Biting the Moon (32 page)

“What can we do?”

Reuel went fishing in his scrap heap with a long piece of metal that looked like it might have been a harpoon, which he used like a hook. He shook his head. “Don't know. Never has been any evidence Harry Wine did anything. He's got people fooled, all right. Some like him a lot because he gives so much to charity and he's such a charming cuss. He just ain't like that at all; he's a real bad man.” Andi and Mary were silent, watching Reuel use some kind of metal-cutting instrument to gouge a hole into the side of the aluminum pipe. He stopped and wiped the sweat off his face again and said, “What I need's one of them small binoculars.”

“Don't look at me,” said Mary, irritated with herself that she couldn't figure out what he was making.

“It'd be hard to convince lots of folks around here.” Reuel went on as if she hadn't spoken. “Specially the ladies. He turns them bright blue eyes on a woman, I expect she'd think she's gone to heaven.” He cut another hole on the other side of the pipe, saying, “He was married once. A real pretty girl who I know he beat up on.
Abused
is what they say, right? God, he sure abused that wife of his.”

“How do you know?”

“I know because she told me, that's how. She used to come out here hauling trash. A lot of empties of Wild Turkey and Bud cans. She'd
come once a week, and after a while she'd stop and sit awhile and talk. Like you two.” He fished another length of pipe out of the pile and regarded it. “Most days she'd be sporting cuts and scrapes or have yellow-purple places on her arms the way you would if somebody grabbed you. One day she—” Reuel sighed. “I want to show you something.” He rose and walked over to his truck.

Mary and Andi said nothing, only waited for him to come back. He did, bringing with him an envelope.

Andi sat in a kneeling position, with her body resting on her heels, her forelegs out a little to the sides, her hands gripping her ankles. It was the pose of a little kid, a listening position.

“It's a letter from Beth.”

He shook the close-written pages out. The writing was small and light. “This is something I don't share with others, mostly because they wouldn't take it to heart. But you two, that's different, and I think Beth would approve me reading it, were she here.” Reuel cleared his throat, as if he weren't used to speechifying. “It goes
Dear Reuel
and so forth.

“I never will understand how people seem to hold him in such awe. I never knew a man to be able to fool people the way he does. Or not exactly
fool
people, more like he gets inside their heads and makes them look out of his own eyes. I guess you'd say he's real plausible, someone you can't help but believe in, someone you're almost
waiting
to believe in. I'll never understand that, not until the day I die.

“I know you know he hit me, since you'd see me sometimes before the bruises ever went away, and you were the only one who did. He never touched my face; for this I guess I was lucky. He didn't just in case I dared him and went into town. Nothing's much worse than seeing a woman with a black eye, I guess he figured.

“Now, I know women who never experience marriage this way, they would say they'd never put up with it, and any woman who would's a damned fool. But women who never had a hand shoved in their face can't really say what it's like. ‘Why, I'd never put up with that kind of treatment' they say and are inclined to hold a woman who does put up with it responsible somewhat. And I guess they'd be right to some degree.

“The thing is this: by the time your marriage ever gets to this stage, a lot of other things have happened that corrodes your spirit. It makes sense—doesn't it?—a man that'd raise his hand to you was hardly benign up to that point. So there are many other ways of getting under a woman's skin before you ever start beating her.

“Anyone who ever looked out into the night and saw a deer freeze in the glare of their headlights might understand what makes a wife stay. Understand why she doesn't just look away and run like hell. You can't, or a lot of women just can't. For part of them's been jacklighted just like that deer, even when you think he's surely going to take it all the way and kill you one day. And I thought that day had come over at Devil's Canyon. You know that strange rock formation that juts out over the canyon called Weeping Rock? Well, he kept calling me to come on and go out there to look at the canyon walls, how far down they went. I didn't want to, but I knew it would just make things worse if I refused. He got behind me and curled one arm around me and told me to look down. It was like hanging in space, and when I looked down, I thought I was looking at my death as sure as sure. And I think he did mean to kill me and then decided not to because he hadn't finished with me yet.

