don’t want to pull you off.” He put a
hand on the harness and began to walk.
And while Maud swayed on the horse’s back and looked down
at Booker holding his bowler and her snake stick in his other
hand; while they were out there surrounded by potatoes and a little corn; while the sun was still above the tree line in the west and
the air cooler than it’d been all day; while the sky filled up with
wisps of clouds and bobwhites called to each other and the smell
in the air was of horse, dirt, and just a little moisture; right then,
Maud made up her mind about what she intended to do with the
rest of her life.
She didn’t get back toward home until nearly dark. Booker
stopped the horse beneath trees hanging over the section line,
slid off its rear, and held out his arms. When Maud’s feet touched
the ground, he embraced her, and without asking, kissed her long
on the lips. He stepped back and looked at her with a gaze that
took in her face, her whole head, her hair, and her shoulders. He
said, “Tomorrow?”
She nodded.
“I’ll come down here.”
“Not to the house. Let me prepare Daddy.”
“Where?”
“Come this far. I’ll figure it out. He’s not against courting. But
he’s combustible.”
“Combustible?”
“High tempered.”
“Should I be afraid?”
She shook her head. “I’m just cautious. You’re already on the
bad side of the sheriff.”
He kissed her again.
That went on for as long as Maud thought proper or, really,
longer, because, in spite of what she’d just said, she’d given in back
there on the horse. Now she was hoping she was what Booker
wanted and that she could keep him wanting. That was her plan.
It didn’t have details. It existed more as a primal urge, a force that
was like a river sweeping everything downstream.
As Maud walked the lane, she saw Lovely in the porch rocker
reading in the last of the light. When she got nearer, he closed the
book and looked in her direction. His face was in a shadow, but it
seemed to Maud that the tilt of his head was odd, and she wondered if he was thinking about where she’d been. She next looked
to the lean-to. Her father’s car was there. She wondered why he
wasn’t on the porch. She moved from one possibility to another
until she got to the steps. She whispered, “Where’s Daddy?”
“In bed,” Lovely whispered back.
“It’s early for that.”
“He was whipped.”
“What’re you reading?”
“Gilda’s Bible.”
“How is it?”
“Sorta snaky. Not too bad, though.”
Neither of them was totally ignorant of Christianity. They’d
been taught to say they were Christians when asked, to bow their
heads during prayers at school, and to imitate whatever Christians took in their minds to do. They hadn’t been old enough to
question their mother about that before she died, but Maud had
since figured out on her own that the safest route was to go along.
However, some of her friends were tormented by questions like
“If God is good and loves us, why did He send all this rain to
drown our crops and stock and ruin our houses?” Maud thought
those kinds of questions were worth asking, but she never came
to the same conclusions her friends did. She thought God, if there
was one, didn’t give a shiny penny for what they were doing or
what happened to them. And he seemed particularly unpartial
toward Indians.
Lovely said, “Where’ve you been?”
“Aunt Nan’s.”
“You changed your dress to visit Aunt Nan?”
“Shuuu. Did Daddy ask where I was?”
Lovely leaned toward Maud and lowered his voice again.
“Naw. He’s too interested in getting a puppy to think of much else.
Says he’s going up toward Wagoner to look at a litter on Wednesday. They aren’t ready to leave their mama, but he wants to pick
his out and make a down payment.”
Their daddy burnt through money like fire through wheat
stubble. They had a car only because he’d sold some of his Seminole allotment. Maud knew that the offer of a down payment was
his way of trying to make sure he didn’t blow all his dough before
he got his dog. There really wasn’t much to say about that and she
wasn’t ready to talk about Booker, so she left Lovely out on the
porch and went to bed.
She was too excited to sleep, and she lay on her cot reliving
every look, word, and feeling until she realized that her brother
still hadn’t come in. She figured she’d been lying there for a while,
and her father was breathing a deep rhythm, so she quietly got up,
opened the screen, and went out on the porch. She was expecting
to find Lovely asleep in the chair or laid out on the planks with
his head on the Bible. But he wasn’t there. She looked to the yard.
She saw him by the pump, facing the river, his back to her. He was
standing straight and still. As far as Maud could tell, he was fully
clothed and his legs weren’t spread, so he wasn’t taking a leak. She
watched him for more than a minute. He didn’t turn, didn’t move.
She quietly slipped back inside, and this time, soon after she laid
her head on her pillow, she drifted to sleep.
The next morning, Mustard left out as usual. But Lovely was
quiet even after he went, and he didn’t seem in a rush to get to the
field before the sun rose higher and made his work hotter. When
Maud went out to dump her dishwater, she found Lovely in Mustard’s chair on the porch, one boot on, his other foot covered by
a sock, its boot in his lap. He was staring down at that boot like it
was an object he didn’t entirely trust.
She said, “Lovely, you okay?”
He looked up. “Yeah. Thinking.”
“You going to work?”
“Yeah.” He shook his head like he felt a shiver and looked again
at the boot in his lap. “I’m putting on my boots.”
“I can see that.”
Lovely moved the boot off his lap, brought his knee up, and
put his foot in. Shortly afterward, he rode the mule down the lane.
Maud worked like a dust devil all that day. That was the fastest way to make time pass, and by midafternoon she’d done everything she usually did on Tuesdays and had done the wash, too.
By the time Lovely got in from the field and Mustard from work,
a pot of Tom Fuller had brewed. The three of them ate it, accompanied by cornbread and dog talk.
After that, Maud again left her menfolk on the porch and
walked down the lane with a day-old paper in her hand. Her
daddy hadn’t seemed suspicious and her brother had his nose so
deeply in the Bible that he hadn’t bothered to tease her. As soon
as she got out to the section line, she saw Booker on his horse
ahead under the shade. She looked toward her house and saw her
father still facing in the other direction. She waved to Booker with
the paper.
They couldn’t go toward the river without being seen from the
house. They rode back up the section line, and this time, as Maud
knew would happen sooner rather than later, her uncle Ryde was
on his porch and her cousins were in the front yard around a tree
with a tire swing on it. Ryde grinned in her direction. The children yelled and waved.
“That’s my family. We have to stop.”
“I sold the woman there some cloth.”
“I hope it didn’t have a flaw. Uncle Ryde is bad with his fists.”
The whole bunch of them got introduced. Maud handed Ryde
the paper, and Booker and Ryde discussed how bad the flood had
been up in Booker’s direction. Maud talked to Nan and played
with the kids. After what she considered a respectable time, she
said, “We were after fresh air.”
As soon as they got away from the house, Maud, who this
time was seated in the back, turned her head and looked over her
shoulder. Nan was at the edge of the porch with a pan and a rag
washing Sanders’ face. Ryde was holding the paper but looking in
their direction. Maud waved and turned back around. “I guess the
cat’s out of the bag.”
“Am I not presentable?”
“Well, you are under suspicion.”
“Your uncle doesn’t care. He said the sheriff ’s an idiot.”
“Being on the sheriff ’s bad side will automatically put you on
Uncle Ryde’s good side. That’s the way it works around here. It’s
probably the best thing that could’ve happened.”
“Will he tell your dad I’ve got you out for a ride?”
Maud thought Ryde would and said so, but she also thought
that Ryde and Booker had gotten along fine, and felt that bode
well for her intentions. Her family, as a whole, was liberal in the
area of romance. They all saw mating as a natural action — and
a good source of entertainment and amusement. She was painfully aware she lacked the means to go to the teachers’ college in
Tahlequah and knew she was of a marriageable age. She thought
everybody would expect her to do exactly what she was doing. So
as the two passed through the cross of the section lines, waved at
the Beechers, and veered off onto the path to the cemetery they’d
gone to the day before, Maud left her worries along the road, enjoyed the smell of Booker and the horse, watched the wind ripple
the tops of the potato plants, and felt that life was glorious in general and that her life in particular was turning out better than she
could’ve hoped. After they dismounted at the edge of the thicket
protecting the graves and had taken a respectable amount of time
looking at one stone and then another, they fell rather quickly into
a pattern of necking, saying silly things, and necking some more.
Later, Booker dropped Maud off in the shade where he’d
dropped her the night before, and standing beside his horse, they
necked again. Afterward, they agreed that they would meet there
the following day and Maud would take him up to the house to
meet her brother. Maud figured that Mustard would be in Wagoner and that way she could let Lovely tell her father about Booker
when Mustard got home and ease him into the idea.
She saw Lovely alone on the front porch, and she figured Mustard was inside asleep. This time, however, Lovely was propped
against a post reading by the light of a lamp, and as Maud walked
the lane looking at the lamp’s glow, she recognized that as contrary to his habits, and she thought it meant he was deeply hooked
into the Bible. She said so when she got to the porch, and Lovely
said the book had a lot of rules in it, but it had a lot of action, too.
He had gotten as far as the flood and was enjoying it. They settled
away from the windows on the steps so they wouldn’t wake their
father, and they spent the rest of the evening whispering about
the likelihood that somebody could build a boat big enough to
get two of each animal into it, and if somebody had, what it was
like living with all that livestock. They agreed that two days in the
barn with the chickens had been bad enough, and Maud said that
she thought Noah’s ark was a story handed down through generations and had lost some of its realistic details.
The next morning, Mustard left, eager to pick out his dog, and
took biscuits with him to stave off his hunger on his drive home.
Maud thought Lovely had left with her father, but when she went
to the front porch, she found him there, staring toward the river
with neither of his boots on his feet. “Lovely, you’re getting lazy,”
she said.
He turned toward her with a puzzled looked on his face. “Why
do you say that?”
“You haven’t even put on your boots.”
“I’m not wearing them today.”
“You have to wear your boots. Put ’em on.”
Lovely picked up his right boot and slipped it over his sock
and then slipped on the other one. He seemed so far away that
Maud was tempted to blame the Bible reading. But she put that
down to prejudice on her part, and she went to the garden without giving Lovely another thought.
That night, she walked the lane as she had the two before, but
this time she waved Booker to her and held the first cattle guard
open as he rode through it. He dismounted, led his horse, and
they walked holding hands. After they’d secured the wire of the
second guard, they stopped in the lane and faced the river. The
water couldn’t be seen from where they stood, but the tangled
brush, cane, and reeds that rolled out in front of them didn’t seem
to meet up with the hill on the horizon. Maud told Booker that
broken joint was where the river ran.
Shortly, they turned and walked to the house. Lovely, by
agreement, and after a little kidding, had stayed inside until
Maud called, “We’re here,” and then he came out to the porch
for a proper introduction. Lovely was taller than Booker by a few
inches, but Booker was the thicker of the two, and Maud, as she
stood between them, looked from face to face as closely as though
she were reading coffee grounds to divine their futures.
Booker and Lovely talked at some length about the flood
they’d all lived through, but after that, Lovely said he needed to
tend to something in the barn and left Maud and Booker alone on
the porch. Maud wasn’t given to shame. But she was well aware
there was a whole other way to live that included heat in winter,
light inside, indoor plumbing, and enough chairs for everybody to
have one. So she wasn’t ready to let Booker see the inside of the
house. Cardboard was nailed to the walls in there. A sheet was
hung on a wire; behind it, their clothing was in crates. The only
furniture in the main room was a chest of drawers, Mustard’s iron
bed and feather mattress, two cots, and two rocking chairs. In the
kitchen was a table and straight chairs, a bench, a counter and
sink, a little icebox, a dipping pan, and a wood stove.
