Lost (34 page)

There was something wrong with him. Patch Willingham, who was at the pumps waiting on customers, thought, He's sick. Or he's been sick. In the way the boy just stood there, he seemed bewildered, as if he weren't quite awake. Or else, Patch thought, maybe he's just not quite right. Certainly there was something different about him, something wrong with his face—like someone whose eyes are a little crossed. But that wasn't it. And beside him stood that mean, starved-looking dog.

Taking a nervous breath, Sherman tugged at the Chinaman's rope and stepped away from the curb. To Sherman, these were rough, dangerous men—men who drank whiskey, chewed tobacco, and passed their guns back and forth. He was afraid of them. The smell of wild blood hung over them like a stench, and the loud laughter, the milling drunkenness, made the situation seem all the more explosive. When one of the men stumbled toward him, Sherman got out of the way, moving very fast.

All trace of Mamie and the woman had vanished as if the snowstorm had swallowed them. In town after dreary town, he had shown his pictures and asked his questions until finally, it seemed, her trail had completely dried up. He knew she had come in this direction and he knew she couldn't have gotten far in the storm, but he had gone through four or five towns before the snow made it impossible for even him to go on. And nobody had seen her. Then to get some more pills, he had broken into a drugstore, and afterward he'd stayed hidden, waiting for the weather to break. Every day, standing in some doorway, he tried to listen to the radio playing inside. At night, he sat inside cars in used-car lots and listened to their radios, if he could get them to work, but he had lost the trail. For a week now, nothing new about the woman had come over the airwaves. This morning, as he led the Chinaman through the deer hunters, he was at loose ends, not knowing what to do next. “Yes, sir. Feels like it's gonna clear off,” one of them said as Sherman passed. Voices came to him in scraps. “S'pose to get up to almost fifty,” said another. Then, when he had all but given up hope, Sherman heard what he had been waiting to hear these many days. “You shoulda seen it,” said an unshaven man. “Buick, looked like. Turned over in a creek out by old Bess Turner's place. You know where I mean—out there on Forky Creek Road. Tore all to hell.”

Sherman felt light-headed. A tremendous weight was lifted inside him, only to be replaced by a feeling of dread. A wreck? Mamie, in a wreck? “What color was that car?” he asked the man.

“Aw … black, maybe. I don't know. It was dark.”

“How far out was it?”

“Lessee. Ten miles or so, ain't it, Tom? Yeah, that's about right if you go over through Rocky Comfort. But you're not thinkin' of goin' out there, are ye? Son, you oughtn't to go out there. Ye cain't get through. The road's a mess.”

At the farmhouse, after the morning light reached a certain gray consistency, the sun broke through the layers of fog, and the dreary, overcast day was brilliantly transformed. Beyond the barn, the county road was becoming a bed of swimming vapor.

At ten-thirty, Hardesty still hadn't arrived. Leona glanced at the clock. She had taken Vivian's good silver to the living room to polish it. There, her hands busy with the flannel cloth, she watched for him with growing impatience. It was just after eleven when she heard him walk into the kitchen.

“I have to go on home,” he said. “I really came by to tell you, Leona,”—and she thought, It's the first time he's said my name—“I can take you to town whenever you're ready. My car starts now. I remember you said you didn't know exactly where we are. If you'd tell me where you're going, I'd bring you a map.”

“You mean the kids haven't told you?”

“Well, they told me about an island, but that could be anywhere. Now, don't be cross with them. I had to squeeze it out of them.”

“Yes,” she said. “I bet it was pure torture,” and she laughed.

She thought she could tell him anything and he would believe her, but it was more important that she not lie to him. Her reluctance, all the secrets she had struggled to protect, paled beside her feelings for him. Without hesitation, she told him she had planned to go home, to Brandenburg Station, Kentucky, and he smiled and said goodbye. I'll make you something, she thought. Something marvelous. It'll be my surprise.

Shortly before noon, the electricity flickered and returned to the farmhouse. “Well, well, well,” Vee said. “Now, at least, we can have a decent bath before our company comes.” And Walter said, “I don't want a decent bath. I want my bath in a pan. Like we always do.”

