Nightwoods (15 page)

Not much use anyway. Little piece of pasteboard where somebody typed your name and height and weight and hair color and eye color. So, Lit’s watchman duties half-ass fulfilled, he went directly into his spiel about how you can’t sell what people don’t want to buy and how dim the local laws are. Nothing but the whim of ignorant voters keeping all these steep counties dry when you could drive a couple or three hours in any direction and legally buy alcohol. Or whatever else you need to lift your mood if you don’t get too fussy about every little ordinance. Then he shared several opinions about World War II and its sensible drug policies. The recent idiocy of banning inhalers.

As he talked, Lit began feeling like Bud was reading his mind. Like maybe signals passed between them along the order of Freemasons with their deep verbal codes and intricate handshakes. At that point of possible understanding, Lit looked at his watch and said, Time to go and do.

THREE DAYS LATER
, the black-and-white sat at the street again. Lit, bleak and furious in Bud’s garage, attacked a stubborn inhaler with a chrome nutcracker. It was Lit’s cracker, conqueror of a thousand inhalers, but now something about the diameters mismatched. Either Bud’s new tubes were slightly slimmer or Lit’s cracker was reamed out from hard use. Lit worked with great focus, damning capitalism and government nonstop.

—How you doing? said Bud.

—Hanging in there, like a hair in a biscuit.

—Don’t you ever get tired of that stuff?

Lit looked up from his work and made a great exaggerated expression of incredulity and went back to cracking.

Swallowing the woolly strip inside was the goal, the thing that set Lit’s day up and gave it a forward motion, an aim.

Lucky for Lit, clever entrepreneurs had recognized in advance the profit to be made when inhalers were driven to illegality by the government. For a year prior, a fellow Bud knew down in the low end of the state had bought case upon case of the little tubes from every drugstore around. Now there was a mighty steep markup to be taken. Getting higher all the time in ratio to the dwindle of supply.

—On the dim day when these all go away, then what? Lit said. Twenty cups of coffee before lunch, is what.

Bud bent from the waist, his head in the bright circle from a caged shop light hooked to the upraised hood of the truck. He studied down the open barrel of the carb like he actually knew how all the springs and needles and jets and butterflies and floats deep in there actually worked in concert to make the truck go.

He said, Some of these bits you’re meant to twist one way to mix the air and gas lean, and the other way goes rich. And then some bits, you’d better let alone if you ever care to drive again.

—Damn government, Lit said, working the cracker with elbow and shoulder action. Feeling all wretched because you fight for your country and then you come home wrung out to alleged peace, and they leave you to your own poor devices to find the daily fire. Sad times when heroes pay high money to bootleggers.

—Hell, I’ll do it for you, Bud said. I thought maybe you enjoyed the challenge.

He took the inhaler from Lit and dropped it on the concrete floor and stomped it flat. He stooped and picked the ribbon out of the bits of broken shell and flicked dirt off with a middle finger and then blew on it and handed it back to Lit.

Lit meticulously twiddled the paper into a perfect tight spiral, reflecting how he intended his thoughts to go for the rest of the day. Delicately, he placed the spiral on his tongue and swallowed, tasting the delicious eye-watering tang all the way down.

When his eyes quit watering, Lit said, Coffee’s not the same thing at all.

Bud said, When they make coffee illegal, you come to me. I’ll have it.

—For a price.

—Damn straight. Name something worth having that’s not got a price. The first rule of life is, you got to pay. In my opinion, the more that’s made illegal, the more capitalism works as it was intended.

—That doesn’t really move me one way or the other, Lit said.

—You know, you don’t need these inhalers. It’s not really my line of work, but I can get you pills if you want. White crosses and that kind of thing. Trucker stuff.

Lit glanced skyward, said his thanks to the divine light suddenly bathing him.

RIGHT AFTER HOOKING UP
with Bud’s wonderful constant resupply of uppers, Lit stayed awake for three days and nights. Work hours, people driving through town five over got all kinds of angry barking shit right in their faces to go along with their speeding ticket. Later, about three in the morning, the TV test pattern accompanied by radio music seemed pretty fascinating after some beers cooled Lit down without having the power to put him all the way to sleep, which would have taken a fist of army downers to accomplish.