To keep Booker from seeing any of that, Maud said, “I have
a surprise. Wait here.” She disappeared into the house and came
out with a dish filled with cookies. She handed the dish to Booker,
went back in, and came out with a pitcher of milk and two glasses.
And she and Booker were sitting on the top step, enjoying the
cookies and milk, and also enjoying watching each other chew,
when they were startled by a howl from the barn. They jumped
up and ran.
Lovely was on his back in the dirt in front of the shelf against
the far wall. He was holding his head in both hands. His fingers were bloody. A scythe was on the ground beside him. Maud
said, “Goodness, what’s happened?” She knelt and moved Lovely’s hands away from his forehead. She found a large gash. Lovely
said, “He attacked me.”
Maud immediately thought of the Mounts. She leaped to her
feet and wildly turned her head. To Booker, she said, “Check the
loft. No, wait.” She pulled a hammer off the wall. “Hold this. I’ll
get a gun.”
Booker took the hammer. And Maud didn’t see his startled
look because she was already running to the house. When she
came back with her mother’s pistol, Booker was still holding the
hammer, but Lovely had risen to a seated position. He was still
holding his head in his hands.
Booker said, “Who are we planning to kill?”
Maud knew better than to name anybody in particular. She
didn’t want Booker hearing about the feud with the Mounts. She
looked to Lovely to warn him to keep quiet. But he seemed not
to have heard. She said, “Just protecting us against whoever’s attacked Lovely.”
“I see,” Booker replied. “Do you want me to go up into the
loft?” He held out his hand for the pistol.
Maud licked her lower lip. She didn’t want to get Booker shot
or banged in the head. But she couldn’t say, “I’ll do it,” and unman
him. She addressed Lovely. “Do you think he’s still here?”
Blood was draining through his fingers and dropping into the
dirt. “Don’t know. Couldn’t see him. He was yelling.”
Maud looked to Booker. She hadn’t heard any yell except the
lone howl. Booker shrugged his shoulders. She said, “Did he hit
you with the scythe?”
Lovely shook his head. Maud glanced to Booker again. “He
must have escaped. Did you hear anybody in the loft while I was
away?”
Booker shook his head.
Maud decided then that there wasn’t anybody in the loft and
that it would be safe to send Booker up there. She held out the
pistol. “Would you check, just to be sure?” To Lovely she said,
“We need to clean your cut. Take your shirt off.”
Booker took the gun and headed toward the ladder to the loft.
Lovely lowered his hands from his head one at a time. They struggled getting his arms out of his sleeves. When the shirt was finally clear of his body, Maud pressed it to Lovely’s forehead and
held it. Booker came back, reported that nobody was above them,
and then sat down on a barrel, still holding the gun. The dust
motes danced in the fading rays of sun. A horse fly buzzed. Lovely’s chest rose and fell with the sound of breathing. Nobody spoke
until Lovely finally said, “I was swinging the scythe. I couldn’t see
him, but he was here, yelling. I must’ve swung too hard. I think I
hit my head on the shelf.”
Maud looked up. On the edge of the shelf was a dark spot she
recognized as blood. She wished she’d seen that before she went
for the gun. The whole story sounded strange, and she was still
afraid Lovely would say something about the Mounts in front of
Booker. “Whatever happened, we need to get this cut cleaned
out.” She tapped Lovely’s shoulder.
Booker leaned the scythe against a stall and gave Lovely a
hand to get up. His face was streaked with blood and dirt that
looked like war paint drawn on by a child. His chest, which was
bare except for a small tree of hair, was spotted with red. Booker
said, “It probably looks worse than it is. The forehead is filled with
vessels. Any head cut will stream blood.”
Maud said, “Let’s get to the pump and survey the damage.”
Lovely put his head under the pump and Booker worked the
handle. Maud went to the house and came back with a flour sack,
a pair of scissors, and the bottle of Mercurochrome. She laid
the cloth on the platform, cut it into strips, and dabbed Lovely’s
wound with one of them. She made him hold his face to the sky
as she applied the medicine. Then she tied two others strips together, and she wrapped them around Lovely’s head in a band.
When she finished, she stepped back and said, “You look just like
a wild Indian.” She smiled.
They left Lovely’s shirt soaking in a tub and went back to the
porch. The cookies had attracted flies, but Maud went back inside
and brought out more, and when Mustard’s car lights shone on the
lane, the three of them were enjoying the lingering sweet of sugar
cookies and watching fireflies. Lovely went inside before his daddy
got to the porch, but Maud and Booker stayed where they were.
Mustard turned his head toward the horse at the hitching
rail on his way from the car. When he got to the porch, he said,
“Ryde said we probably had company.” Booker stood up, walked
down the steps, and offered his hand. Mustard ignored the hand
and scraped his boot on the bottom step. Booker dropped his
hand and turned to Maud with a startled look on his face. Maud
couldn’t tell him right then that Indians didn’t shake hands unless
they were trying to act white. She smiled instead. “Daddy, this is
Booker Wakefield. He’s a schoolteacher.”
Mustard scraped the sole of his other boot. “Whatchya teach?”
Booker stuck both hands in his back pockets. “Oh, just a little
of everything.”
Mustard looked off toward the barn. “I see. Well, we need
teachers. I’ve had a long day. Nice to meetchya.” He didn’t move.
Booker glanced at Maud and took his hands out of his pockets. He rubbed his palms over his suspenders. “Nice to meet you,
too, sir. I’d better go.” He made a slight nod toward his horse.
Maud said, “I’ll walk you to the rail,” and on the way there,
Booker whispered, “He didn’t take to me, did he?”
Maud couldn’t explain her father’s Indian ways within earshot.
She was trying to come up with an answer when Mustard called
out, “Watch fer the snakes!” Maud smiled. “I believe he did take
to you.”
“Maybe he just doesn’t want me to die in his front yard.”
Maud poked him with an elbow. “You’d be good for the garden. Don’t worry. That’s just his way.”
She and Booker said a hasty good-bye. Then Maud walked
back to the porch where Mustard had settled in his rocker. “I
sorta had you figured for Billy Walkingstick,” he said.
Maud felt a blush rise to her cheeks. She was glad for the dark.
And she didn’t want to talk about Billy or even think about him.
She sat down against a post facing away from her daddy. To distract him, she said, “Tell me about your dog.”
“I picked out a bitch. The only girl left in the litter. She’s got
the prettiest eyes I’ve ever seen on a dog.” Mustard straightened
a leg, reached into his front pocket, and pulled out his money. “I
want ya to do something fer me, Maud.” He licked his thumb and
separated three bills from the rest. “I want ya to take this, and no
matter how bad I beg, I want ya to hide it from me ’til I go after
that dog.” He held the bills out.
Maud felt embarrassed for her father. But she felt a surge of
love, too. Not only did he not make a fuss over Booker, he was
trying to control himself. She reached inside the collar of her
dress, unpinned a cloth purse from her slip, and held her hand
out. Mustard handed her the bills and said, “You better not put it
in such a public place.”
Maud yelled, “Daddy!” got up from the porch, and let the door
rattle shut behind her. As she drew her dress over her head behind the sheet, she heard Mustard chuckling.
Mustard saw Lovely’s forehead at breakfast the next morning. He
started questioning, and when he got vague answers, his tongue
sharpened. To blunt it, Maud asked again about the dog. And she
led her father so far with dog questions that the subject of Lovely’s wound was completely forgotten. But when Mustard’s car was
safely stopped at the first cattle guard, Maud said, “Now, tell me
the truth. What happened?”
Lovely touched his headband. “Don’t know. Do you ever hear
people around here?”
“People other than us?”
“Yeah.”
“No.”
Lovely bit his lip. “It must be my imagination. I thought I
heard someone yelling at me. So I grabbed the scythe. Then I got
to swinging ’cause he wouldn’t show his self.”
“Was it one of the Mounts, do you think?”
Lovely shook his head. “Maybe I read too much.”
Maud didn’t know what to say. So she said, “Let’s see how that
cut is. We better do it at the pump.”
They were at the pump, and Maud was enjoying the relative
cool of the morning and wrapping Lovely’s head with the rest of
the strips, when he said, “I’m gonna lay ’round here today. I feel a
little light-headed.”
Maud stood back from her work. He did look hollow eyed.
“I’m not surprised. That was a blow.”
“Will you put the mule to pasture?”
“Sure. You think you’re getting sick?”
“Might be.”
She felt his earlobe for fever. “You may be a little hot. It’s hard
to tell this early in the day. Should we bring out your cot?”
They set the cot and its pillow on the west porch, the coolest place in the mornings. Lovely settled in with the Bible and
Maud went about her chores with her mind turned to Booker
and herself. She was sweeping the front yard, thinking about how
her mother would take to her pick, how she would be proud of
her and like Booker, and how he would like her, when she heard
Lovely call. She went to the west side of the yard to find that he
had pitched up his breakfast over the side of the porch. Chickens
were pecking in it.
Maud’s first thought was to protect her own health. She didn’t
want to get sick so early into courting. Rather than bring the dipping pan and dipper out, she drew water in a bucket and brought
Lovely a cup. She put the bucket and cup down beside him, and,
as she backed away, told him that she would bring him more food.
Lovely washed his mouth out, spat at the chickens, and lay back
down on his cot. He turned his face toward the wall of the house.
When the sun hit the cot midday, they moved it beneath the
branches of the live oak tree. In the late afternoon, Blue brought
in a mess of fish, and Maud cleaned them by the pump. She, Blue,
and Mustard ate fish, and gave Lovely the only food he wanted,
a hushpuppy. By the time Booker rode up, Maud was convinced
Lovely had the influenza, and she used his illness as a reason for
them not to linger. She left her father and Blue discussing politics
on the front porch and Lovely still on his cot under the tree and
rode off behind Booker on his horse.
They went again to the cemetery. They took the horse into the
shade with them to scare away any snakes, tied her to a branch,
and settled on a stone that marked the grave of a great-greatuncle. They moved from necking to petting and, in between
bouts, began telling each other every significant event that had
happened in their lives and many of the insignificant ones, too.
Booker was thirty years old. He’d been married. His wife had died
in childbirth, and so had the daughter she’d carried. After that, he
took to peddling to remove himself from daily reminders of loss
and distract himself with new horizons. He was not interested in
any woman back home and hadn’t found, until now, anybody who
interested him. He’d often thought he’d never find anybody again.
The reawakening of feeling wasn’t as frightening to him as he had
imagined, but it was surprising. He’d thought romantic life would
pass him by, that he would be a witness to it, but only a sad one.
Booker’s tragedy made him all the more attractive to Maud
and also made him seem more reliable. Maud wanted someone
as stable as her daddy was shaky. Someone who would talk to her
about books and ideas, who would take her to exciting places,
who thought indoor plumbing and electricity were basics of life.
Booker seemed to fill that ticket, and it didn’t hurt that he was
also handsome, sexy, and sweet smelling. She rode home holding
on to his waist with her face against the back of his shirt, listening to the slow clip-clop of his horse and thinking that she’d never
dreamed this kind of happiness would find her. Her contentment
lasted until Saturday night.
AMY STEWART
Girl Waits with Gun
(Excerpt)
ON SALE: September 1, 2015
”
From the bestselling author of The Drunken Botanist comes a novel based on the
forgotten true adventures of one of the nation’s first female deputy sheriffs.
