Garden of Stones (23 page)

Perhaps Mrs. Sloat was like that duck—trapped, helpless. Lucy wondered if she felt condemned here, in the small life of a motel keeper in a tiny town far from anything except cracked earth and harsh winds and dirt-brown weeds. She had no children to distract her from the monotony of her days. There seemed to be little affection between her and Mr. Sloat; perhaps he had a roving eye, grasping hands, and he was the one who drove the former maids away.

Out the back door, a clothesline stretched between aluminum poles in the middle of an enormous, weed-choked yard. From the line hung a limp pair of men’s long underwear, several billowing white sheets, three or four undershirts.

Mrs. Sloat followed Lucy’s gaze, and her lips turned up slightly at the corners. “Those are Garvey’s, of course.”

Now that Lucy knew her employment was secure, she asked the question. “Who is Garvey?”

Mrs. Sloat tilted her head in mock surprise. “Sister Jeanne didn’t tell you about him? About my brother?”

“No, ma’am.”

“Oh, I see. I’m so sorry, I thought you knew. Garvey is my younger brother. He’s a war hero. He was wounded in Guadalcanal, in the Battle of Edson’s Ridge. Do you know it?”

“No, ma’am,” Lucy muttered, even though the name was lodged deep in her mind along with so many others: battlefields in which Japanese and American blood was spilled, names she’d heard the men talking about as they clustered around the radios for news of the war.
Tulagi. Savo Island. Henderson Field
.

“I just thought—well, you being Japanese and all.”

“I’m not Japanese. I’m American.” Lucy forced herself to maintain eye contact. What she knew about Edson’s Ridge was that the Japanese were defeated, losing many soldiers for every American loss. Cheers went up around Manzanar when the news came in.

It was impossible not to know some things.

Mrs. Sloat raised an eyebrow. “Indeed. Anyway, don’t pay Garvey any mind. Sometimes he lets off a little steam, but it’s all just talk. You two are going to get on fine.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“There’s nothing wrong with his mind,” Mrs. Sloat continued. “He was lucky, as these things go. It was a lower vertebra that was damaged. He retains some sensation. He’s continent. He gets tired, but don’t worry, he takes care of himself. You’ll do the washing and cleaning, of course, but he can...”

Mrs. Sloat made a gesture with her hand that seemed like she was tying a knot; Lucy was bewildered. Dress? Fold his clothes? Brush his teeth? Here was the reason the Sloats had been willing to hire her, the reason the position must have been difficult to keep staffed. She supposed she ought to be grateful.

Well, so be it. Lucy had been prepared for worse.

“You’ll meet him later.... He’s in his workshop now. He doesn’t care to be disturbed in the afternoons. It’s when he gets the most work done.”

Mrs. Sloat limped briskly across the yard—it had been carelessly mowed, with missed patches sending up long spurs of weeds and sawgrass—toward the motel. It couldn’t have been more than eight or ten years old, but a certain shabbiness had set in. The stucco was dingy along the bottom, a few of the screens were torn, and the weeds had made inroads along the brick edging sunken into the earth. Geraniums grew valiantly in the flower beds, but they could have done with some fertilizer, some compost. There were metal chairs with shell-shaped backs that stood in front of each room next to the door, where Lucy imagined a traveler might rest after driving all day, enjoying a sunset or reading a book. The nicest feature of the motel was the breathtaking view of the ice-topped mountains in the distance.

The motel was shaped like an L, with the long leg fronting the road, and the short end opposite the big house. In a way, the motel resembled the camp barracks: a row of boxy rooms. But these rooms were larger than any in the camp, and they each had their own bathroom. There would be no cracks or chips in the walls or floors, and though the walls might not be thick, a whispered conversation in one room would not be overheard in the next.

On each door a shiny metal numeral was held in place by a pair of tiny nails. In most of the windows, the drapes were drawn. Each window was flanked by a pair of green shutters. At each door, a mat of plain rubber waited for travelers to wipe their feet before entering.

Mrs. Sloat took a ring of keys from her pocket. “Leo’ll be getting you your own set. Just the rooms, mind you—no reason for you to have any of the others.”

She slipped a key into the lock and the door swung open. Inside, the room was dim and smelled of mothballs and ammonia. Mrs. Sloat stood aside to let Lucy enter.

“This is very nice,” Lucy said.

