Crossing the Tracks (9781416997054) (21 page)

Mrs. Nesbitt gives him an exaggerated blank expression. “We know that, Avery. That's why we've both vowed to avoid him—not that it's any sacrifice. Couldn't you give Cecil some knockout pills until Dot's long gone?”

“Knockout pills?”

“Well, I don't know… something.” She slumps, sighs.

“Actually,” Dr. Nesbitt says, “this plan of yours is so full of holes, it just might work.”

“Speaking of holes… ,” Mrs. Nesbitt says slowly, turning to me. “I've been meaning to ask you, Iris. Do you know how to shoot?”

“Ma'am?”

“A gun.”

“No.”

Dr. Nesbitt lowers the paper. “Why don't you show her, Mother?”

“Any bona fide farm woman should know,” Mrs. Nesbitt says. “Don't you agree, Avery?”

“Absolutely. Without the threat of a farm woman with gun skills, a fox could tip his hat to Marie, waltz right into the coop, and exit chewing a chicken leg.” Dr. Nesbitt puts down his paper, picks up the shotgun, and aims it
out the back door. He glances skyward. “We've still got a few hours of light. Would you please hang our target, Iris, while I back the car into the next county?”

I pin an old sheet to the clothesline and shut Marie in the house.

Mrs. Nesbitt is very particular about my technique. She demonstrates proper form by planting her feet just so, raising Henry to her shoulder, and squinting down the barrel of him.

Dr. Nesbitt hops out of range. “Is Henry loaded?

“This is called a ‘side by side.' Two barrels.” He inserts a cartridge in each side, cocks the hammers, and shoots the sheet. Once. Twice. We walk into the yard to study the shot pattern. “We already know you've got crackerjack aim with an egg, Iris.” He points to the piercings in the cotton. “If your coyote is unusually tall, say he's up on his hind legs and he's got a flaming rear end, you can scare him by aiming high.”

“Does the predator in question answer to the name Deets?” Mrs. Nesbitt asks, her face wary. “If he knows we helped steal a chicken from his house, don't we also know he'll try to steal one from ours?”

I practice shooting a dozen times—at the sheet, the broad side of the shed, and at cans on a sawhorse.

“It's easier than cooking, but I'm still terrible,” I say, dizzy and sore from the kickbacks, the gun powder, and the ringing in my ears. “I suppose if a real coyote came, I'd have to ask him to pose in front of the sheet for me to kill him. Besides, I can't hurt anybody. Any self-respecting
target will know that. They'll think I look like a fool.”

“You may surprise yourself.” Dr. Nesbitt turns to his mother. “Right?”

Mrs. Nesbitt nods. “Remember to aim high. You just want to threaten, to scare. That's all.”

Dr. Nesbitt levels me with a grave look. “And Iris, you are anything but a fool.”

I weigh the envelope from Leroy on my hand as I
walk up from the mailbox. Two pages? Three? I position it, still sealed, next to me on the elm tree bench and imagine what's inside.

I hope he's saying he'll be here in a month for my birthday.

I swat a grasshopper off my skirt and look around. Sigh. It's already turning into fall. I imagine the Missouri River bluffs in Atchison painted with red vine. I smell burning leaves and hear my neighbors complain that oaks keep their dull brown foliage clear till Thanksgiving. I picture my old school. I'm through with that now—although Mrs. Nesbitt insists we still have much to discuss on the education topic.

Inside the envelope are two heavy sheets of paper, but not a single word.

Drawn on one is an outline of Leroy's left hand and on the other is his right. I smooth out the folds and arrange them on my lap with thumbs pointing at each other. His fingers are long, the contours strong, almost elegant. No one else has hands like Leroy's.

Stars—constellations—are drawn around the outlines in midnight-blue ink. I picture him studying his star chart, drawing them, careful not to smear.

I place my palms on his. Stretch my fingers and take a deep breath.

Hi, Leroy.

Still anchored to the paper, I look into the afternoon sky. The moon is a bleached opal. The brassy sun outshines the Big Dipper.