Constance Kopp doesn’t quite fit the mold. She has no interest in marriage and has
been isolated from the world since a family secret sent her and her sisters into hiding
years ago. After a dangerous and powerful silk factory owner runs down their buggy
and refuses to pay the damages, Constance finds she must take matters into her own
hands, confronting her past and defending her family in a way that few women of 1914
would have dared.
“I got a revolver to protect us,” said Miss Constance,
“and I soon had use for it.”
— New York Times, June 3, 1915
!1"
Ou r tro ubl es be g an in the summer of 1914, the year I
turned thirty-five. The Archduke of Austria had just been assassinated, the Mexicans were revolting, and absolutely nothing was happening at our house, which explains why all three
of us were riding to Paterson on the most trivial of errands.
Never had a larger committee been convened to make a decision about the purchase of mustard powder and the replacement of a claw hammer whose handle had split from age and
misuse.
Against my better judgment I allowed Fleurette to drive.
Norma was reading to us from the newspaper as she always did.
“ ‘Man’s Trousers Cause Death,’ ” Norma called out.
“It doesn’t say that.” Fleurette snorted and turned around
to get a look at the paper. The reins slid out of her hands.
“It does,” Norma said. “It says that a Teamster was in the
habit of hanging his trousers over the gas jet at night but,
being under the influence of liquor, didn’t notice that the
trousers smothered the flame.”
“Then he died of gas poisoning, not of trousers.”
“Well, the trousers —”
The low, goosey cry of a horn interrupted Norma. I turned
just in time to see a black motor car barreling toward us, tearing down Hamilton and picking up speed as it crossed the intersection. Fleurette jumped up on the footboard to wave the
driver off.
“Get down!” I shouted, but it was too late.
The automobile hit us broadside, its brakes shrieking. The
sound of our buggy shattering was like a firecracker going off
in our ears. We tumbled over in a mess of splintered wood
and bent metal. Our harness mare, Dolley, faltered and went
down with us. She let out a high scream, the likes of which I
had never heard from a horse.
Something heavy pinned my shoulder. I reached around
and found it was Norma’s foot. “You’re standing on me!”
“I am not. I can’t even see you,” Norma said.
Our wagon rocked back and forth as the motor car reversed its engine and broke free of the wreckage. I was trapped
under the overturned rear seat. It was as dark as a coffin, but
there was a dim shape below me that I believed to be Fleurette’s arm. I didn’t dare move for fear of crushing her.
From the clamor around us, I gathered that someone was
trying to rock the wagon and get it upright. “Don’t!” I yelled.
“My sister’s under the wheel.” If the wheel started to turn,
she’d be caught up in it.
A pair of arms the size of tree branches reached into the
rubble and got hold of Norma. “Take your hands off me!” she
shouted.
“He’s trying to get you out,” I called. With a grunt, she accepted the man’s help. Norma hated to be manhandled.
Once she was free, I climbed out behind her. The man at-
tached to the enormous arms wore an apron covered in blood.
For one terrible second, I thought it was ours, then I realized
he was a butcher at the meat counter across the street.
He wasn’t the only one who had come running out when
the automobile hit us. We were surrounded by store clerks,
locksmiths, grocers, delivery boys, shoppers — in fact, most
of the stores on Market Street had emptied, their occupants
drawn to the spectacle we were now providing. Most of them
watched from the sidewalk, but a sizable contingent surrounded the motor car, preventing its escape.
The butcher and a couple of men from the print shop, their
hands black with ink, helped us raise the wagon just enough
to allow Fleurette to slide clear of the wheel. As we lifted the
broken panels off her, Fleurette stared up at us with wild dark
eyes. She wore a dress sheathed in pink taffeta. Against the
dusty road she looked like a trampled bed of roses.
“Don’t move,” I whispered, bending over her, but she got
her arms underneath herself and sat up.
“No, no, no,” said one of the printers. “We’ll call for a doctor.”
I looked up at the men standing in a circle around us.
“She’ll be fine,” I said, sliding a hand over her ankle. “Go on.”
Some of those men looked a little too eager to help with the
examination of Fleurette’s legs.
They shuffled off to help two livery drivers, who had disembarked from their own wagons to tend to our mare. They
freed her from the harness and she struggled to stand. The
poor creature groaned and tossed her head and blew steam
from her nostrils. The drivers fed her something from their
pockets and that seemed to settle her.
I gave Fleurette’s calf a squeeze. She howled and jerked
away from me.
“Is it broken?” she asked.
I couldn’t say. “Try to move it.”
She screwed her face into a knot, held her breath, and
gingerly bent one leg and then the other. When she was finished she let her breath go all at once and looked up at me,
panting.
“That’s good,” I said. “Now move your ankles and your
toes.”
We both looked down at her feet. She was wearing the
most ridiculous white calfskin boots with pink ribbons for
laces.
“Are they all right?” she asked.
I put my hand on her back to steady her. “Just try to move
them. First your ankle.”
“I meant the boots.”
That’s when I knew Fleurette would survive. I unlaced the
boots and promised to look after them. A much larger crowd
had gathered, and Fleurette wiggled her pale-stockinged toes
for her new audience.
“You’ll have quite a bruise tomorrow, miss,” said a lady behind us.
The seat that had trapped me a few moments ago was resting on the ground. I helped Fleurette into it and took another look at her legs. Her stockings were torn and she was
scratched and bruised, but not broken to bits as I’d feared. I
offered my handkerchief to press against one long and shallow cut along her ankle, but she’d already lost interest in her
own injuries.
“Look at Norma,” she whispered with a wicked little smile.
My sister had planted herself directly in the path of the motor
car to prevent the men from driving away. She did make a
comical sight, a small but stocky figure in her split riding skirt
of drab cotton. Norma had the broad Slavic face and thick
nose of our father and our mother’s sour disposition. Her
mouth was set in a permanent frown and she looked on everyone with suspicion. She stared down the driver of the motor
car with the kind of flat-footed resolve that came naturally to
her in times of calamity.
The automobilist was a short but solidly built young man
who had an overfed look about him, hinting at a privileged
life. He would have been handsome if not for an indolent and
spoiled aspect about his eyes and the tough set of his mouth,
which suggested he was accustomed to getting his way. His
face was puffy and red from the heat, but also, I suspected,
from a habit of putting away a quart of beer at breakfast and
a bottle of wine at night. He was dressed exceedingly well,
in striped linen trousers, a silk waistcoat with polished brass
buttons, and a tie as red as the blood seeping through Fleurette’s stockings.
His companions tumbled out of the car and gathered around
him as if standing guard. They wore the plain broadcloth suits
of working men and carried themselves like rats who weren’t
accustomed to being spotted in the daylight. Each of them was
unkempt and unshaven, and a few kept their hands in their
pockets in a manner that suggested they might be reaching for
their knives. I couldn’t imagine where this gang of ruffians had
been off to in such a hurry, but I was already beginning to regret that we had been the ones to get in their way.
The driver waved his arms and shouted for the crowd to
clear the road. The other men took up his command and
started yelling at the onlookers and pushing at them like
drunks in a barroom brawl — all but one of them, who backed
away and tried to run. He stumbled and the men in the crowd
easily took hold of him. With twenty or so people blocking the
way, the motor car’s engine sputtered and died, but the shouting and shoving went on.
I couldn’t catch Norma’s eye. She was taking them in, too,
the outrage draining from her face as she realized that this
gang was trouble.
The shopkeepers, clerks, and drivers of other automobiles
now stalled along the curb were all barking orders and pointing fingers at once.
“You’re going to pay these ladies for what you did!” one
yelled.
“Their horse spooked!” the driver shouted back. “They ran
right in front of us!”
A ripple of dissent rose up. Everyone knew that the horse
was never to blame in these collisions. A horse could watch
where it was going, but an automobile with an inattentive
driver could not. These boys had obviously had something on
their minds besides the traffic when they roared into town.
I couldn’t leave Norma to face them by herself. I gave
Fleurette a firm pat to keep her planted on the buggy seat and
ran around to stand next to Norma. All eyes traveled over to
me. As the tallest and the oldest, I must have looked like the
responsible party.
There was no one to introduce us, but it was the only way
I knew to begin.
“I am Constance Kopp,” I said, “and these are my sisters.”
I addressed the men with all the dignity I could muster,
considering that I’d just been upside down in an overturned
buggy. The driver of the motor car looked pointedly away as
if he couldn’t be bothered to listen to me, and in fact made a
great show of behaving as if I weren’t standing right in front
of him. I took a breath and spoke louder. “As soon as we settle
on the damages, you may be on your way.”
The one who had tried to run away — a tall, thin man with
droopy eyes and a prominent front tooth — leaned over and
whispered something to the rest of them. They appeared to be
making some kind of plan. As he hobbled around to discuss
the situation, I saw that his limp was caused by a wooden leg.
The driver of the automobile nodded at his friends and
reached for the door handle. He was going to push through
the crowd and drive off without a word! Norma started to say
something but I held her back.
He pried the door open. Seeing no alternative, I ran over
and slammed it shut.
This elicited a satisfied little gasp from the bystanders,
who were clearly enjoying themselves. I saw no choice but to
press my advantage. I stepped up and stood as tall as I possibly could, which meant that I towered above him considerably. He was about to address my collarbone, but thought
better of it and lifted his chin to stare me in the face. His
mouth hung open slightly, and as I watched, perfectly round
beads of sweat bloomed in even rows above his lip.
“I suppose we may require a new buggy, as you seem to
have smashed this one beyond repair,” I said. A pin sprung
loose from my hat at that moment and rang like a tiny bell as
it hit the gravel. I had to force myself not to look down at it
and hoped there were no other pins or fasteners working their
way loose, as they could in moments of great agitation like
these.
“Get offa my car, lady,” he said between clenched teeth.
I glared down at him. Neither of us moved. “If you refuse
to pay, then I must see your license plate,” I declared.
He lifted one brow as if issuing a challenge. At that I
marched around to write the plate number in a little notebook I carried in my handbag.
“Don’t bother with this,” Norma said from just behind me.
“I don’t like them looking at us.”
“I don’t either, but we need his name,” I said in a low hiss.
“I don’t care to know his name.”
“But I do.”
People were starting to crane their necks to hear us argue.
I walked back around to the man and said, “Perhaps you’ll
save me the trouble of asking the state of New Jersey for your
name and address.”
He looked around at the crowd and, seeing no alternative,
leaned toward me. He smelled of hair tonic and (as I’d suspected) liquor and the hard, metallic stench that leaked out
of all the factories in town. He spat the particulars at me, releasing a wave of abdominal breath that forced me to take a
step back as I wrote them down: Henry Kaufman of Kaufman
Silk Dyeing Company on Putnam.
“That will do, Mr. Kaufman,” I said, in a voice loud enough
for the others to hear. “You’ll have our invoice in a few days.”
He made no answer but swung back into the driver’s seat.
One of his friends gave the engine a hard crank and the motor
roared to life. They all climbed aboard and the car lurched
ahead, clearing a path through the mob of shoppers. Men
held their horses back and mothers pulled their children to
the sidewalks as the motor car careened away.
Norma and I watched the dust rise up behind Henry
Kaufman’s tires and settle back down again.
“You let them go?” Fleurette said from her perch on our
buggy’s broken seat. She had assumed the pose of an audience member at a play and seemed very disappointed in our
performance.
