Mr. Tall (4 page)

He found himself not at the entrance to the breezeway but at the open door to one of the abandoned units. Sand had spilled several feet through the doorway and Darryl followed it across the threshold and into the room. The air inside was still and sour, its odor a mixture of mold and the pungent smell of fish and mud left behind after a receding tide. The surf sounded as if it were going to break on top of him. He felt a little giddy with fear. He forced himself to take another step. The carpet beneath his bare feet was wet and clammy and gritty. It was the darkest place he had ever been. He leaned into the room and waved his arms around in front of his face. “William?” he whispered. “We mean you no harm.”

He opened his phone and held it at arm's length with the screen facing out, as if it were a torch. The room was empty. No beds, no nightstand, no dresser, no round table and matching chairs, no television secured to the wall by a bracket, no folding luggage rack with its ratty webbing—everything had been taken away. He knew that Cheryl had never set foot in this particular room, and never would, but the fact that this room was so similar to the room in which she now slept, or didn't sleep, and that it was ruined and empty suddenly flooded him with despair. He moved to the spot corresponding to the place where Cheryl's bed would be in their room. He flipped the phone shut and sat down on the floor. Once, four hundred feet of white beach had lain between this room and the ocean, and now only a fragile berm of sand separated the room from that same ocean's inexorable lifting up and dragging away. He knew that the nor'easters were coming, if not this winter, then the next. You couldn't blame the ocean, of course; he understood that. The ocean itself possessed no intent, no peacefulness or fury, save that ascribed to it. The problem was that a boy from Florida and a girl from Salvo had chosen to build something in its way.

Darryl and Cheryl had once published a newspaper, and they had once had a little girl, but now the newspaper was gone (although, somehow, a cruel facsimile of it still appeared daily in their paper box, poorly written and riddled with typos) and the little girl had grown into a young woman whose face only two days ago had clouded over with scorn when she opened her door and saw them. Darryl lay back on the dank carpeting. He patted the empty spot on the floor beside him. He had begun to shiver in his wet clothes. “My car,” he mumbled, “is shit.”

Cheryl's cell phone rang a long time before she answered it.

“Darryl?” she said. Her voice was warm with sleep, mercifully drained of danger. She might throw the other shoe at him once she had had a cup of coffee, but he was in the clear for now.

“Hey,” he said.

She yawned, and he heard her sit up in bed. “Where are you?”

“I'm not sure. I fell into the ocean.”

“Are you all right?”

“I wish we had our newspaper back,” he said.

“I know you do.”

“I wish we had our newspaper back and I wish you were pasting up the front page and I wish we had a good picture above the fold and I wish Misti was under the light table.”

“We can't do anything about any of that,” she said softly. “That's all gone, baby.”

“Then what are we going to do, Cheryl? Please tell me, because I honestly don't know.”

Cheryl drew in a deep breath, held it a beat, then let it out. He pictured her with her eyes closed, holding a fistful of her hair straight up in the air. When she opened her eyes and let go of her hair, she would be ready to face whatever needed to be faced. He had been married to her for more years than he had been alive before he met her. It was a fearsome mathematics to consider, a number unrolling day by day toward some finite but unfathomable edition. They had gone to print together 4,864 times. They had spent their youths compiling a record already sliding from the realm of the public into the realm of the historical inside a morgue of microfiche drawers in the Argyle library. Their daughter was going away from them in exactly the expected ways. Darryl held himself perfectly still.

“Okay, College Boy,” she said finally, “here's what we're going to do. In the morning, we're going to eat a big breakfast. Then we're going to go to Virginia Beach and find us an interstate pointed toward home. After that we'll just have to see. Does that sound good, Darryl? Because right now that's all I've got.”

In all the years he had worked with her, Cheryl had never worried about the next paper until it was time to lay it out, and she had never met a deadline she was afraid of. For his part, whenever she yelled, “College Boy, get your worthless ass back here and bring me some copy!” he had always produced, even on the deadest days, copy enough to bring her. It was the only way he knew to make a life, the transfigurative ordering of event into story, something he could not do without Cheryl. What good, after all, is editorial without production? He stood up and turned in the darkness toward where he remembered the door to be.