I hold the papers against both cheeks. I close my eyes and imagine night blooming all around the two of us. I slide his hands over my lips and down my neck.

Something flutters by. Oh, God! My eyes snap open. I scan the yard. It's just a curious little dirt-brown bird. “Oh! I just… it's a letter… I…”

It blinks at me and hops away.

I put the papers on my lap. “I miss you, Leroy.”

I hear him whisper:
Send something to me.

I know immediately what I want to send back.

“It's Olive Nish for you, Avery,” Mrs. Nesbitt yells
through his office door late Thursday evening.

We can hear Olive's voice through the line as Dr. Nesbitt listens and nods. She seems to have a vague but mighty pain in her left lower quadrant that takes her “breath away.”

My heart sinks. Olive's sick.

“Make a house call,” Mrs. Nesbitt whispers to her son.
“We need Olive at full steam. There's nothing of her to wither. We need her probing for Pansy, not suffering with a queasy quadrant.”

Mrs. Nesbitt and I drink tea to pass the time. I read aloud an article from an old
Atlantic Monthly
magazine of Dr. Nesbitt's entitled “Art and the X-ray.”

Mrs. Nesbitt recalls some of the gustatory medical “payments” her son has received from Olive over the years. “Each one etches its own signature on the stomach.”

“So he helps her feel better, and she makes you two sick!”

“Exactly. It's the unlikely mix of ingredients in her food, the texture… the odd bitter twist to her tomato aspic, her gravelly gravy, her pulpy sweet potatoes…” She shudders. Shuts her mouth.

Moths bounce off the table lamp. Marie yawns for the hundredth time. Olive's malady must be serious, judging from the clock.

Finally Dr. Nesbitt's headlights wind up the drive. He walks in with a towel-covered metal baking pan large enough to hold hay for a herd of buffalo.

We hop to our feet. “Well… ? What's wrong? What's Olive got?”

Dr. Nesbitt's face is dead serious. He whispers, “Pansy.”

Mrs. Nesbitt holds her throat.

My heart flutters. “On the phone?” I ask, as stupid as can be.

“No. She's at Olive's house.”

“Right now?”

“Yep. Pansy at this moment is lodging with Olive's
invisible renters and their equally invisible dog.”

“Did you see her? Talk?”

“Yes.”

“Are you sure? I mean… of course, but what… what have you got there?” Mrs. Nesbitt eyes the casserole.

“Proof.”

He puts the pan on the table and lifts the towel. On top is a ratty nightgown and under it a brown knit shawl. “All Pansy's stuff, just what you asked for, Iris,” he says with a flourish. He lifts out a knotted hankie. Taps it on his palm. “Full of silver dollars.”

“Why did she give you silver dollars?” Mrs. Nesbitt asks.

“Olive thought you'd figure a use for them. Dot's a crow when it comes to something shiny.”

Mrs. Nesbitt pats her stomach. “So Pansy knows about Dot and all?”

“I believe Olive has been quite blunt with Pansy regarding Dot.”

“How'd Pansy get here?”

Dr. Nesbitt shakes his head. “Olive's lips are sealed.” He does a pinched-voiced, bent-over Olive imitation. “I'll carry the burden. No one need know the details but me. I love intrigue of this persuasion.”

Mrs. Nesbitt and I exchange a look. We asked for Pansy, we got Pansy. There's no turning back. We are meddlers, to be sure, but only apprentices compared to Madam Nish.

“Your job, according to Olive, is to lure Dot to the Nish residence,” Dr. Nesbitt says. “And Olive's magic trick is to make Dot and Pansy disappear.”

The ace poker players have stacked the deck—actually
the laundry basket. We're about to “play cards” with Dot.

The basket—or as Dr. Nesbitt calls it, “the bait”—is on the back porch waiting for her arrival.

Marie plays possum beside it. Dr. Nesbitt is at work and Mrs. Nesbitt and I are positioned behind the blinds in her bedroom. I'm on my knees and Mrs. Nesbitt sits in her old wheelchair rolled to the window. I have just cleaned her glasses so we both have a perfect view of the washing machine. My stomach is a double knot. Mrs. Nesbitt swears she swallowed her tea bag at breakfast.