“I didn’t want to spend another minute with them,” Norma
said. “They’re the worst people I’ve ever seen. And look what
they’ve done to your leg.”
“Is it broken?” asked Fleurette, who knew it wasn’t but
loved to elicit from Norma one of her gloomy predictions.
“Oh, probably, but we can set the bone ourselves if we
have to.”
“I suppose my dancing career is at an end.”
“Yes, I believe it is.”
The livery drivers led a shaky but intact Dolley back to us.
What remained of our buggy had been moved to the sidewalk,
where it lay in a dozen or so pieces.
“I’m not sure it can be repaired,” one of the liverymen
said, “but I could send my stable boy around to the carriage
shops to inquire.”
“Oh, there’s no need for that,” Norma said. “Our brother
will come and fetch it. He drives a wagon for work.”
“But let’s not involve Francis!” Fleurette protested. “He’ll
blame it on my driving.”
I stepped between them, not wanting the liveryman to
withdraw his offer of help while we squabbled. “Sir, if you
could send your boy to my brother’s place of business, I’d
be very grateful.” I wrote down the address of the basket importer where Francis worked.
“I’ll take care of it,” he said. “But how are you girls getting
home?”
“Constance and I can walk,” Norma said quickly, “and our
little sister will ride.”
I wasn’t sure I could walk. I was already stiff and sore
from the crash and it would be past dark by the time we got
home. But I was in no mood to debate Norma, so I accepted
the man’s offer of a saddle for Dolley. We lifted Fleurette into
place and wrapped her injured foot in a flour sack before sliding it into the stirrup. Norma took hold of Dolley’s reins and
we shuffled down Market, looking more like refugees from a
war than three sisters out shopping for an afternoon.
Ordinarily, I would have considered getting run down by
an automobile to be the worst sort of catastrophe that could
befall the three of us. But this was not to be an ordinary year.
!2"
The ne xt morni ng the sun worked past the half-curtained
windows and hit the mirror on the wall opposite, casting a
blinding light across my bed. Even at that early hour, the air
was heavy and unbearably hot. I kicked the blanket away and
tried to sit up. As soon as my feet touched the floor I knew
I’d been hurt worse than I had realized. My right arm was
useless, the shoulder red and hot and bruised so badly that I
could hardly bear to move it. With some difficulty I opened
the top buttons of my nightgown and slid out of it. I was
hardly able to stand, but after a few attempts, I forced myself upright and struggled into the first dress I could find that
didn’t require me to raise my arm above my head.
Walking was nearly impossible. My hip felt like it had been
pushed out of joint. I couldn’t quite hold myself upright, and
every time I put weight on my left leg, my knee cried out in
pain.
This was not the soreness of a hard day’s work. It felt more
like the aftermath of a beating. I made my way to the hall and
kept one hand on the rail as I shuffled downstairs.
I found Fleurette in the kitchen, eating a boiled egg with a
spoon.
“Bonjour,” she said. After Mother died last year, Fleurette
took to imitating her speech mannerisms. Mother, having
grown up in Vienna with a French father and an Austrian
mother, spoke French and two distinct styles of German.
Fleurette preferred the French for its romantic flourishes.
Norma and I found the affectation tiresome, but we had conferred on it and decided to ignore it.
“Let me see your foot.”
She lifted her skirt and presented a badly bandaged ankle.
The cloth was stained a rusted brown. I am sorry to admit
that it was a stagnation of dried blood, and not our poorly situated pins, that held the bandage in place.
“Ach. We did not take very good care of you last night.”
“Je pense que c’est cassé.”
“Surely not. Can’t you move it? Stand up.”
Fleurette didn’t move. She picked at her egg cup and kept
her eyes down. “Norma said to tell you that Francis —” But
before she could finish, there was a rattle at the kitchen door
and my brother let himself in.
“Which one of you was driving?” he said. With Mother
gone, Francis had taken on the proprietary air of the man of
the house, even though he’d been married and living in Hawthorne for years.
Fleurette — who looks people square in the face when
she lies to them — turned to Francis and said, “Constance,
of course. I’m too young to drive, and Norma was reading the
paper.”
“It doesn’t matter who was driving,” I said. “That man aimed
his machine directly at us. Dolley could have been killed.”
“I could have been killed,” Fleurette said with a dramatic
roll of her eyes. She shifted around in her chair to give Francis a look at the purple bruise emerging just above her knee.
He turned away, embarrassed.
“She’ll be fine, won’t she?” he asked, and I nodded. He
held the door open and gestured for me to come along for a
private scolding and an examination of the wreckage he’d just
delivered.
Outside was a wide and airy barn that housed Dolley, an
occasional goat or pig, and a dozen or so chickens. The eaves
had been extended on one side to accommodate Norma’s pigeon loft. The imbalance between the two sides of the building made it seem in constant danger of losing its footing.
Next to it, facing the drive, was the entrance to our root cellar. A few summers ago, Francis had laid the stone walk that
led us there.
He spoke in a low voice so Fleurette couldn’t listen in
from the kitchen door. “Who is this man, this Harry — what
was it?”
“Henry Kaufman,” I said, “of Kaufman Silk Dyeing Company.”
That brought him to a stop as surely as if he’d walked into
a wall. He planted his feet and looked down at them with a
long and loud exhale. This was a mannerism of our father’s,
one I had almost forgotten until Francis reached the age at
which exasperation became an everyday emotion. Francis had
our father’s light brown hair and his pale Czech features, but
where our father had managed to take a high forehead and
light, intelligent eyes and make himself into something of a
ruffian, Francis took the same features and composed them
into those of a serious gentleman, with perfectly slicked and
combed hair and a mustache that turned up neatly at the
ends.
“He’s a silk man? Are you sure?”
“One can hardly picture him running a factory, but that’s
the address he gave. He’s on Putnam with all the others.”
He shook his head and squinted at Norma, who had heard
us coming and backed out of her pigeon loft. She took her
time locking it behind her. Norma had cut her hair short this
spring, insisting on doing it herself and chopping at it until
her brown curls framed her face unevenly. In the last few
years, she’d taken to wearing riding boots and a split skirt
that fell to just above her ankles. In this costume she would
climb ladders to repair a gutter or traipse down to the creek
to trap a rabbit. Fleurette used to sing a little song to her that
went, “Pants are made for men and not for women. Women
are made for men and not for pants.” Norma took offense at
the song but nonetheless insisted that what she wore could
not be considered pants in the least.
“You aren’t hurt,” I said, as she walked up. At least one of
us could still move.
“My head aches terribly,” she said, “from listening to Fleurette go on about how she was nearly killed yesterday. She
talks too much for a girl who is almost dead.”
“I wondered why she was up so early. She’s been rehearsing her story for Francis.”
“Listen to me, both of you,” Francis said. He put a hand
on each of us and led us down the drive to his wagon. “This
man Kaufman. What exactly did he say?”
“As little as he could before roaring off in that machine
with all his hoodlum friends,” I said, as I reached up with my
good arm to help Francis pull the tarpaulin off the back of his
wagon. “But I let him know that he should expect — Oh.”
The buggy was a horror of splintered wood and twisted
metal. Until now I hadn’t thought about exactly how it had
looked when we left it in Paterson, but here it was, this fragile
veneer of wood panels and leather and brass fittings that had
done so little to shelter us from the force of Henry Kaufman’s
automobile.
Norma and I stared at it. It was a wonder we’d survived.
Francis removed his hat and ran a hand through his hair.
“I can’t be out here all the time looking after you girls.”
“We haven’t asked you to look after us,” I said. “We only
needed our buggy brought here, and that wasn’t too much of
a bother, was it?”
“No, but without a man around the place —”
“We haven’t had a man around the place since you married!” I interrupted. “And what difference would it have made?
He hit us broadside with his automobile. There was nothing
you could have done.”
“It doesn’t matter. You shouldn’t be out here by yourselves,” Francis said, “especially now that you’ve lost your
buggy. Wouldn’t you rather stay in town with us?”
“I prefer not to live in a town,” Norma said. “Going to
town nearly got us killed yesterday, in case you’ve forgotten.
We’re much safer here.”
Francis looked down at his feet again — this had been our
father’s way of stopping himself from saying something he
didn’t want to say — and worked his jaw back and forth for a
minute before giving in. “All right. I’ll take care of the repairs.
I know a man in Hackensack who can do it. It looks bad, but
I think it can be rebuilt. The gears are fine, and most of the
panels came apart at their seams.”
“We can arrange for the repairs,” I said, “and Henry
Kaufman will pay for it.”
“You can’t make him pay, and you shouldn’t have anything
to do with him,” Francis said. “You know what these men are
like. Didn’t you see what they did to the strikers last year?”
Francis didn’t have to remind me. Everyone had seen what
happened to the strikers. The mill owners got it into their
heads that a worker could operate four looms at a time, instead of two, and do it for ten hours a day instead of eight.
Three hundred mills shut down. Factory workers in New York
City walked off the job in solidarity. The streets in Paterson
were choked with outraged strikers. Even the children who
worked as pickers and twisters in the mills took up their placards and marched.
The mill owners used their considerable influence to have
the police turn up at rallies and arrest as many people as the
jails would hold. When the police were overwhelmed, the
silk men hired their own private force. That’s when houses
started burning down. That’s when speeches were interrupted
by gunshots. That’s when bakeries and butchers were warned
not to sell food to the strikers. Eventually the workers were
too starved and defeated to do anything but return to their
looms.
The silk men behaved as if they owned Paterson. But none
of them had the right to run us down in the street and get
away with it.
“Mr. Kaufman doesn’t frighten me,” I said. “He will pay
what he owes.”
ELLY GRIFFITHS
The Zig Zag Girl
(Excerpt)
ON SALE: September 15, 2015
”
Elly Griffiths, beloved author of the Ruth Galloway mystery series, brings readers a
brand-new cast of characters based on her own family history in post–World War
II England. In Brighton, the body of a girl is found cut into three pieces. Detective
Inspector Edgar Stephens is convinced the killer is mimicking a famous magic trick—
the Zig Zag Girl. The inventor of the trick, Max Mephisto, served with Edgar in the
Magic Men, a special ops unit that used stage tricks to confound the enemy. When
another victim of a deadly magic trick is found, Edgar and Max are sure that the
answer lies in the history of the Magic Men. They must join together to hunt the killer
before his next trick, the Wolf Trap, places them in the killer’s sights.
‘I’ faith he looks much like a conjuror.’
— Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus
PA RT 1
The Build-Up
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CHAPTER 1
‘Looks as if someone’s sliced her into three,’ said Solomon
Carter, the police surgeon, chattily. ‘We’re just missing
the middle bit.’
I must not be sick, thought Edgar Stephens. That’s what
he wants. Stay calm and professional at all times. You’re
the policeman, after all.
He looked down at the shape on the mortuary table.
You couldn’t really call it a body, he thought, almost
dispassionately. It was more like one of those classical
statues, head and shoulders only, hacked through just
above the breasts. The beauty of the face and the flowing
blonde hair only heightened the sense of unreality. He
could be looking at a model head in a milliner’s shop.
Apart from the clotted blood and smell of decaying flesh,
that is. Despite himself, he felt his stomach heave.
‘We can’t be sure that the head and legs are from the
same body,’ he said, pressing his handkerchief to his
lips.
Solomon Carter laughed heartily at that one. ‘There
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are hardly going to be two dismembered women’s bodies
floating around Brighton at the same time.’