“That sounds good enough,” he said. “Let's run it.”

O
N THE FIRST SATURDAY
in January 1932, when she was sixteen years old, Plutina Scroggs married Charlie Shires in her father's house beside the railroad track in Weald, North Carolina. That morning she bathed her mother and wrestled her into a white nightgown trimmed with lace bought specially for the occasion. (A stroke had rendered Mrs. Scroggs mute, bedridden, and, so far as anyone could tell, senseless as a pillow when Plutina was eleven years old.) Both her older sister Henrietta and her father believed Plutina to be betraying them—not necessarily for marrying Charlie Shires but for moving away from Weald, leaving them shorthanded with an invalid to care for—and quietly but pointedly made their displeasure known. Her father refused to speak to Charlie that morning and despite the bitter weather sat alone on the front porch without a coat until the preacher called him in for the ceremony. At the last minute Henrietta decided that their mother couldn't be left alone for the fifteen minutes it would take Charlie and Plutina to say their vows and eat a piece of cake and chose instead to sit at Mrs. Scroggs's bedside, melodramatically stroking her hand.

Before Plutina left she went into her parents' bedroom and kissed her mother, but not Henrietta, good-bye. Henrietta's unforgivably bad manners on what Plutina insisted was the happiest day of her life added yeast to the grievances and recriminations and snits that had bubbled between the sisters for as long as Plutina could remember. Plutina swore to herself that she wouldn't write Henrietta unless Henrietta wrote first.

As Charlie and Plutina were leaving the house, Plutina heard the window of the front room slide open a crack. Out of sight behind the winter curtains Henrietta began to wail. Her father looked at Plutina and said, “I hope you're happy.”

“I am,” Plutina said, perhaps a little more haughtily than she would have liked, considering the solemn nature of the occasion. At that moment her most troubling secret was that she loved her father more than she loved Charlie Shires.

To Charlie her father said, “All sales are final, son. Don't try bringing her back.”

Charlie nodded curtly and said, “Don't come looking for her, neither.” Then he picked up her suitcase and they made their way along the duckboards down the muddy street to the train station.

Plutina's father worked for the railroad as a switchman, and she had grown up riding the train (as far as Asheville to the east and Murphy to the west) but she had never before ridden it as a married woman. Charlie took off his coat and placed it between them so that they could hold hands underneath it. She was too embarrassed to look at him for very long at a time, so she stared out the window at the river and the muddy fields and the houses and barns tucked up against the gray mountains. She thought, with some degree of wonder each time the train passed a farmstead, married people live in that house, and married people live in that house, and married people live in that house. She felt as if she had been granted admission into some benevolent, secret society to which almost everyone belonged but of which hardly anyone ever spoke.

The flag wasn't out at Revis so the train didn't stop until Corpening, where it took on coal and water for the long climb to Uptop. Plutina had never thought much of Corpening as a town (as a native of Searcy County she patriotically preferred Weald, which in her opinion had the nicer courthouse) but when she stepped off of the train the shop windows of the town seemed brighter, its sidewalks more crowded, the errands of its inhabitants more urgent than anyplace she had ever been, including Asheville. A taxicab honked at them when they tried to cross the street. Charlie pointed at a brick hotel with a revolving door and grinned and jabbed her in the ribs with his elbow. She shook her head because she honestly didn't know what he meant. (And when he said, “If the train was going to be here awhile me and you could check in,” she still didn't know what he meant.) He led her instead to a noisy diner filled with men who kept their hats on inside, where they sat at the counter beneath a blue cloud of cigarette smoke and splurged on a lunch of egg salad sandwiches and fried potatoes and Coca-Cola floats, a meal that Plutina decided was easily the best one she had ever put in her mouth.