Mrs. Sloat pushed open the drapes. There was a bed with a plain brown coverlet. The carpet was mossy-green, worn in places. A desk held only a gooseneck lamp. Next to the sink was a cake of soap wrapped in paper. Lucy wanted to break open the seal, peel away the paper, press it to her nose. She wanted to caress the satiny cake before running water over it, lathering and lathering for hours. She had not touched a fresh cake of soap since before they left Los Angeles. Her mother had favored a brand called Cadum, with French writing on the wrapper.

“It’s clean.” Mrs. Sloat ran a fingertip along the desk, held it up to show Lucy. “See? No dust. Not a speck. That’s what I’ll expect from you. If I receive a complaint, I’ll dock your pay for that day.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

A scratching sound outside the open door was followed by a thud that shook the building. A man in a wheelchair appeared in the door frame, his large hands gripping the wheels. His indisputably handsome face was angled with sharp edges and flat plains, and his eyes flashed with fury. Light brown hair, allowed to grow too long, fell across his brow. His feet were held in place by metal stirrups, and he wore only socks on his feet, no shoes. One of them had bunched around his ankle and seemed in danger of falling off, a detail utterly at odds with the tensed strength in his muscular, veined forearms.

“You the girl?” he said gruffly. His voice was raw and hoarse, as though he did not often use it. “Let me look at you.”

Beside her, Mrs. Sloat stiffened.

“Go ahead,” she said, shoving Lucy forward. “Let him see.”

Lucy took a step toward the door, which was too narrow for the wheelchair to pass through. Mrs. Sloat stood directly behind her with her strong fingers pushing at her spine.

“Well, you’re not much to look at, are you,” he said softly. “Ugly as original sin.”

Something inside Lucy twitched, a snag in the stoic façade behind which she had been determined to hide. She would endure whatever the Sloats dished out, but she would not allow this man to shame her.

“Yes, sir, I am ugly,” she said. “I guess that makes two of us.”

The smug expression froze on his face, his icy-gray eyes callous and cold.

He pressed his lips together and suddenly a gobbet of spit came hurtling from his mouth, landing on the front of Lucy’s dress.

“You can go to hell,” he said, backing up his wheelchair and turning with surprising agility. “You and every other Nip left on this planet.”

27

In the kitchen, Mrs. Sloat fetched a rag for Lucy, and watched silently as she wiped away Garvey’s spit.

“Throw it in there,” Mrs. Sloat said, pointing to a bucket in the corner of the kitchen. “You can start the wash this afternoon.”

Several hours later, Lucy was alone in the backyard with a huge basket of wet laundry and her first moment of solitude since arriving at the Mountainview Motel. As she hung the sheets and towels from the clothesline, she stole glances at the house, wondering if anyone inside was watching her work.

From the yard, she could see that the main house had suffered several shoddy additions. A screened porch was crowded with furniture and junk, spiderwebs and wasp nests lodged in every corner. To the right, a boxy extension jutted out toward the motel. An angled ramp clinging to the side suggested that the addition was where Garvey lived.

Was it her imagination, or did the curtains in Garvey’s window move slightly now and then? Lucy worked steadily, going through nearly all the clothespins from the cloth bag around her neck, but every time she bent over the basket she could sense Garvey watching her.

She pictured his face, how it contorted with anger, and wondered what had happened to him. A bullet to the spine seemed most likely. Was it a stroke of luck to return from the war with an injury like that? Or would it be better to be dead? Lucy was quite sure that it would have been better for her to have died than survive her burns. Even better would have been if she and her mother had both died on the same day as her father. A car accident, perhaps—something quick and tragic.

Lucy imagined her father in his grave in the cemetery behind Christ Community Church back in Los Angeles. The Presbyterians preached that the immortal soul would spend eternity in heaven, and that all of life was a journey to that end. Sister Jeanne had assured Lucy that her own beliefs were pretty much in line with the Presbyterians on the matter. Lucy had her doubts.

When Lucy had pinned the final sheet to the line, shaking out the fabric to minimize the wrinkles, Mrs. Sloat materialized at her side. Perhaps it was her gaze, not Garvey’s, that Lucy had sensed while she worked.

“These are too close together,” Mrs. Sloat said, unpinning several towels. “They’ll drag down the line.” Lucy didn’t point out that when they were repinned, the line sagged just as much.