Edgar shifted his gaze to the end of the table, where
the legs lay primly side by side, still clad in flesh-coloured
stockings, cut off mid-thigh as if by a prudish censor. It
occurred to him that, without the ‘middle bit’, it was
impossible to prove conclusively whether the corpse was
male or female.
‘Might not even be a woman’s legs,’ he remarked, just
to say something really.
‘You’re joking,’ said Solomon. ‘Those are a woman’s legs
or I’m a Dutchman. Beautiful pair. Long as a showgirl’s.’
No, you’re not a Dutchman, thought Edgar as he followed the police surgeon from the room. He’d met a lot
of Dutchmen during the Norway campaign and they’d all
been rather pleasant.
Later, in the pub, he managed to joke about this to his
sergeant, Bob Willis. Bob never really laughed at Edgar’s
jokes, but sometimes his ears went pink. Edgar thought
that Bob considered laughter somehow lacked the dignity
appropriate to a policeman. Bob was sensitive about being
only twenty-one and not having fought in the war. He
would never have been a sergeant at this age if it wasn’t
for the men who did fight, of course.
‘Solomon Carter was just about to proposition the girl,’
he said. ‘I promise you, he wouldn’t be put off by a little
thing like her middle section being missing. Probably
likes his women like that.’
Bob’s ears reddened and he took a suspicious sip of
his beer. They do a good pint in the Bath Arms, but it
was part of Bob’s policeman persona to be suspicious of
everything.
Edgar took a more generous swig of his drink. He knew
that he shouldn’t really be drinking with his sergeant
on a Friday night. His own father would have left work
sharply at five, brisk walk home, whisky and soda, nice
little mixed grill, evening listening to the wireless with
the family. But Edgar had no one to make him a mixed
grill and the thought of returning to his digs was too
depressing. He wondered if Bob had someone to go home
to, some clean-looking girl from the perfume department
at Hanningtons, a doting mother frying spam fritters,
desperate to hear of her son’s adventures on the dark side
of the law.
But it appeared that Bob had been thinking. Always
dangerous.
‘Where do you think the rest of her is, then?’ he asked,
almost fretfully.
‘I don’t know,’ said Edgar. The legs and torso had been
found in the Left Luggage office at Brighton station, individually concealed within plain black cases, the kind
that house the less interesting orchestral instruments,
a French horn, maybe, or a tuba. It had been the smell
which had alerted station staff. It was a cold grey August,
but still warm enough to make a dead body smell pretty
bad after a few days.
‘Who would do a thing like that?’ said Bob. Again, he
sounded personally affronted at the sheer cheek of a
person who would cut a woman into pieces and leave
them scattered untidily around the place.
‘Someone very strange,’ said Edgar. He thought of
the mortuary room and the head and legs with the gap
in-between, the sickly smell, the marble skin. ‘Tell you
something,’ he said. ‘I was almost sick today just looking
at what they’d done.’
Bob seemed shocked at his boss’s frailty. ‘Surely you saw
worse in the war?’
‘I saw a lot of odd things in the war,’ said Edgar. ‘You
wouldn’t want to know.’
Bob looked as if he heartily agreed with this sentiment.
‘I can’t believe nobody saw anything at the station,’ he
said, sounding aggrieved again.
The two boxes had been deposited on Monday morning and it was now Wednesday. But it seemed that none
of the station staff remembered who had left the boxes
and why they didn’t pick them up again on Monday evening. The only description they had was pitiful in the
extreme: ‘It was a man. I think he was wearing a hat.’
What sort of hat? wondered Edgar now. A pirate’s tricorn?
An errand boy’s cap? A top hat? For some reason – perhaps it was because of the music case connection – Edgar
could imagine a top hat.
‘We’ll go and see them again tomorrow,’ he said. ‘Ask
at the shops around the station. Someone must have seen
something.’
‘No one’s ever seen anything,’ said Bob. ‘It’s this town.
It’s a hotbed of vice.’
Bob wasn’t from Brighton, and it showed. He had been
brought up in a small village on the Kent coast. His parents were Methodists and sometimes that showed too.
‘It’s not too bad,’ said Edgar. He liked Brighton. When
he first joined the police force, he had been stationed in
Croydon. Brighton was definitely a step up. He liked the
cheerful anonymity of the town although, as Bob said,
sometimes that had its drawbacks. But surely a man who
could cut a woman in two must have left a trail behind
him.
‘In three,’ said Bob, when Edgar voiced this thought
aloud. ‘He cut her into three. We haven’t seen the middle
bit yet.’
That was the thing about police work, thought Edgar
as he watched Bob go up to the bar to order more drinks.
There was always something to look forward to.
As he walked home, Edgar thought again about his father
and the mixed grill. What would his dad – long dead now
– have thought about having a son who was a policeman?
On one hand, the job surely deserved his parents’ most
prized epithet, ‘respectable’, but on the other it hardly
matched their other major criterion, ‘nice’. Edgar had
spent the morning looking at dismembered body parts,
the afternoon trying to trace someone – anyone – who
might know how they came to rest in the Left Luggage
office at Brighton station, and the evening drinking beer
with a lad who should be looking up to him as a superior
officer. No, nice it wasn’t.
Edgar’s digs were in Hanover, the steep hill that
stretched from the Pavilion almost to the racecourse. The
houses were mostly small and run-down, but on a clear
day you could see the whole of Brighton spread out before
you, a series of tottering white terraces until you reached
the pier and the sea. As Edgar stomped up the worst part
of the hill, he reflected how his mother would have considered the area ‘common’. Edgar’s parents had graduated
from a terrace to a semi-detached bungalow in Esher and
had thought themselves the most fortunate people on
earth. Edgar’s father had not lived long to enjoy the suburban bliss. He had died barely a year after the move to
Surrey. But Edgar’s mother, Rose, lived on, polishing her
silver and ironing her tablecloths as if preparing for a
banquet that never quite materialised.
Edgar thought of his childhood as being dominated by
the pursuit of respectability. His father, Bill, had worked
at the Post Office and, though it was a struggle at times,
it was his boast that Rose had never had to go out to work.
Edgar and his brother and sister were never allowed to
play in the street with the other children. They had to stay
inside, doing their homework and practising the piano.
This joyless self-betterment had its results. All three siblings won places at the grammar school although, when
Edgar later got into Oxford, this was considered rather
showy and unbecoming. ‘People like us don’t get degrees,’
his mother said. ‘Just when Dad’s got you a nice little
berth in the Post Office.’ But Edgar went to Oxford and
enjoyed two delirious terms before Hitler spoilt it all and
he found himself, almost without knowing it, on a troop
ship bound for Norway. His younger brother, Jonathan,
had further ruined the party by getting himself killed at
Dunkirk. Lucy, his sister, was now the only regular visitor
to the bungalow, where she reported that Jonathan and
Edgar were both spoken of in the same hushed, regretful
tones. They had both let their mother down. Jonathan
dead on a French beach and Edgar in the police force.
Edgar’s flat was on the ground floor of a house painted
a rather virulent shade of pink. As he let himself in, he
smelt the familiar musty smell that never seemed to get
better no matter how much he left windows open or tried
to spring-clean. He had once gone as far as complaining
about it to his landlady, who had sniffed the air and said
‘nasty, isn’t it?’ as if it had nothing to with her. Mice, Bob
had said, when he’d mentioned it at the station, and he
was probably right. Edgar frequently heard scurrying and
squeaking in the skirting boards and, once, when he had
left a biscuit out overnight, he had woken to find that it
had been chewed by sharp rodent teeth.
Trying not to think about the mice, Edgar cut himself
some bread and searched for something to spread on it.
He thought he had some sardines somewhere, but a trawl
through the larder produced nothing better than some
rather mouldy jam and a half-open tin of spam which he
hastily threw away (maybe that was responsible for the
smell?). He scraped off the thin layer of green and spread
the jam on the bread. Then he took the sandwich and a
bottle of beer and repaired to the front room for the best
part of the day. The cryptic crossword.
He didn’t know where his love for crosswords started.
Maybe it was sitting at the kitchen table trying to do his
homework and being distracted by the tempting black and
white squares on the back of his father’s evening paper.
His father never did the crossword and his mother could
hardly even bring herself to touch a newspaper (news was
rarely nice or respectable). All evening the clues would
tempt and tantalise: ‘fare to be cooked over first part of
Sunday . . . I, for one, am reflected . . . ruminate, stuck in
ales perhaps.’ He couldn’t remember the first time that he
had taken the discarded paper and tentatively filled in the
blanks, but even now, even after completing a crossword
had indirectly led him to the Magic Men and some of the
worst experiences of his life, he still saw an unfinished
puzzle as a treat, something to be savoured at the end of
the day.
He sat down now and chewed his pen. ‘Turn to
important person making a comeback.’ Five letters.
‘Comeback’ often meant that the word was reversed.
Important person? VIP. Turn that and you get ‘piv’. Oh
yes, ‘pivot’ – turn to – an anagram of ‘VIP to’. Edgar filled
in the answer in neat black capitals. It was a point of
honour never to use a pencil. Two down: ‘Christmas visitors include conjuror (8)’. Well, Christmas visitors are
always ‘Magi’. Magi . . . Edgar stopped, looking down at
the paper.
He heard Solomon Carter saying, ‘Beautiful pair. Long
as a showgirl’s’. He thought of the boxes in which the
body parts had been found: wooden, black, fastened with
brass clips at the back, exactly the same size. And he saw,
not the dingy walls of his flat, but a variety show at the
end of a pier – the velvet curtains, the wheeled cabinet
and the white face of the magician as he proceeded to saw
a woman into three.
CHAPTER 2
Max Mephisto stared up at the damp spots on the ceiling.
Five and two. Seven-card brag. Find the Lady. Hearts, clubs,
diamonds, spades. The darker spots could be spades, if
you gave them the benefit of the doubt. Queen of spades.
The Dark Lady. One of his best table tricks. You could
pluck the baleful-looking queen from a lady’s hair, from
her evening bag, even from her cleavage if it was the right
kind of club and she was the right kind of girl.
The girl beside him sighed in her sleep. Max had no
idea what kind of girl she was and, as this show was only
a weekly, he wouldn’t have a chance to find out. Vanda, he
thought. Or was it Tanya? One of those Russian-sounding
names. Their act was vaguely Russian, he seemed to recall,
lots of squatting with arms crossed and legs kicking out.
The costumes too had lots of unnecessary fur, though
they were skimpier that those generally worn by peasants
in the Urals. To be honest, though, the Majestic Theatre,
Eastbourne, was probably colder than Siberia, even in
August. Where was he going next? Southport, he thought.
Or maybe Scarborough. Somewhere beginning with S.
Please God, don’t let it be Skegness.
‘Mr Mephisto!’
Mrs Shuttleworth’s bell-like tones. Did she suspect that
he had a woman in his room? Well, she knew him so she
probably did suspect. But her voice had sounded excited
rather than reproving.
‘Yes?’ he shouted, unhelpfully. Vanda/Tanya pulled the
pillow over her head.
‘Gentleman to see you.’
Gentleman must mean that he wasn’t a theatrical. Max
rejected the idea of coming down in his dressing gown. It
might be an agent, someone with news of a really good
show, a Number One, somewhere like the Finsbury Park
Empire or the Golders Green Hippodrome. He dressed in
shirt and trousers, no tie, a respectable-looking tweed
jacket. Before he left, he handed the girl her clothes.