—Need me some no-go.
Mucho, mucho
no-go, Lit repeated to himself, until he found the rhythm in the words, and it seemed like a good start for the chorus to a country song, except you probably needed to figure a few more lines. And a bridge. Songs needed bridges, but Lit wasn’t certain what they were. He decided maybe Bud would be a good place to start looking for a cowriter. Bud looked pretty musical, especially his hair. And even if they couldn’t make up a hit song together, Bud could for sure get some downers.

CHAPTER
  3

I
T TOOK LUCE A WHILE
to believe that the children were not mean, they were scared. Or, maybe, to hew closer to the harsh truth of a bad day, they were not
just
mean, they were
also
scared. The scared part was what they guarded against showing Luce or anybody else outside the pair of themselves. Luce thought of her new understanding as a hypothesis. They want to travel on, put an end to days where every moment begins in fear. Shift the load somewhere else. So they strike a wood match and hold its power between thumb and forefinger. Which leaves about five seconds to decide how best to be its agent. No wonder flammable things like nostalgic cheerleader outfits and wonderful old farmhouses got lit up and burned to ashes.

Give anger a furious voice, why not? The argument for finding joy in those strong blazing minutes of destruction was not lost on Luce. Afterward, though, nothing but a black circle in the green woods to show for it. And the after is what she couldn’t quit worrying about.

Left to the thoughts that arise from fire, maybe in fifteen years the children would be making everybody who brushed up against them scared or hurt or dead. End up in Central Prison, sitting on the wrong side of the green porthole, buckets of acid between their feet, eyes as blank as burnt holes in carpet. So, like prep for a high school debate, Luce started thinking about ideas to argue against fire.

——

A BLUE-SKY SEPTEMBER DAY
, color in some of the trees, especially poplar and dogwood. Luce and the children walked past the edge of what was once a cornfield, but now the lovely hopeful processes of plant succession had transformed it into a Brer Rabbit briar patch. The arcing canes etched a tangled geometry where bright migrant finches, yellow and black, darted for the last drupelets of withered blackberries. In a cleared space about the size of a stage, a pony mare harnessed to a long pole paced a circle centered on a simple machine made mostly of wood, a mill designed for crushing cane to make molasses. A nearly forgotten folkways practice from the past, but not an irretrievable past. Short of poisoning all life or blowing it up, people could keep doing it on and on, if they wanted to. Like when you’re on the wrong road, you turn around and go back.

Luce believed that the children could learn something here. A calmness. Some seasonal lesson about time flowing forward pretty steady, and this day connected to all the others, and the years connected too. Not every day needing to stand all by itself and be its own apocalypse.

Maddie wore a broad-brimmed man’s hat and tended a slow fire of wood coals under a big three-legged iron cauldron of simmering cane squeezings. She sat on an upturned stub of log with her shanks crossed and her boots unlaced, and when Luce and the children arrived, she tipped her face out of the shadow of her hat brim and winked a pale eye at them. She scraped at a raw split cane with a pocketknife and then licked the white marrow off the blade. When the pony came around at less than the necessary pace, Maddie tapped her with a long stick, a gentle reminder of the job they were doing together. The air sweet with the smell of the crushed stalks heaped in bright yellow piles and the boiling molasses syrup and wood smoke. No sound in the immediate world rose louder than the grinding of the cane press, and it so muffled as not to obscure the shuffle of the mare’s feet in the dirt and the occasional pop of the hickory fire.

Normally, the children would have offered a lot of emotion back at the fire, but the mare drew their attention so strong that they ignored everything else. And, Luce hoped, not because it was occasionally being struck with a stick.