They didn't talk much going through the gorge, but then nobody else in the car did, either. Something about the gorge always made people hush. To Plutina's eye the cleft between the mountains west of Corpening had never looked wide enough to contain both the railroad and the thunderous, pitching river that roiled along beside the tracks. Most of the scary stories she knew were set there—tales about robbers and train wrecks and hangings and feuds and Indian war parties and men you encountered walking along the road in the moonlight who vanished as you approached them. Conversation in the car didn't pick up again until the train huffed over the grade at Uptop and started down the other side. Ordinarily the exhilaration she felt on leaving the gorge behind would have set Plutina talking as well, but when her ears popped at the top of the grade she suddenly understood, with the clarity of revelation, that for the first time in her life she would not be turning around in Murphy and heading back to Weald. She had thoroughly and permanently left home.

Much to her surprise, she found that she not only missed Henrietta but felt awful about abandoning her. Truth be told, Henrietta was long-waisted and flat-chested and hard to get along with, and wouldn't have had an easy time finding a husband worth having under the best of circumstances. But now, because Plutina had allowed the only boy ever to chase her to actually catch her, and had bolted without a second thought from underneath their shared responsibilities, Henrietta was pretty much damned to the spinsterhood to which everyone had always feared she was fated—unless of course Mrs. Scroggs drastically picked up the pace of her dying, which, five years into the process didn't seem likely. (Both the Scroggs girls were good cooks and diligent nurses and under their care in the years since her stroke, Mrs. Scroggs had not only stayed alive, but developed the appetite of a baby bird.) As the train descended toward the valley floor—a valley cut by a river whose name she didn't even know—Plutina became convinced that if she traveled one mile farther away from Weald she would start crying and never stop. How could she have left her family behind so callously? Why, if her mother came down with pneumonia and died because Henrietta couldn't turn the poor woman without help then Plutina would not only be a bad sister, she would also be a murderer. She leaned to one side and studied her new husband's reflection in the cinder-ticked window. He looked like a murderer, too. (Or at least a murderer's accomplice.) Oh, Plutina, she thought, closing her eyes, the world on this side of the gorge suddenly too hard and ugly to contemplate, you are a hussy—which is exactly what Henrietta had called her when she announced that she was marrying Charlie Shires and leaving home.

When they arrived at Argyle in the middle of the afternoon, few people were about and the handful of stores and businesses huddled along Main Street already seemed to be closing down for the evening. At that particular moment the deadness of the place suited Plutina fine. Charlie didn't own a car (yet, but he had promised) and she hadn't been looking forward to having strangers see her riding a mule through the middle of town like some common hillbilly. (The roads, Charlie had explained several times, were too bad for him to bring the wagon.) She walked with him to the livery stable where he had boarded the mule the day before. The livery stable also doubled as a Dodge dealership, a fact that gave Plutina the impression, which she never quite got over, that the town of Argyle was a place where things could go either way. Charlie saddled the mule and lifted her onto its broad back, where she primly sat sidesaddle. She tried to look regal and unconcerned as he led her out of town toward the looming mountains, despite the fact that she was terrified of the mule. Her father had always owned a car, and as a town girl she had ridden horseback very little—certainly never anything as big and dangerous-looking as Charlie's beast of a mule. She would've straddled the animal and held on to the saddle horn for dear life but didn't want the first impression she made in Hudgins County to be parading down Main Street with her dress hiked halfway up to her tail and her legs hanging out for everyone to see.

Charlie's people came from the high ridges above Corpening, where the government had recently flushed them from their perches when it bought (or illegally seized, depending on your point of view) most of the land in Donald County for the park, a scattering from which the Shires as a clan never quite regrouped. There weren't many of them to begin with, and when they left Donald they flew every which way. Plutina had spent so little time with Charlie's relations that she couldn't say with any surety whether or not that was a blessing. Charlie had borrowed enough money from an uncle—whom, incidentally, had lit out for Texas before Plutina ever laid eyes on him—to buy eighty-three acres of land and set up housekeeping in the deep mountains ten miles outside of town. (Charlie's property had figured heavily in her calculations as she considered his proposal—calculations she silently adjusted once she understood that the majority of that property approached the vertical in pitch.) She had almost gotten used to riding the mule, and was beginning to sleepily pretend that she and Charlie were Mary and Joseph on the way to Bethlehem, when Charlie climbed on behind her and wrapped the arm not holding her suitcase around her in such a way that his forearm casually but noticeably pressed into her breasts. (Unlike Henrietta, she was not flat-chested.) The forwardness and broad-daylight nature of this affection struck her as a little trashy, but she was glad to have both the warmth he provided as well as someone to keep her from falling off the mule in case she dozed off.