‘Better get dressed,’ he said kindly. ‘Landlady’ll be up
to do the rooms in a minute.’ Old Mother Shuttleworth
never stirred herself to clean the rooms before midday,
but the girl wasn’t to know that.
She sat up, trying to stretch in a seductive way. She was
pretty enough, even in the daylight, a sort of cut-price
Betty Grable. ‘Are you coming to the last-night party?’ she
asked. ‘After the second house.’
‘Of course,’ said Max hoping that a better offer would
come his way. Maybe he’d be dining with the agent at the
Grand.
‘See you later, Max.’
‘Bye Vanda.’
‘Sonya.’
Sonya. That was it.
Mrs Shuttleworth had shown the visitor into the front
room, rather than the dining room where some of the
pros were still having breakfast. Coming softly down
the stairs, Max could hear the unmistakable tones of
Ronaldo the Sword Swallower and Walter Armstrong
the Impressionist. He crossed the hall without looking
round. Ronaldo was more than he could stomach in the
morning – swords, it seemed, were the only things he
could swallow without spraying the room with crumbs
– and Armstrong was tediously devoted to imitating
inanimate objects. Max felt that his day could quite comfortably start without hearing a cork being pulled from
a bottle or a lavatory cistern gurgling.
Max prided himself on his double-takes, it was a classic
way to distract the audience. Open the cabinet door and
the girl is . . . gone. Stagger downstage, look wildly up
at the royal circle, clutch throat. But stepping into Mrs
Shuttleworth’s over-stuffed parlour, he did, in fact, take
a genuine step backwards.
‘Ed. Good God.’
‘Hallo, Max.’
Mrs Shuttleworth, hovering in the background, seemed
to feel that this exchange lacked something.
‘This gentleman has come to see you specially, Mr
Mephisto.’
‘So I see.’
‘I wondered if there was somewhere we could have a
chat,’ said Edgar. It was nearly five years since he’d seen
Ed. The last time they met was at the end of the war. The
Magic Men had been disbanded and they had met at Victoria Station, each on their way to another posting. They
had argued, Max remembered, some ridiculous conversation about whether Edgar should go back to university or
become a policeman. Well, he had made his choice and
here he was, unchanged as far as Max could see. Tall, thin,
sandy-haired, looking about him with an air of expectant
eagerness. Max knew that in contrast he looked old and
seedy. He was ten years older than Edgar, but his eyes had
never looked that trusting, even when he was young.
‘I’ll leave you in peace then,’ said Mrs Shuttleworth,
after a moment’s pause.
‘No,’ said Max. ‘We can go out for a walk.’
‘But you haven’t had your breakfast yet.’
‘I’m not hungry, thank you, Mrs Shuttleworth.’
‘Breakfast smells terrific,’ said Edgar with a schoolboy
grin that would earn him a fortune on the boards in bestfriend roles.
‘We keep chickens,’ explained the landlady, though
Max felt sure that Edgar could have smelt as much. ‘And
it’s easier now bread’s not rationed. I can give you some
eggs to take home,’ offered Mrs Shuttleworth expansively.
‘Your wife will be pleased.’
‘I’m not married,’ said Edgar, grin sagging a little.
‘Come on, Ed,’ said Max, ‘let’s get some air.’
*
Max had lit a cigarette before they had descended the
porch steps. He offered his case to Edgar, who shook his
head.
‘I’ve given them up.’
‘Whatever for?’
‘I just didn’t like being so dependent on something.’
They walked in silence along the promenade. A cold
wind was blowing through the palm trees and the sea was
a steely, uninviting blue. They stopped in a shelter so Max
could light another cigarette. Breathing in the smoke, he
said, ‘How did you find me?’
‘I looked in Variety magazine. “Max Mephisto appearing
at the Majestic Theatre, Eastbourne.”’
‘Are policemen reading Variety magazine these days?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Edgar calmly. ‘But I looked because
I wanted to find you.’
‘Why?’ Max squinted at him through the smoke.
‘Let’s walk on a bit and I’ll tell you.’
They walked as far as the pier. The floral clock made
Max’s eyes ache – all those clashing ranks of Michaelmas
daisies, yellow, purple and orange – he must have had
more to drink last night than he realised. The wind was
turning the deckchairs into mini sailboats, but there were
still a few brave families setting up on the beach.
‘We’ve found a woman’s body,’ said Edgar. ‘Cut into
three. The top and bottom were found in the Left Luggage
at Brighton station. The middle part was delivered to me
at the police station yesterday.’
‘The middle part?’
‘The torso. Breast to hips.’
‘Jesus.’ Max took a drag at his cigarette. ‘And you say
this was delivered to you?’
‘Yes. In a black case addressed to Captain Edgar Stephens.’
‘Captain Stephens. Not PC?’
‘It’s Detective Inspector Stephens. But, yes. They used
my army rank.’
They leant on the railings and watched as two children
– hardy in striped bathing costumes – built a sandcastle.
Max’s eyes stung. He hoped it was just from flying sand.
‘Well, what’s it got to do with me? You chose to join the
police. Aren’t dead bodies part of the job?’
‘The way the body was cut into three, each part put
into a black box, it reminded me of a magic trick. One
you used to do before the war.’
Max was relighting his cigarette. ‘The Zig Zag Girl,’
he said. ‘Girl in a cabinet, blades cut through top and
bottom. Pull the mid-section out to make a zig zag shape,
open a door to show the midriff. Always a crowd-pleaser.
The trick is that the cabinet’s bigger than it looks. Black
strips down the sides make it look narrow and the middle
part is actually bigger than the top and bottom.’
‘Well this man,’ said Edgar. ‘He actually cut her into
three. I’ve seen the pieces.’
Max said nothing so Edgar continued. ‘The whole
thing was so theatrical. The way the pieces were found,
the middle part – the key part – being sent to me. I just
thought it might be . . .’
‘You thought it might be a lunatic magician.’
There was a silence. The hurdy-gurdy started up on the
pier. On the beach the children were laughing as they
jumped over the waves.
‘Yes,’ said Edgar at last. ‘I thought it might be a lunatic
magician. And, if you’re looking for a lunatic magician,
where else to start?’
Max laughed. It felt like the first time he had laughed
for years. He had certainly never laughed at Nobby ‘Crazy
Legs’ Smith, the comedian on the bill that week.
‘It’s good to see you again, Ed.’
‘Good to see you too. It’s been too long.’
‘Do you see anyone else from the Magic Men?’
At that name, Max stopped laughing. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I
don’t see anyone from those days. The war’s been over for
five years.’
‘And you can’t think of anyone who’s performing The
Zig Zag Girl now?’
Max shrugged. ‘I bet magicians are performing it up
and down the country. People copy tricks all the time and
it’s not particularly difficult if you’ve got a good cabinetmaker.’
Edgar brightened. ‘Well, that’s a lead for a start. Can you
give me the names of the best theatrical cabinet-makers?’
Max turned and began to walk away. Edgar kept pace
with him and, after a few moments, Max said, ‘All right. I
can give you some names. There’s a good prop-maker near
Brighton, as it happens. But I don’t want to get involved.
I don’t like the police, remember?’
‘I remember.’
‘We live in different worlds, Ed. You’re on your way up
and me . . .’ he gestured towards the town behind him,
the stuccoed hotels, the flags of nations fluttering from
the pier. ‘I’m on my way down.’
‘The Majestic isn’t a Number One then?’
Max laughed. ‘It’s a Number Three on a good day. Variety’s dying, Ed, and I’m dying with it. You should see the
bunch on this week’s bill.’
‘I will,’ said Edgar. ‘I’ve got a ticket for tonight’s show.’
The show wasn’t as bad as Max made out, thought Edgar.
He’d quite enjoyed the sword-swallowing and the impressions of doors opening and shutting had been mildly
entertaining. Max had rightly characterised the comedian, Nobby Smith, as the least funny man in the world,
but he seemed to go down well with certain members of
the audience. Sonya and Tanya, the exotic dancers, were
also popular, though Edgar thought this might be because
Sonya’s fur bikini kept slipping. From his vantage point
in the stalls, he could see their goose-pimples.
Max was the last act, as befitted his star billing. Max
might say that he was on his way out, but it was clear
that he was the one most of the audience had come to
see. In the interval, as Edgar nursed his warm gin and
tonic (a woman’s drink, Tony Mulholland used to say),
there was only one name buzzing through the bar. ‘Saw
him at the Hippodrome before the war. Incredible . . .’
‘They say he escaped from a pyramid in Egypt.’ ‘Of course
he was a spy, you know.’ ‘I heard he was a Nazi.’ ‘Touch of
the tar-brush . . .’ Max was the sort of man who attracted
rumours, thought Edgar. It was strange only that some of
them were true.
Sonya and Tanya opened the second half with a dance
that was vaguely Egyptian in aspiration. Edgar thought
about Max and the pyramid. That, too, could be true. He
knew that Max had been in Egypt at the start of the war.
By the time the Magic Men unit was formed, most of its
members had already seen enough action for a lifetime.
Except Tony Mulholland, who had somehow managed to
avoid the call-up, and The Great Diablo who was sixty-five
if he was a day.
A ventriloquist followed the dancers. He was quite good
if you accepted that the puppet had a speech impediment.
The audience were charitable about his attempts to sing
the national anthem whilst drinking a glass of water.
Then there was a female impersonator, Madame Foo-Foo.
His (her?) act was absolutely filthy and Edgar wondered
how it had got past the Lord Chamberlain’s Office. But
there was no doubt that Madame Foo-Foo had her fans,
particularly in the gallery. She left to what was almost an
ovation and the audience settled down to await the great
Max Mephisto.
The silence seemed to crackle into expectancy and then
almost impatience until, at the last possible minute, Max
strolled onto the stage. Edgar hadn’t even realised that
he was holding his breath until he exhaled with a sigh.
Because, if anything was obvious, it was that there was
nothing to be nervous about. Max was so clearly in charge.
Effortlessly elegant in a dinner jacket with the bow tie
undone, he grinned sleepily down at the audience. By
the time that he had wandered down into the stalls
and removed a watch from someone’s ear and a seemingly endless string of pearls from a woman’s handbag,
the audience were in the palm of his hand. After a few
complicated card tricks, enlivened by a stream of patter
wittier than anything heard so far that evening, a trestle
table was brought onto the stage and Max invited a girl
from the audience to lie on it. A delicious tremor ran
through the seats around Edgar. This was what they had
come for. The faintly macabre sight of a man leaning over
a woman and preparing to dispose of her. Edgar thought
of the girl on the slab. This girl was blonde too, and Max
solicitously tucked her hair under her neck as he pulled
the cloth over her face. Edgar had done the same to the
poor remains in the mortuary.
He told himself to keep watching the girl but, as usual,
he was distracted by Max who, with a clap of his hands
conjured two white doves from thin air. As the doves flew,
cooing anxiously, towards the royal box, Max removed the
cloth with a flourish. The girl had, of course, vanished.
Thunderous applause, redoubling as a spotlight revealed
the girl back in her seat looking both embarrassed and
relieved. Max bowed, kissed his hand to the gallery and
disappeared, not emerging even for the cries of ‘encore’.
