Last Summer at Mars Hill (38 page)

Sam stared at me. I saw a light flare and fade in his iris: the pupils pulsed like a pair of flexing black wings, then shrank to tiny points once more. I shrugged, then nodded uneasily.

“Julie,” he whispered. “You his girl?”

I shook my head, stammering, and shrank from the window.

“Julie Dean. I’ll remember,” whispered Sam. He slid his hand over mine, his skin smooth and dry and cool as glass. “You know, Ice Cream is awful good to us.”

“I thought everybody hated the ice cream man,” I remarked, grinning.

Sam shook his head, shocked. “We
love
ice cream.”

Cass grinned. “Hear that? They love me. Right, Maidie? Right, Eva?”

Maidie giggled sharply, tilting her head so that I saw the moles clustered beneath her chin, buried like dark thumbprints in that fleshy dewlap where the hairs grew thickest. I shuddered, thinking of cancers, those dark little fingers tickling her throat in the middle of the night. Little Eva laughed with her mother, clutching the truck’s fender.

“Ice Cream!” she shrieked. “Give me ice cream!”

Cass beamed and scooped another popsicle from the freezer, tossing it to her like a bear slapping a trout to shore. The kitten flashed from the grass, tumbling the pop in mid-air so it fell at Maidie’s feet.

“I’ll be by tomorrow,” Cass called to Sam, and he started back into the truck. “You catch me then.”

“I got money,” Sam muttered. He wriggled his hand into a pocket, then opened his palm to display a handful of tarnished coins, age-blackened and feathered with verdigris. Cass scrutinized the coins, finally picked out three. Eva giggled, baring a mouthful of green-iced teeth.

“Okay,” he said. “But I got to go now. Kiss, Little Eva?”

She fled tittering to the porch, pausing to spin and wave like one of those plastic whirligigs, bobbing goodbye before she skipped indoors. Cass started the truck and waved.

“So long, Maidie, Sam. Anything special tomorrow?”

Maidie yelled, “Eclairs,” then waddled back to the porch. For another minute Sam lingered, stroking the rusted metal of the truck’s headlights. “You’ll be back?” he finally asked.

“Sure, Sam,” Cass shouted above the motor. “Tomorrow.”

Sam nodded, lifting his hand and opening it a single time in measured farewell. “Tomorrow,” he repeated, and stepped back from the cloud of dirt and grass that erupted behind us. A minute later and they were gone from sight, hidden behind the oaks and serpentine road. Cass grinned like a dog, twisting in his seat to face me. “What’d you think?”

I lit a cigarette, staring at the fields streaming red and gold in the twilight, the tumbledown walls and rotting fenceposts. I waited a long time before answering him, and then I only said, “I thought it was sad,” and tossed my cigarette across the road.

“Sad?” said Cass, puzzled. “You thought Little Eva was sad?”

“Christ, they’re so poor. Like they haven’t had a real meal in months.”

“Sad?” he repeated. “Sad?” And he stomped the gas pedal. “I thought they’d make you happy.”

“Cass!” I shook my head, kicking at an empty beer bottle. “You’re
feeding
them.”

“I don’t give them anything,” he protested. “They buy that ice cream.”

“Cass, I saw you give him a box of éclairs.”

He shook his head violently, jerking the wheel from side to side. “He bought that, Julie. He paid for it.”

“Fifty cents for ten bucks worth of éclairs.”

“What are you saying? Just what are you saying?” Cass demanded. “I sold him that ice cream.” His face glowed bright pink, the stubble on his face a crimson fuzz. I hunched back against the freezer and looked away stubbornly.

“Look, Cass, I don’t care what you do with your money—”

“Shut up. Just shut up. What the hell do you know? They don’t need that ice cream. They
love
it. That’s why I go there. Not like—” He stopped, furious, switching the radio on and then off again.

We rode in silence. It grew darker as we traced our way back down again. Night leaked like black water to fill the rims and ridges of the mountains. The first stars gleamed as the trees began to bow before a cool rising wind. I reached over to roll up the window, as much to shut out the night itself as the chill air; but the handle was broken. I rubbed my arms and wished I’d brought a sweater. Silently Cass groped beneath his seat with one hand, then tossed me a dirty sweatshirt. I pulled it on gratefully and leaned forward to kiss him.

“Am I your girl? Is that what you tell them?”