Vee laughed and hugged him. “Honey,” she said, “I've twisted your mind with my old ways. Don't you know we've got a bathtub?”

Another hour passed, the minutes slipping away. It's ending, Leona thought. She had gone to the root cellar for apples, gathering them in the hamper she made of her apron skirt and carrying them out that way. With her free hand she lifted stray hair from her face. Out on the road, a snow-covered car lumbered by, the first she had seen pass. She turned toward the front of the house and stood looking at the snow shriveling to ice, the weathered fence, the loose fabric of twigs above her head. Waterdrops from the trees splattered around her with a sudden ripe velocity. At the edges of her borrowed boots, mud oozed through the snow. This is the real world, she thought; this is what I wanted, all along. And now, too soon, the snowplows would come and the Buick would be discovered, and then the police … We should go, she thought, while this feeling lasts. But the prospect of leaving held no attraction for her now. Knowing their time was short only increased the strength of her feelings. She had loved these days at the farmhouse more than she could have ever imagined possible.

Everything was clear in her mind; her life was no longer just a meaningless confusion of terror and flight; it was so much larger than thoughts of escape. And it was almost enough—to feel so good and alive, gathering the apples to take inside, peeling and coring them and arranging the hard white crescents inside a piecrust. To make something with her hands for Mark. She crossed the screened porch, opened the door, and stepped into the kitchen.

Tomorrow, she thought. I'll talk to Mark and we'll go tomorrow.

From time to time all that bright afternoon, as they prepared the Thanksgiving dinner, Leona caught herself staring fixedly at an empty vase or the tin match holder beside the door or the box of Cream of Wheat in the cupboard—studying them as if she could memorize them and in that way take something of this place with her when she was gone.

Evidence of the wreck remained scattered down the roadbed like fragments of an explosion. A chrome headlight ring dangled in black twigs; long streaks of blue paint glittered beneath vertical icicles on the cliff wall. Removing his one glove, Sherman touched bits of water-green glass in the running ditch, then stood and ran down the steep curve.

The sun was beginning to set in the west; the air had slowly chilled. Sharp, piercing rays shot through the weave of branches—the tall silver poplars, the black elms. His stolen galoshes sucked noisily on his shoes. A full moon had risen, muddy-colored on a distant blue ridge. Shadowlike ahead of him, the Chinaman trotted up the ramp of a long bridge. The wind blew the damp evening fog in spirals. When Sherman glimpsed the car overturned on the embankment below, he grasped the bridge railing, a shout of recognition pouring from his throat.

Scrambling, he hurtled down the snowbank. The Buick had been there at the edge of the creek for some time; its doors were sprung open and mired in the frozen ground. Snow had blown around and through it in drifted water shapes. Twisting, the Chinaman wriggled through the car's inverted interior. It's her car, Sherman thought. Apprehension filled him.
Nobody knows about this!
Neither the woman nor the children had been found or he would have heard some news of it on the radio. Going to his knees, he began to dig at the snow inside the crushed roof, dragging out handfuls of wet comic books. He scanned the immediate basin of snow for any unnatural lump or protrusion that might be a body, then stared at the creek—green water rippling through brackish ice grottos. Did the crash throw them out? Did they drown?

At once he ran wildly down the creek bank, ice-coated witchgrass breaking around him like glass, but he saw nothing, no trace of them in the water. He turned and hurried back, his heart still hammering in his throat. “Damn her,” he muttered. “
Goddamn
her!” He crawled into the shadowed compartment and poked his head up toward the broken steering wheel, explored the baggy hanging seats, looking for blood or some clue to their disappearance. There was nothing. Even the windshield had been busted out completely. He reached higher, desperate for some sign of what had happened. Then he realized he was looking for the wrong things.
The car keys are gone!
He clambered out, suddenly warmer in his jacket. They got out of it, didn't they? Or else why'd she take the key? They're around here someplace. And his eyes swerved up the bank toward the winding road.