“I suppose that will have to do for now,” Mrs. Sloat said, her hands at her hips. “Now come with me. There is one more thing to see.”

Lucy followed Mrs. Sloat to the wheelchair ramp leading up to the addition. Up close she could see that the boards were neatly swept and the glass panes set into the door were sparkling clean—except for the top row, which was thick with grime. The slope gave Mrs. Sloat some trouble: she had to hold the rail for balance, and the dragging of her right foot seemed worse. She opened the unlocked door without knocking and called her brother’s name.

Once through the door, Lucy stopped in surprise. The addition seemed larger from the inside, with private quarters in between the spacious outer room and the main house. The walls of the large room were lined with shelves, and a long workbench took up much of the wall separating the addition from the main house. It had been built low, to accommodate Garvey’s wheelchair. Hutches on either side of the desk held orderly rows of instruments and knives, clamps and jars, curious wooden forms in strange shapes, ranging from the size of a child’s fist to several feet long.

But all of these details barely registered, because on the remaining shelves, dozens of animals stared out at Lucy with shining eyes.

Lucy gasped. There were just so many of them. Squirrels—a lot of squirrels—but also mice, raccoons, possums, coyotes. A fox occupied a double-height shelf, his plumed and brushed tail arcing out into the room. Birds were suspended from the ceiling, ranging from a red-tailed hawk with an astonishing wingspan, to tiny white birds, smaller than the palm of her hand. Above the shelves, near the ceiling, were fish mounted on boards, with pert fins and gaping mouths and eyes that seemed to look inward.

In Los Angeles, Lucy never had any pets. Other than Aiko’s cats, she’d observed animals only from afar at the zoo. But these animals were different. They seemed intelligent, their poses cunning, their artificial eyes crafty. They were not arranged to appear as they were in their natural habitat, like the stuffed beasts that Lucy had seen in the Natural History Museum on a third-grade field trip.
These
animals were arranged in practically human poses.

Many, if not most, stood on their hind legs. Some reached beseechingly toward the viewer, paws outstretched. A beaver crossed his paws over his chest and sat back on his tail, looking for all the world like a businessman in a boardroom. An owl with a tiny vole hanging from its beak raised a claw in the air as though pumping a jubilant fist. A rat mounted on a stand kicked up its tiny feet, dancing several inches above the shelf.

“
This
is how my brother spends his time,” Mrs. Sloat said triumphantly.

As if on cue, Garvey appeared in the doorway of his bedroom, glowering at his sister. If anything, his expression became even more hostile when he saw Lucy. He wheeled himself over to his worktable, where the skin of an animal was stretched over some sort of wooden support. Pink flesh dappled the thing nearly to the ruff of fine black-and-gray fur at the top edge. It took Lucy a moment to realize that the creature was inside out.

“I’ve asked you to knock,” Garvey muttered.

Mrs. Sloat shrugged. “Well. You wouldn’t have heard me.” She turned to Lucy. “Garvey has his own bathroom. It’s specially fitted for his needs. Cost a pretty penny, but what can you do? Hygiene can be quite time-consuming for him.”

Lucy blushed, discomfited not just by the discussion of private matters, but by the tension that filled the room.

“I don’t want that girl in here.”

“She’ll have to come in, to clean,” Mrs. Sloat said blandly. She picked up a small muskrat from a nearby shelf, one of the more conventional ones. Three of its paws were attached to the board on which it was mounted; the fourth was raised as though in admonishment. Its mouth was open and its pink-and-black gums seemed to glisten. Lucy wondered how Garvey accomplished that. Far from being put off by the stuffed corpses, she wanted to examine each more closely, to search for evidence of seams or means of death, to understand how he had created such lifelike replicas of tissues which surely could not last, like tongues and gums and glistening lips and pearly-pink translucent ears.

“Hold it by the base,” Garvey snapped, and Mrs. Sloat set the thing back on the shelf. “She doesn’t have to come in to clean.
I
clean just fine.”

“And look at what a splendid job you’ve done of that,” Mrs. Sloat retorted, pointing at the walls. It was just like outside—anything that Garvey could reach from his chair was dusted, polished, arranged with care. But thick cobwebs hung in all the corners, and the upper third of the walls were grimy and streaked with dust. “If you don’t want to get buried in dirt, you’re going to have to let her help.”