He shrugged and shifted gears. He drove with his face pressed right up to the gritty windshield, shoving his glasses against the bridge of his nose as if that might make his eyes strong enough to pierce the dark tunnel of pine and shivering aspen. “Damn,” he muttered. “This place gets dark.”

I nodded, huddling into his sweatshirt as I peered into the night. It was like day was something that could be peeled away, and now the black core of the mountain, the pith and marrow of it, throbbed here. I saw averted eyes, heard wings and the rustle of pokeweed where something loped alongside us for a few yards before veering off into the bracken. I stuck my head out the window and saw reflected in the scarlet taillights a fox, one black foreleg raised as he watched us pass.

Then came a long stretch where the road flattened out and stretched before us like a solid shaft of darkness flying into the heart of the country. Overhead, branches linked and flowers dangled against the windshield, laving us in their dreamy scent. Cass cut back the engine and the truck glided down this gentle slope, headlights guttering on rabbits that did not run, but stopped to regard us with gooseberry eyes from the roadside. I yawned and let my arms droop out the window

“Poison ivy,” warned Cass; but he did the same thing, sparks from his cigarette singeing sphinx moths and lacewings. Great white blossoms belled from the trees and I reached to grab a handful of flowers, yanking them through the window until the branch snapped and showered us with pollen and dew.

“Look,” I gasped, breathless from the cold spray. “What are they?”

Cass poked sagely at his glasses, leaning over to inhale.

“Moonflowers,” he announced.

“Really?” I lifted my face and shook the branch, spattering more dew on my sunburned cheeks. “They smell like heaven.”

“Nah. I don’t know what they are, really. White things—asphodel, moonflowers,” he finished, yawning. “They do smell like—”

He choked on the word, twisting the wheel sharply. “Sweet Jesus…”

In the road before us crouched a child, her eyes incandescent in the highbeams. I shouted and lunged for the wheel, tearing it from Cass’s hands. With a shearing sound the wheel spun free and the truck plowed forward.

There was no way we could avoid hitting her. The soft thump was almost a relief, the gentle slap of a great wave against a dinghy. The truck shuddered to a stop and Cass groaned, knocking me aside as he staggered through the door to land on his knees in the dirt. I followed and collapsed beside him.

She was dead, of course. A vivid russet bruise smeared her face from neck to shoulder, staining her torn T-shirt. At first I didn’t recognize the face beneath the speckled dirt and blood. Then I noticed the tiny pink cleft above her teeth, the blood pooling there to trickle into her mouth. Cass dabbed at her chin with his shirt sleeve, halted and began to cry. His keening rose higher and higher until I covered my ears against his screams, too stunned to calm him. I didn’t think to go for help. We knelt there a long time, and I dully brushed away the insects that landed on the child’s face.

Behind us something moved. A silhouette cut off the headlights’ beam. I stared at my hand splayed against the girl’s clenched fist, afraid to turn and face the figure standing in the light. Instead I waited for the cry that would drown out Cass’s voice: mother, father, searching sister.

But the voice was laconic, dull as dust. “What you crying for?”

I lifted my head and saw Maidie feeling her way along the front of the truck, balancing clumsily by grabbing the grill above one headlight. Cass stared at her and choked, clutching wildly at my knee. “She can’t see,” he gasped, and suddenly pushed at the girl’s body. “Julie—”

Maidie stood in front of the truck, her blue shift glowing in the backlight. I stammered loudly, “Maidie—we got trouble—Kimberly—we hit her.”

She stumbled towards us, smacking the grill and kicking violently at stones in her path. A rock bounded against the child’s forehead and Cass gagged, drawing closer to me. I rose to my knees and reached to halt the blind woman.

“Maidie. You better go back…”

Then she was on her knees beside us, groping in the dirt until she grasped the crushed shoulder, the head lolling like an overripe peach. “Hurt that pore old head,” she laughed, and her yellow eyes rolled behind glinting lenses. “Bang.”

I drew back in disgust, then squeezed Cass’s hand as I stood. “Don’t leave,” I warned him. “I’m getting help.”

Maidie leaned over the child, brushing the girl’s hair from her forehead. “Poor old head,” she chortled. Then she spat on her fingers and rubbed the dirt from the girl’s mouth, all the while staring blankly into the glaring headlights.

For a moment I hesitated, watching the gleam of light on her beard, the flash of her glasses like two bright coins. Then I turned to leave. Where the circle of light ended I paused, blinking as I tried to see where the road twisted. Behind me Cass hissed and Maidie giggled, the two sounds like a bird’s call. I glanced back once again.