By five o'clock, the kitchen glowed with the red sundown and the neighbors were coming into the kitchen: the Holts arrived first, carrying jars of homemade relish; then the Jessups left two pumpkin pies on the dry sink. They were soon followed by a barrel of a man called Grudge Drummond and his beautiful wife, whose curly hair and wide lusty hips shook when she laughed at some remark. A few minutes later, a woman named Hoot Lawrence appeared and her husband, Filmore, then the Hostettler twins, Imogene and Flo, the room made lively with their harmonious racket. Leona was introduced amid the raucous good cheer and the crisscross of voices, but she began to lose track of them as still others arrived. “Go on in,” Aunt Vee said. “You menfolk go in there by the fire and let us set this table.”

In the living room, the men spoke to Funny Grandma and pulled up rocking chairs. “How's this weather been treatin' you, Miz Turner?” Her face wobbled as she collected her voice. “Toler'ble fine,” she said. From dark velvet-lined cases, a guitar, a fiddle, and a mandolin were produced, and a gangling boy named Billy jostled through the kitchen with a bass fiddle. The wood of the instruments gleamed softly with age: long necks had knobs and strings; frets were inlaid with mother-of-pearl. Walter, in particular, stood fascinated as the men, with tortoise-shell picks, began to tune their pieces. “What key're you in? G?”

Hoot Lawrence said, “If you're gonna pick around on them things, at least play something we know. Play that blackbird song.” And so the music started, and in spontaneous celebration the women's feet began to tap and shift comically and somebody was singing, “
So make my bed and light the light. I'll be home late tonight, blackbird, bye bye
…” It was infectious and irresistible: even Leona could feel her body sway lightly to the beat of the music. Skeeter Johnson, a small tidy man with his work shirt buttoned tight on his reedy throat, walked in from the porch and blew a few notes on his French harp.

The room frolicked with laughter and the women's quick shuffling steps. The plates and bowls in the old cupboard rattled and the beautiful hanging lights swayed and pitched. Leona glanced at the clock.

Mamie whirled; she danced; she strutted. Caught up on the tide of festivity, she laughed through her hands at the strangers who reached for her, twisted and dashed away. “Whose little girl're you?” one of them asked her. “I'm nobody's girl,” she told him, and shot off in another direction. Wearing her frilly white party dress, she hid behind curtains, darted beneath the table, and ran out again. “Bless your heart, chile,” a neighbor woman said, “slow down 'fore you strain yourself.” Her cheeks were burnished red, her face damp with sweat. Catching her breath at the edge of the cupboard, Mamie watched Hardesty come in and saw Leona turn, watched their hands almost touch, the smiles that slipped across their faces as they talked. He leaned to whisper in her ear, then bent down to listen to her and they drew close.

Folding card tables were brought in from another room and butted end to end against the kitchen table, then covered with overlapping white tablecloths, some patterned, some not, while women tied on aprons, stirred the pots, added a pinch of salt here, pepper there, and repeated local gossip. Still another woman appeared at the door, carrying a tray of homemade candy. “Oh, May, I've dreamed about your bonbons,” Aunt Vee said.

“I hope you still do after you've tasted these.”

In Mamie's dreams it was always a day just like this. There was music and laughter and her mother setting the table. Home from work, her father might be standing in the doorway, his voice deep and resonant like Hardesty's, half-listening to the radio, smoking his cigarette, and there was that delicious sweet mixture of good smells saturating the air just like now. Outside, the sun would be going down, a bird flying home to roost, and this music was like radio music: the old kitchen blurred with Mamie's memory. Looking at Leona, she remembered, before things were bad, seeing that same look in her mommy's eyes, something she couldn't say or shape with her hands.

Every so often, Leona would stop what she was doing and glance about until she saw Hardesty, and then their eyes were so secret, so unaware of anyone else. The other women were busy taking up dinner; none of them seemed to notice. But Mamie did. It was happening with tiny suggestions in the way they moved, in their friendly, sweet eyes and smiles. Only once before had she seen faces so open with feeling it almost hurt to watch, and it caused an emptiness in Mamie like hunger—she wanted to be somebody's girl, their little girl. She wanted to be included in the beautiful unseen thing that was happening. She could almost feel that deep sense of belonging rush around her and raise her up. Because now they were just like her mommy and daddy. And for that short interval of time while the table was being set everything seemed so real. So possible.