“You remember Stevie, that little old hound dog used to ride with me in the truck whenever I'd come to the dump? He killed him. When I asked why, he just said the dog had to be put down, his arthritis was so bad. I don't know how he can still look me in the eye, all mournful, and say things like that as if I'd believe him. He could do that, you know; he did it all the time.

“Poor Stevie. This broke my heart, it really did. I found out later from one of Bonnie's kids—Earl, I think—just how he did it. Earl was there in the barn, forking up hay, when Stevie and him came in. Earl told me this as if he was ashamed to have seen it. He threw a bucket of water over the poor animal and then he took one of those cattle prods and went after the dog. Earl said he poked him again and again and every time the dog just let out the most awful wail that Earl thought he'd never heard the like of before. Earl said, ‘My hands were clawin' air, Missus, but I couldn't do nothin' to help that old dog.' Poor Earl hung his head down as if he was ashamed, as if it was his fault somehow. Poor boy. I told him never to mind, there wasn't anything he could've done.

“Reuel, I'm telling you this about Stevie because it's what brought me finally to do something, made up my mind to get away. If it hadn't been for something as hateful as happening not to me but to another, I might never have got up the courage. Frozen as I always felt in this marriage, still in some tiny pocket of my mind I had the choice to leave. But Stevie didn't; Stevie never had any choice but to be killed like that. To vent that kind of hatred on a dumb animal, that's his ticket to hell, even if he never did another thing.

“It's what I said before, Reuel, or what I asked. How can this side of him, which is the biggest part, be so hidden from other people when it's so stark to us?

“So I'm heading out, I'm going West. And I want you to know what a friend you'd been to me, and how I depended on you, even though we never outwardly talked about things. I guess we did inwardly, and that was the important thing.

“Love,

“Elizabeth Loomis

“P.S. Not to be called ‘Wine' anymore.”

Reuel folded the white pages carefully and slipped them back into the gray envelope and put that in his pocket. Gave it a pat for safekeeping.

Mary looked over at Andi and saw something in her face you often see in the faces of the very old, a tiredness that seems to say, It's time to go, as if she'd had about enough of life and didn't want to fight any longer.

A life not even pegged front and back with solid numbers. Mary realized it made her anxious, this uncertainty about Andi's age, as if such knowledge were necessary to hold people to earth, to keep them from floating up and off into the numb gray sky. Which further led her to wonder what would happen to her, Mary, if Andi got killed. For she did dangerous things. What would happen if she
had
drowned? For Mary felt Andi to be a screen set before raw experience, a filter or scrim that made whatever was on the other side just bearable. It was as if Andi did the actual looking, reporting back to the encampment from the front lines.

Mary looked down at the picnic table and made wet circles with her Coke can, thinking of the main difference between them. Here
she
was, not giving thought to the dog Stevie or to the poor woman's being forced to the edge of Weeping Rock, no. Mary was thinking (as usual, she guessed) about herself.

All of this went through Mary's mind in seconds. She raised her head briefly to look at Andi again. Andi's face had a stricken look, eyes narrowed, peering off toward the horizon as if across its blurred dark line walked the shape of Beth Loomis.

Mary opened her mouth to say something, shut it—uncertain if the silence should be disturbed, for it seemed to have been here for a long, long time. But she said, “That's terrible,” and felt foolish for saying it, something so obvious.

Abruptly, Andi came to as if she'd been in a coma. “Not once did she say the name. She never said
Harry
in that letter. It's like she was afraid of the name, that it could call up demons that would curse your tongue to name it.”

Reuel looked at her. “Well, I expect that's how she did feel. Even his name must have felt dangerous to her.”

Speech lapsed into silence again while Mary tried herself to see into the dark depths of the woods.

Then Andi said, “Why does he hate you?”

Reuel considered. “I guess because I'm on to him. I won't let that Atkins girl go. And other things.”

“Like what?” Andi asked.

Reuel grunted. “You don't have to know everything, girl.”