The road away from town climbed up and up and—each time it no longer seemed possible—up some more. She tried to remember the way back to Argyle as they rode along, but was soon lost beyond finding. They weaved in and out and around the ridges the way a child might have found her way through a drawing room packed with adults. More than once they seemed on the verge of dead-ending into the face of a mountain, only to veer at the last minute into some previously hidden pass; in the passes the road picked its way along the courses of narrow white creeks that bounded down from the high country as if fleeing something. Because Weald lay on a riverbank in a wide, fertile valley, the mountains Plutina had grown up knowing stood politely some distance away from where she had viewed them. These new peaks, however, pressed in on her like rude strangers. They seemed haphazardly piled on top of each other, like toys in a box or apples in a bowl, and left little room between them for anything so pleasant as a valley, let alone one with bottomland enough for a farm. She didn't know where Charlie was taking her, but increasingly began to think that it couldn't be anyplace good.

An hour and a half into their journey the road tunneled through a hollow so thick with balsam and rhododendron that they could see neither the sky above their heads nor the rushing stream whose echo hissed in the leaves all around them. Once they climbed out of the hollow Plutina noticed that the woods continued to hiss even though they had moved out of earshot of the creek. It had begun to sleet. The tiny, flat hat that she wore with her wedding suit was mostly ornamental, and within minutes her hair began to freeze. Plutina's hair had never once froze before she married Charlie Shires and set off on a mule into the wilderness, so she pushed his forearm away from her breasts. Back in Weald, Henrietta would be cooking supper, probably chicken. Henrietta was good with chicken. Their father would be reading and rattling the Asheville paper, which came without fail every afternoon on the train. He was more than likely grumbling about Herbert Hoover to anybody who would listen. Now Henrietta was the only possibility. Plutina had always felt a little sorry for President Hoover, but because he was a Republican (an affiliation that could get you shot in Weald on certain days of the year) she had never said so out loud. With the hand she wasn't using to hold on to the mule, she reached up and patted her stiff hair. But honestly, how could the problems of an entire country be the fault of just one moon-faced man? Shouldn't people at least be nice to him because he was trying? Plutina found the state of the world too much to think about with frozen hair, so she decided to go ahead and cry. If Charlie noticed her sobbing he never let on.

Just when she began to consider the possibility that Charlie was taking her off into the mountains to kill her, they rounded a bend and he pointed off to the right and said, “There's our house.” It was small and white and occupied the top of a knob that sprouted at the base of App Mountain. Already more than a hundred years old, it had begun life as a dogtrot cabin constructed out of chestnut logs by some pioneer whose name had been forgotten. Later occupants had enclosed the dogtrot and covered the logs outside with weatherboarding and inside with plaster. Charlie would eventually raise the roof of the center pen and add a second story. Miraculously, for a house set so far back in the mountains, it overlooked a narrow but perfectly flat creek valley.

He helped Plutina down off the mule and they ran onto the porch as if they had been caught in a sudden shower only moments before, and were not already soaked through and half frozen. When he picked her up to carry her across the threshold the ice on her coat began to break. He put her down in the dark, largely empty center room and set her suitcase on the floor beside her. “That way's the kitchen,” he said, pointing to the left, “and that way's the bedroom. I've got to put the mule up.” Then he was gone. He hadn't even lit a lamp. Plutina sat down on top of her suitcase, facing the front door. Although her teeth were chattering, and had been for a while, she couldn't be sure if the rest of her was shivering from the cold or because she was so mad. She made up her mind that when Charlie Shires opened that door again she was going to call him everything but the son of a righteous God and demand that he take her back to Argyle that instant and put her on the next train to Weald. Her daddy would take her in no matter what he had told Charlie.