Between Cass and the bearded woman the child stirred, thrashing at the ground until she heaved herself upright to stare at them sleepy-eyed. She shook her head so that her hair shone in a blur of dust, the face beneath that mane a sticky mess of blood and dirt.

Then she stuck her finger in her mouth, blinking in the painful light, and asked doubtfully, “You the ice cream man?”

Cass nodded, dazed, pulled his glasses from his nose, put them back, stared from Maidie to the child once more. Then he laughed, hooting until the mountain rang, and I heard an owl’s mournful reply. “Jesus, you scared me! Kim, you all right?”

“Kimberly,” she murmured, rubbing her shoulder. She glanced at her bloody hand and wiped it on her shorts. “I sure fell,” she said. “Can I have a Sno-Cone?”

Cass staggered to his feet and sprinted to the truck. From inside he tossed Sno-Cones, éclairs, a frozen Moon-Pie. A can of pop exploded on the ground in a cherry mist and he stopped, seeing me for the first time. He ran his hands through his hair. “Sno-Cone,” he repeated.

“I just want an e-clair,” Maidie called petulantly, and she pounded the road with her palm. “We got to get back, Kimberly.” She lumbered to her feet and hobbled to the truck, the girl beside her scratching. Cass stepped down and put a Sno-Cone in each small hand, turned and handed Maidie an éclair. The bearded lady grabbed Kimberly by the neck and pushed her impatiently. “Take me home,” she rasped, and Kimberly started to walk up the road, limping slightly. Maidie kicked the stones from her path as they plodded past me, trailing melting ice cream. At the edge of light they disappeared from view, the soft uneven pad of their feet fading into the pines.

From the doorway Cass squinted after them, and I stared at him, both of us silent. Cass trembled so that the cigarette he lit flew off into the darkness like a firefly. In the road melted a dozen Sno-Cones and éclairs, pooling white and red and brown in the clay. I stepped towards the truck and knelt to inspect a slender rillet of blood. Already tiny spiders skated across the black surface and moths lit there to rest their wings, uncoiling dark tongues to feed. With one finger I touched the sticky surface and raised my hand to the light.

There was too much blood. She had not been breathing. The right side of her face had paled to the color of lilacs, and I had glimpsed the rim of bone beneath her cheek, the broken lip spilling blood into the earth. Now behind me two sets of footprints marked the mountain road, and I could hear a woman’s distant voice, a child’s faint reply. I wiped the blood from my finger, and slowly returned to the truck to help Cass up the steps. Gently I eased him onto the freezer, pushing his shoulders until he sat there quietly. Then I settled myself beside the wheel. I started the engine, tentatively pressing pedals until the truck heaved forward, and drove crouched at the edge of the seat, squinting into the halo of light that preceded us. Behind me Cass toyed with his glasses, dropping them once and retrieving them from the floor. I saw him reflected in the truck’s mirror like a trick of the light, his eyes fixed upon the passing hollows, the dark and tossing trees that hid from us a wonder.

After that I rode with Cass every morning on the town route. And as each afternoon struggled to its melancholy peak we’d start for the bearded lady’s house. Sometimes we’d take one or two of the children with us, Kimberly and June Bug flanking me atop the freezer or playing with the radio dials. But usually we’d just find them all waiting for us when we arrived, racing through the tall grass behind Eva: Little Eva always running, running to hug Cass’s knees and slip slyly past me when I stooped to greet her. Cass would bring a six-pack of True Blue Beer, and we’d squat beside Sam on the flimsy back porch, drinking and watching the children play.

The months marched past slowly. Our afternoons lingered into evenings when we took our cue from the hoarse voices of mothers hailing their children home. One night we stayed until moonrise, waving goodbye to the children as they took their hidden paths through the pinegroves. Their chatter was of school starting in the valley: new clothes and classrooms, a new teacher. The three Kims were the last to leave, and Cass handed each a popsicle as they passed the truck.

“Too cold,” Kimberly squealed, and tossed hers into the weeds. Cass nodded sadly as we walked back to the porch, tugging at his collar against the evening chill. Eva sat yawning in Sam’s lap, and the old man stroked her hair, humming to himself. I could scarcely see Maidie where she stood at the edge of the field, her face upturned to the lowering sky. Cass and I settled beside Sam, Cass reaching to take Eva into his arms.