Yes, I do.
Mary knew that's what was in Andi's mind, though she never said it.

One thing about Reuel: You couldn't pump him for information. If he wanted you to know, you'd know. If he didn't, you wouldn't. Mary found it comforting to know here was someone you couldn't manipulate.

But, of course, Andi wasn't really trying to manipulate. She just wanted to know. So as if he hadn't spoken, Andi asked again, “What things?”

Reuel leaned back and turned his face upward as if imploring whatever was up there that this yoke be lifted from his shoulders. “My
lord,
girl!” He looked at her foursquare. “I'll tell you this much: Harry ain't no friend to Bonnie Swann. Nor her kids.”

Mary again saw Harry coming out of the Swanns' house with that expression on his face that coupled rage and satisfaction. That was so strange—as if fury sated some kind of hunger in him.

Mary gasped. “Didn't you tell the
police
?”

Reuel heaved a big sigh. “Girl, you are the
biggest
one for police I ever did know. Anyway, one day Beth came out and said, ‘I guess you must wonder why I'm so bruised up, Reuel.' She said it ever so sad. And I told her yes, I did, actually. And she said, ‘Harry.' And nothing else. It wasn't for some time after that she ever said more. The only place she got to go was the dump, right here. He wouldn't let her go into town until the bruises all disappeared. Then it'd start all over again. So she hardly got out at all.”

“Why didn't you tell the police?” Mary asked. She was surprised by her own anger, not at Reuel but at life or fate or whatever there was to rail against.

Reuel seemed to know this and didn't mind if she chose him. “I didn't tell them because she was scared to death of Harry. She said he threatened to kill her if he ever even suspected she'd told anybody. I told her, ‘Well, Beth,' I said, ‘the danger is he'll do that anyway.' ” He picked up a rag and wiped down the pipe. “I'll say this: it's easy for us, for people that ain't in that position, to sit around saying things like, ‘Why does she put up with it?' or ‘I'd leave him; why doesn't she just leave him?' Stuff like that. But you got to have firsthand knowledge about a situation like that, you have to be just as scared to death as she was, you've got to have worn your brain down to a nub trying to think of a way out—before you start second-guessing the person that's in that spot.”

Mary could feel herself coloring; she felt a little ashamed. “I guess. But what happened to Beth?”

“I don't know. That ‘heading West' business sounds a lot like death to me. Or maybe she meant it literal and just left. But I have my suspicions that he just might have beat her finally 'til he couldn't beat her no more. All I know is, I never saw Beth again.”

Mary put her hands to her face and just shook her head. She could sense a terrible heaviness within Reuel. He grew still and stopped
wiping the pipe and just looked off across the Dumpsters, out over the ledge and the land.

Andi said, “Couldn't you've stopped him yourself? I mean, you knew about it. Even if you couldn't tell the sheriff?”

Reuel just looked at her as if all his patience were being brought to bear on listening to them criticize. He nodded toward Mary. “She's all for tellin' and you're all for stoppin'.” He shook his head, looking at Andi. “You are the righteousest person I ever come across.”

Andi blushed, but smiled at the same time. “I just don't like it when people get pushed around, that's all.”

“Most of us don't like that, I guess, but
you—you
don't like it with a vengeance. How have you got pushed around yourself?”

“I can't remember.” She too lifted her eyes to gaze off across the landfill.

Reuel was silent for a few moments as if considering the piece of pipe, but Mary knew he was thinking about Andi's answer. “Now, do you mean that in a kind of general way, like most of us can't remember lots of things in our past? Or is it something in particular you can't remember?”

His tone was offhand, but his eyes looked almost as if they were hurting for her. Mary could see why Beth had talked to Reuel and why Beth knew her secret would be safe with him.

“It's particular,” Andi finally said, and turned her eyes on him, made honey-colored by the sunlight. Her long light hair almost turned to silver. “I don't know who I am. I mean, I've got amnesia. It's been going on for four months, since winter, since January.” She looked away as if she was ashamed for not knowing, as if it were her fault, not remembering.