Escaping while the anthem was still playing, Edgar
made his way to the pass door, as instructed by Max. The
doorman greeted him with a nod. ‘Max? Third on the
left. Usually I tell his visitors to watch out for him, but
you look like you can take care of yourself.’ Edgar smiled,
guessing that Max’s visitors were usually younger and
more female. He had never been backstage at a theatre
before and he was surprised at how scruffy it was. The
Majestic may have seen better days, but the front of house
still had a veneer of glamour – red velvet curtains (only
slightly moth-eaten), gilded cherubs on the balconies, a
chandelier glittering up above the gods. But behind the
pass door there were dusty floorboards and pipes running
along the low ceiling. There was also a strong smell of
damp. Edgar passed a dressing room which was obviously
shared by the ventriloquist, the sword-swallower and the
impressionist. He heard the sound of a champagne cork
popping and wondered if that was Walter Armstrong at
work. He couldn’t imagine champagne being drunk here
otherwise.
Max did, at least, have a room to himself. He was
drinking whisky and rubbing cold cream into his face.
Edgar found himself staring. He’d never imagined Max
using greasepaint somehow. He thought what his father
would have said about a man wearing make-up. Well, he
didn’t want to be like him at any rate.
‘Great show,’ he said. ‘You were brilliant.’
Max smiled and pushed the whisky bottle towards him.
‘Help yourself. Glad you enjoyed it.’
‘That last trick was incredible. How did you do it?’
‘I can’t tell you. I’d be kicked out of the Magic Circle.’
‘You told me that you’d been expelled from the Magic
Circle years ago.’
‘Oh, all right then. Trapdoor. When I whirl the table
round, it’s positioned over the trap. The girl just gets
down and climbs through the hole. A few drum rolls and
she’s back in her seat. You can do a version where you set
the table alight, but that’s against fire regulations here.’
‘So the girl wasn’t just someone from the audience?’
‘God, no. She’s the stage manager’s daughter. Nice girl.’
Edgar took a sip of his whisky, watching Max carefully
removing every trace of grease. What would it be like, he
wondered, to do that show twice nightly. Always the same
twirl and smile up to the gallery, the same fake surprise
as the doves erupted into the air, the same dumb faces
tilted towards you.
‘Where did the doves go?’ he asked suddenly.
Max looked surprised. ‘I gave them to Sheila. The girl.
Easier to buy another pair when I get to Scarborough. Or
I might try something else. A bunch of flowers bursting
into flames is always good.’
‘Is that where you’re going next? Scarborough?’
‘Yes. Sunday’s changeover day. I’ve always hated Sundays.’
Watching him in the mirror, Edgar saw Max’s face
change. A girl was standing in the doorway. She was one
of the dancers, wearing a rather tatty peach satin wrap
over her costume.
‘Are you coming to the party, Max?’ she asked. ‘You
could bring your friend.’
Edgar watched as the mechanical smile spread over
Max’s face. His audience smile.
‘Wish I could, sweetheart, but Ed and I have business
to discuss.’
Max took Edgar to an Italian restaurant that he knew. It
was a little place, tucked away in a back street, but the
food was wonderful. Max’s mother had been Italian, Edgar
seemed to remember. It was one of the few facts that he
knew about him. Presumably it was from her that Max
had inherited his dark good looks, the kind that made
people speculate about the tar brush.
‘Bit better than the Caledonian Hotel,’ said Max,
twirling spaghetti.
‘Bet they don’t do rock cakes though,’ said Edgar. But
the mention of the Caledonian, the only bar in the Highland town where the Magic Men had their headquarters,
had eased something between them. Edgar found himself
telling Max about his job, about how hard he found it
having to live up to his reputation as a brilliant ex-secretservice man. ‘And most of the time I know less than the
lowliest PC. And they know it too.’
Max confessed that the endless parade of seaside towns
was taking its toll. ‘I’d pack it in if there was anything
else I could do.’
‘But you’re a brilliant magician.’
‘Yes.’ Typically, Max did not dispute this. ‘But the public
don’t want brilliant any more. Have you seen all these
new NAAFI comics? There was one on at the Palladium
the other week. They don’t do jokes, they don’t do patter.
This character – it was like listening to a mad man on the
bus, but the audience loved him. Practically ate him up.
Have you heard of a chap called Tommy Cooper? Cooper
the Trooper?’
‘No.’
‘He’s a magician. Ex-NAAFI too. And his thing is, he gets
it wrong. He does the build-up and the patter and then
the trick goes wrong. First time I saw it, I couldn’t believe
it. The watch is under this cup, no this one, no – hang
on – it’s this one. Brought the house down.’
‘Maybe he did just get it wrong.’
‘No, that’s his act. I’ve seen him a few times. He’s a
good magician underneath, I can tell. But audiences don’t
want good magicians any more. They don’t want smoke
and mirrors and swirling cloaks. They don’t want girls in
spangled costumes. They want to see how the trick works.
Trouble is, once you tell them how it works, you’re done
for.’
‘Speaking of spangled costumes, why don’t you have an
assistant?’
Max refilled their glasses. ‘Assistants are too much
trouble. I had a fantastic girl before the war, Ethel her
name was. She knew exactly when to get the audience’s
attention and when to keep still. Most of them never get it
right. They’re twirling away when you want the spotlight
on you and standing there like a bloody corpse when you
want the audience distracted. But Ethel . . . she was a
wonder.’
‘What happened to her?’
‘Got married, like they all do. Married a fireman and
lives on the Isle of Wight. She still sends me cards at
Christmas.’
Where does she send them, thought Edgar. Max told
him that he hadn’t had a permanent address since being
discharged. He wanted to ask Max about the dancer, about
whether there was a woman in his life, but he didn’t have
the nerve somehow.
But Max, it seemed, had been thinking along the same
lines.
‘The thing about The Zig Zag Girl,’ he said, pouring the
last of the red into Edgar’s glass, ‘is that it’s a trick that
depends on the girl. You need a very good girl, one that
can get into that middle section in double-quick time.
She’s got to be fast and she’s got to be brave.’
‘Why are you telling me this?’ asked Edgar. The wine
was making his head feel fuzzy. The picture of the Bay
of Naples behind Max’s head was pulsing unpleasantly.
Edgar hoped that it wasn’t about to erupt.
Max’s voice seemed to come from a long way away. ‘You
wanted my advice about your murder. Well, this is it. Find
the girl.’
CHAPTER 3
The station still hadn’t got over the shock of the box delivered to ‘Captain Stephens’. On the Thursday, the day after
the discovery of the head and the legs, the duty sergeant
had arrived at Bartholomew Square Police Station to find
a black box waiting on the doorstep. None of the night
staff had seen it being delivered but, as they had spent
most of the night in the basement gathered around a
primus stove, this was hardly surprising.
The sergeant, a solid individual called Larry McGuire,
picked up the box and carried it to the counter. It was
then that he had noticed the smell, a terrible, allpervading miasma that made him back away, shielding
his face. Handkerchief over mouth and nose, he had
approached again, seen the typewritten name on the
address label, and reached for the phone to call Edgar.
By the time Edgar arrived, out of breath from running
all the way, there was a small crowd in the reception
area.
‘Bloody hell,’ he’d said. ‘What’s that smell?’
McGuire had pointed silently to the box. Edgar recognised it immediately – wooden, black, brass clips – the
missing triplet that completes the set.
‘Get a camera,’ he said, ‘we should record this. And call
Chief Inspector Hodges.’
When he’d opened it, the smell had sent him staggering backwards. He was dimly aware of Sergeant McGuire
clicking away in the background and of the chief’s indrawn breath. A piece of flesh, roughly hacked at the top
and bottom, greyish in colour but still, unmistakeably and
horribly, part of a human body. Edgar had heard someone
retching and the bile had risen in his own throat.
‘There’s something in there,’ said McGuire, his voice
reassuringly matter of fact. ‘Looks like a rose. A red rose.
It’s still fresh.’
So, on the Monday after his visit to Max, when McGuire
told him that a flower-seller was asking for him in Reception, Edgar had thought immediately of the rose. The
reception area, with its grand mosaic floor, still smelt
strongly of bleach and, when Edgar escorted the woman
to the interview room, he could see doors opening and
people peering out to watch their progress. The weekend
papers had been full of the Brighton trunk murders
(though the full details hadn’t been released), and Edgar
knew the pressure was on him, as the detective in charge,
to make some progress with the case. Frank Hodges had
already had strong words for people who spent their
weekends gadding about in Eastbourne when there was
a murderer to catch.
The flower-seller was a stout woman with a disconcertingly red face. She looked almost pityingly at Edgar as she
said, ‘You’re the policeman in charge, aren’t you?’
Edgar agreed that he was.
‘You were asking at the stall about the man that left
the packages last week. The ones with the bits of body in
them.’
‘That’s right.’
‘Well, I think I saw him. The man.’
‘Really?’ Edgar leant forwards.
‘It was on the Monday. I saw a man carrying two boxes
into Left Luggage. Then he came to my stall.’
‘Are you sure it was the same man?’
‘I think so. He was small, I remember that. The boxes
looked too big for him. I remember thinking that he
might be one of those theatricals.’
This was interesting. ‘Why?’
‘The boxes looked like they could have had instruments
in them. And he was small, like I said. He looked foreign.
Like one of those foreign musicians.’
‘He looked foreign?’
‘Yes. Dark.’ She gave the word a sinister emphasis.
‘Dark-skinned?’
‘No. Dark hair. Except I couldn’t see his hair because he
was wearing a cap.’
Edgar sighed. ‘Witnesses,’ Frank Hodges always said.
‘You can’t trust a witness.’
‘He was wearing a cap? Like a sailor’s cap?’
‘No. More like an errand boy. A peaked cap.’
‘Can you remember anything else?’
‘He was wearing a long coat. I thought that was funny
for August. Still, it’s been wicked weather for summer.’
‘What did he say to you? Did he buy some flowers?’
‘He bought a rose,’ said the woman. ‘A single longstemmed red rose.’
Later that day, Edgar sought out the cabinet-maker recommended by Max. His workshop was in Hove, close to the
cricket ground. ‘D. Fitzgerald,’ said the uncompromising
sign, ‘Propmaker’.
D. Fitzgerald was engaged in putting the roof on what
looked like a large kennel. On the side, the words ‘Cave
Canem’ were written in italic script.
‘What’s that?’ said Edgar.
‘It’s a kennel,’ said D. Fitzgerald straightening up. ‘For
a dog.’
‘Oh.’ Edgar was disappointed. ‘It’s not a magic trick
then?’
‘No. Magic work is thin on the ground these days. I have
to take what I can get.’
Edgar thought about what Max had said about variety
dying and no one wanting the traditional magic tricks any
more. It seemed a shame somehow that there would be no
more girls stepping into cabinets and reappearing in the
stalls. And, presumably, prop-makers would have to turn to
kennels and wardrobes in order to make their living.
Edgar introduced himself. ‘I got your name from Max
Mephisto,’ he said. ‘He said you’d made props for him.’
‘Ah, Max,’ Fitzgerald smiled reminiscently. ‘A real gentleman, is Max. A great magician too. Have you seen him
work?’
‘Yes,’ said Edgar. ‘Once or twice.’
‘I made a few cabinets for him. The ghost cabinet. Have
you seen that one? And a couple of sword cabinets too.’
‘What about The Zig Zag Girl? Ever make the cabinet
for that?’