The pony was a stocky elderly Welsh cob, dusty black and already growing her winter shag, even before the first frost. She was descended from pit ponies, bred to pull mine carts, but was several New World generations beyond that ancestral brutality—being lowered by a belly strap down into a horrible dark shaft to live a brief life beyond the light of day. Her nose was pink as a rose petal over yellow teeth nubbed from cribbing. Pale patches at hip bones and shoulders where her hair was worn down almost to the hide by time and work. She sported a wide barrel and a deep neck, and her back swagged low between her shoulders and her hips. Her expression struck Luce like she held no illusions, having seen it all. Yet her ears aimed forward, alert and hopeful for the next significant thing to appear, even though right then, walking in a circle, she just kept seeing the same old scenery come back around every thirty seconds.

Maddie looked up from tending her bubbling molasses and saw the children’s interest. She came over and said to Dolores, You can ride her, if you care to.

Maddie grabbed Dolores at the armpits and swung her onto the mare’s down-slung back. Dolores neither fighting Maddie’s touch nor falling numb and surrendering to some black personal hole down deep in herself. She sat on the mare’s back and grinned.

Frank, watching his sister, raised his arms to be lifted as well.

The two of them fit perfectly into the sway of the mare’s back. Dolores, in front, grabbed a handful of mane, and Frank squeezed his arms around Dolores’s waist and pressed his face against her back with his eyes closed at first, as if to feel only so much sensation all at once. Maddie gave the mare a pat, and the children went riding together around the circle like normal children would do, enjoying the view from higher up than they were used to, smelling wood smoke and burnt sugar and the pony herself and the manure trod into the dirt.

When the ride ended and Maddie set the children back on the ground, Dolores looked up at her, all open-faced.

Maddie said, Her name’s Sally, at least as long as I’ve had her.

Dolores nodded solemnly, like that name seemed perfect to her. She said, Sally Sally Sally. Then Frank said the name too, but just once.

THAT NIGHT AT BEDTIME
, Luce said, Tell me something. What kind of weather suits you two best?

They stared at her as if she were a fool, and then they looked at each other. Neither of them said a word.

Luce said, I know you can talk. I heard it.

Nothing but blank faces from the kids.

—I’m the one that puts food on the table, Luce said. That’s not any kind of threat, simply a fact. It’s one of the things I do for you. I’m asking a question about weather. Do me a favor and answer, just because it would make me happy.

Wheels turned behind the dark eyes. Dolores finally said, very weary and put upon, as if the answer were obvious: Lightning.

—Good, Luce said. That’s a sort of weather. Now, Frank, your turn.

—Lightning.

—Still a good answer. So, Frank, next question. What’s your favorite color?

The boy turned his head to the side and did a little spitting thing like a smoker who rolls his own cigarettes getting a fleck of tobacco off his tongue.

Luce waited and waited.

She said, Frank, you’re being called on to name a color. There’s not a wrong answer, and nobody’s going to hold anything against you. So say one of them.

Without looking at Luce, Frank said, Black.

—Yes, that’s a color. And one of my favorites too.

—Fire color, Dolores said.

—Well, let’s call that red and orange and yellow. So good choices, and thank you both.

She touched them each lightly at the brow, just a graze of fingertips, and turned out the light near their bed and sat awhile in the dark, listening to the radio playing soft, enjoying the rare feeling of finishing a day knowing you’ve done about as good a job as you know how to do. Though with all that fire and lightning talk, maybe she’d better keep sleeping with one eye open.

WANTING TO KEEP
language rolling forward, Luce figured bedtime stories would make a good starting point. She wished she had some family heirlooms to tell, but Luce had missed out on ancestors. No barking-mad great-grandfather to sit by the fireside of a frosty winter’s night passing down the folktales of their people, fishing his pink-and-white false teeth out of the bib pocket of his overalls so he could properly wheeze harmonica sound effects to a tale that involved a steam locomotive. As folkloric as it got for Luce were Lola’s Wild Turkey ravings and Lit’s bloody World War II stories.

Luce went scavenging through the lobby bookshelves and found a collection of violent Old World tales. Fe, fi, fo, fum, I smell the blood of an Englishman. She read them all, front to back, trying to imagine which ones Dolores and Frank might find useful. Share lessons children had learned for centuries regarding power and vulnerability. People got beaten and killed awfully cavalierly in the old stories. The fragility of the human body, all the threat and fear loose out there in the dark, and also sometimes in the daylight.