Dot plods up the driveway in a flimsy checked dress, mopping her forehead on this Indian summer morning. Her expression is sour as usual. She does not have one clue that she is about to make the biggest choice of her life. She can free herself from Cecil's grip, take her fate and her baby's future into her very own hands.

But will she?

Dot peers through the back door with a “where is everybody” look. She scowls, no doubt disappointed I am not handy to spit on. She stretches her back. Scratches her big belly.

Inside we strain at the window to detect one tiny bit of softness in her touch, a gentle pat, a reflective sigh.

Nothing.

Dot yanks one, two, three towels off the pile in the basket. She inspects and sniffs each one and stuffs them in the tub. I know she's figuring out which towel each of us used during the week.

Mrs. Nesbitt takes my hand as we watch Dot peer deep in the basket. Her eyes shift. She stops, scratches her behind, looks again. She slowly pulls out her mother's dingy lavender-gray nightgown, the way someone would remove a person's bloody bandage.

She shakes it out and just stares and stares. I swear I see Marie open one snake eye. Dot crushes the gown in her fists, then raises it to her nose.

C'mon, Dot. Keep going.
We shift to try and see her expression, but all we get is that pug profile.

Dot claws through the next level of clothes. Stops short at Pansy's shawl.

Mrs. Nesbitt holds her hands in prayer point. “Put it on, Dot. Wrap up in it.”

Instead Dot drops it on the floor and bangs a fist on our back door.

We stay silent and absolutely motionless.

She bangs again. “Shit!”

Dot turns and marches off the porch. Her face is fiery, like her father's. She scans the yard, yanks open the shed, then the coop. She struts and stirs the chicken yard into a meringue of feathers.

She's after me. Next she'll stomp right in the house, waving the gown and screaming, “What're you doing, you bitch?”

Instead Dot plops down on the porch step, her back to us. We want desperately for her to sob. We want her to smell her mama in the shawl, stroke her own cheek with it. “Dust the shawl,” Mrs. Nesbitt and I coach softly. We ache for her to put two and two together, to realize this answers her cry for help.

More than anything we want her to not run home.

Marie rouses, pads across the porch, and places her paws on the laundry basket. She whines as though it's her empty supper bowl. Dot stands, turns, still holding her mother's clothes, and shoos Marie off. She eyes the basket with a suspicious sneer that is pure Cecil.

“Okay, Dorothy, find the money,” Mrs. Nesbitt barely whispers from the bedroom.

Dot claws down through the basket, her eyes darting
this way and that. I think she senses it's a trap, and she's right. She's used to being hunted.

Find the money.

Find the money.

Dot lifts the hankie full of silver dollars and pulls open the knot. She sits cross-legged on the floor and lines up the coins, which we have polished to an irresistible shine, across her lap.

She examines each coin, even tries to bite one. Dot unfolds the little paper we put inside that reads:
For more $ go to Olive's.

The dollar sign jolts Dot like smelling salts. She hurriedly pockets the silver, then wraps the nightgown and shawl into one of our towels and ties it. She looks this way and that, clutching her Mama's belongings, and hurries down the driveway.

Don't go left. Don't go home. Go right. Go to Olive's. Please… turn right to Olive's.

Mrs. Nesbitt elbows me. Smiles. Dot has stopped long enough to wad the note, pop it in her mouth, and swallow it.

Brilliant!

Dot takes off running toward Olive's without so much as a backward glance, her heavy pocket clanking against her stomach.

I let out the breath I have been holding for at least an hour. Mrs. Nesbitt shakes her head and says, “Pansy knows her girl. Money talks.”

“Where do you think the two, uh, three of them will go?”

“Anywhere without a forwarding address. That excludes Pansy's sister, and they obviously can't stay at Olive's. What we don't know can only
help
us. Especially if we get the third degree from You Know Who.”

“All we did was fill the laundry basket, same as every other Monday,” I say. “But what'll Dot and Pansy use for money? Ten dollars isn't enough for expenses and train fare for two.”