Fitzgerald looked at him curiously. He was a tall man
with curly hair like a bull’s poll. There was something
bull-like about his stance too. Edgar imagined that he
would be a tough customer in a fight.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I’ve made the cabinet for that.’
‘I wondered if you’d take a look at this.’ Edgar got out
one of Sergeant McGuire’s photographs. It showed the
box – the third box – sitting on the station counter. The
actual box was still in the Evidence Room, but the smell
was still so strong that no one would go near it.
Fitzgerald looked up. ‘Is this to do with those murders?
The body in the trunk?’
‘Yes.’ Edgar didn’t see any point in denying it. ‘Have you
seen boxes like this before?’
Fitzgerald shrugged. ‘Don’t know. It’s just a box.’
‘What about this?’ Edgar showed him a picture of the
three boxes stacked on top of each other. ‘Remind you of
anything?’
The cabinet-maker scratched his head. ‘It looks like the
cabinet for The Zig Zag Girl, but in that case the boxes
would all have false bottoms. The girl would have to be
able to stand up and the magician would need to be able
to get the blades through. Have these got false bottoms?’
‘No.’ As far as Edgar could see, the boxes were just that –
plain wooden cubes painted black. It was just their size and
their absolute regularity that brought the trick to mind.
‘Have you any idea who could have made them?’ he
asked.
‘Anyone could have put these together,’ said Fitzgerald.
‘You wouldn’t even need to be a carpenter. For a magic
cabinet, now, that’s different. You need to be a real artist
for that. Take The Zig Zag, for example, the middle box is
actually bigger, but you wouldn’t be able to see that from
the audience’s viewpoint.’
‘So you’ve no idea who could have made these boxes?’
Fitzgerald shook his head. ‘No. Like I say, they’re just
boxes.’ He turned back to his kennel and, as Edgar walked
away, he heard the staccato sounds of nails being hammered into wood.
Edgar set off southwards, walking briskly. It was a
longish way back to the police station, but the good thing
about Brighton was that you couldn’t get lost; you just
had to head for the sea. He thought about magic tricks
and the stage, about cabinets made to conceal bodies,
about deception and artifice. The boxes may just be boxes,
but the important thing was that someone wanted them
to look like something else.
At Bartholomew Square, his boss was waiting for him.
Chief Inspector Frank Hodges was a large man with a
drooping moustache given to pessimistic pronouncements about the police force, crime and life in general.
He was nearing retirement age, but frequently said that
he expected to ‘die in harness’. ‘And with a knife in your
back,’ Edgar had heard someone mutter when Hodges last
made this comment. The Chief Inspector was not popular
with the younger officers.
Today, though, he looked not so much gloomy as
enraged.
‘Where have you been?’ he demanded as Edgar entered
the Incident Room.
‘Following a lead,’ said Edgar. He tended to assume a
calm, professional tone with his boss, knowing that this
infuriated him still further.
‘What sort of lead?’
‘A cabinet-maker. Someone who may have known who
made the boxes.’
‘And did they know?’
‘No,’ Edgar admitted.
Hodges’ face turned an alarming shade of red. Edgar
hoped that this wasn’t the harness moment.
‘The boxes looked as if they might be theatrical props,’
he said soothingly, ‘so I went to see someone who specialised in that sort of carpentry.’
Hodges did not seem even slightly soothed, although
his colour faded a little. ‘What’s this obsession with the
stage?’ he said. ‘I hear you went to Eastbourne to see a
magician, of all people. Get this straight, Stephens. This is
a murder inquiry. The biggest murder case this town has
ever seen. It’s not some bloody silly university review.’
Edgar’s two terms at Oxford were a source of neverending irritation to Frank Hodges. Edgar both resented
this and realised that it gave him a certain power over his
boss.
‘The boxes reminded me of a magic trick,’ he said.
‘One where it looks as if a girl is cut into three. I saw
it performed before the war and I know the man who
invented the trick. He’s called Max Mephisto and he was
performing in Eastbourne last week.’
‘Max Mephisto.’ Hodges chewed his moustache thoughtfully. ‘He’s quite a big name, isn’t he? Think I saw him in
Blackpool once. Performed a hell of a turn with a burning
table.’
‘He’s the best-known magician in Britain,’ said Edgar. ‘I
served with him in the war.’
‘You served with him?’ Frank’s voice suggested that he
thought theatricals should have been interned along with
the Italians and Jews.
Edgar sighed. He had hoped not to have to go into the
whole history of his friendship with Max. ‘You know I was
seconded to MI5 in the war,’ he said. This was a pretty fancy
way of saying that he was spotted by Colonel Cartwright
doing the cryptic crossword on a train. ‘Well, I ended up in
this special unit, based near Inverness. Our job was to create
false trails for the enemy, to trick them if you like.’
Max, he remembered, had claimed to be able to make
ghost fleets ride the north seas. The fact that he had ended
up sailing into enemy waters in a dinghy, accompanied
only by Edgar and an aged desperado called The Great
Diablo, was nobody’s fault really.
‘Well, Max was part of this unit,’ he concluded. ‘He was
an expert at camouflage. He’d worked in North Africa, in
the desert. He created these decoy tanks made from wood
and canvas. He even painted an aerodrome on canvas.
From the air it looked like the real thing.’
Max had created tanks that folded up and could be
stored in a suitcase. He had placed one on the front lawn
at the Caledonian ready to greet Major Gormley when he
opened his bedroom window.
‘This is all very well,’ grumbled Frank. ‘But it doesn’t
get us much further with this case.’
‘I suspected that the killer had links to the theatrical
world,’ said Edgar. ‘I asked Max if he knew of any specialist cabinet-makers. That’s all.’
‘And did you get anywhere?’
‘No, but I’ve got a possible description of the killer.’ He
described the visit from the flower-seller.’
‘So we’re looking for a foreigner?’ Frank brightened
perceptibly.
‘Not necessarily,’ said Edgar. ‘The florist just thought
he might be foreign because the boxes reminded her of
music cases – it’s that theatrical link again. But I asked if
he had a foreign accent and she said no. She said he had
a soft voice, soft and young.’
‘The man was small, though.’ Frank wasn’t letting that
go easily. ‘Foreigners are often small.’
‘Smallish,’ said Edgar. ‘That’s all we have really. A small
man wearing a cap and coat.’
‘Could be anyone. Could be bloody Max Miller,’ said
Frank.
‘I suspect Mr Miller has an alibi,’ said Edgar.
Frank glared at him. ‘We’re no further forward at all
then. Any luck with identifying the girl?’
‘No. I’ve been through the Missing Persons list. Nobody
there answering to our girl’s description.’
Five foot ten, long blonde hair, a beautiful figure now
cut into grotesque pieces. No, nobody like that had been
reported missing in the Brighton area.
‘I’m making inquiries in private lodging houses,’ he
said. ‘The sort used by theatricals.’
‘The bloody stage again,’ said Frank. ‘What makes you
think the girl was . . . well, that type?’
Edgar hesitated. He didn’t like to admit that it was
Solomon Carter’s phrase about the girl having legs
‘as long as a showgirl’s’ that first put the idea into his
head.
‘It’s just a theory,’ he said. ‘But actors live a nomadic life,
here one week, gone the next. It’s possible that someone
could disappear and not be missed for a while.’
Frank chewed the end of his moustache. He didn’t like
the word ‘nomadic’, it had a slippery, foreign sound.
‘Solomon Carter said there were marks around her
head which could be consistent with wearing a headdress of some kind,’ said Edgar. ‘The kind worn by an
exotic dancer.’ He thought of Sonya and Tanya in their
fur bikinis and Sonya’s face when she had looked at Max.
He thought of Max saying, ‘You need a very good girl.’
Frank made the snorting sound again. ‘She could have
been a prostitute. Have you thought of that?’
‘Yes,’ said Edgar. ‘We’ve made inquiries in the red light
district.’
‘Well, make more inquiries. The press are onto it. We
don’t want to look like idiots.’
‘We certainly don’t, sir,’ agreed Edgar.
Max enjoyed the drive to Scarborough. Sometimes it felt
as if his Bentley were the only thing in his life to have
escaped from the war unscathed. It (however much he
loved the car, he refused to think of it as ‘she’) had passed
the war years hidden in a barn on a farm belonging to an
ex-girlfriend. Max would never forget the moment when
Joan pulled back the tarpaulin to reveal his treasure, covered in straw but still with tyres and headlamps intact.
He could have kissed her. He would have kissed her had
not her husband, a taciturn farming type, been hovering
with a pitchfork.
He had left early, in order to avoid saying goodbye to
anyone at the digs. Thank God, none of them were going
on with him to Scarborough. He tried to remember who
was on the bill with him there. One of the new comedians, he thought, and a singer who had made it big with
patriotic numbers during the war. ‘There’ll Always Be an
England’, that sort of thing. Still, the Alexandra was a
nice theatre and he was going to stay with an old friend,
a girl who had once been part of a double act and now
ran a boarding house. What was her act called again?
Sometimes he saw the names on a never-ending playbill
in his head: the Great Supremo, Leandra’s Feats with the
Feet, Lou Lenny and her Unrideable Mule, Raydini The
Gay Deceiver, Petrova’s Performing Ponies. He’d got it.
The Diller Twins. Though they hadn’t even been sisters,
let alone twins. They didn’t even look alike. Pretty enough
girls, though. He and Brenda had enjoyed one memorable
summer in Scarborough and had kept in touch even after
Brenda had married a man who could rip telephone directories in two. What was his name? The Mighty something
or other. He could never remember the men.
He made good time and reached Scarborough just
before eight. As he drove along the seafront, he saw the
towers of the Grand looming over the town. Once he
had stayed in the Grand for a whole season. Now he was
reduced to boarding houses and he could see a time
when he’d be sleeping in the Bentley, a shambling figure
standing on street corners taking flowers out of his hat
and begging passers-by to choose a card. He shook his
head, irritated at this self-pitying theme. He needed a
holiday, that was all. After Scarborough he was back
down in Brighton, then he had a two-week break. He’d
go away, somewhere civilised like Le Touquet. There was
still some money for that. He wasn’t quite reduced to
busking yet.
Brenda met him at the door. She was still attractive,
with creamy skin and red hair, but marriage to the strong
man and the birth of two children had enlarged her contours somewhat.
‘Max!’ She kissed him on the cheek. ‘You look exactly
the same. You’ll never get older.’
‘I feel a hundred,’ said Max.
‘That’s just the drive. You’ll feel just dandy after a rest
and a glass of sherry.’
‘You’re a wonderful woman, Brenda.’
And he did feel better after a hearty meal and two
glasses of (disgustingly sweet) sherry. Larry, the strong
man, turned out to be an affable fellow and they spent a
pleasant hour reminiscing over old names.
‘Raydini! What happened to him?’
‘Heart attack at the Wood Green Empire.’
‘What a way to go.’
‘What about your twin?’ Max turned to Brenda, who
was looking quite alluring in the light from the gas fire.
‘The other Diller girl?’
‘Peggy? I don’t know. I lost touch with her. Last I heard,
she was down in Brighton.’
‘I’m there next week,’ said Max easily. ‘I’ll look out for
her. Is she still in the business, do you know?’
‘Yes.’ Brenda gave her full-throated laugh. ‘Actually, last
I heard she was following in your footsteps, Max. She was
a magician’s assistant.’ Larry opened the door to let the
cat out, but this wasn’t the only reason for the small, cold
chill that ran through the room.