The Enchantment of Lily Dahl (22 page)

*   *   *

Monday was quiet. The day brought no more rumors about Lily or anybody else. The
Chronicle
came out, but there was nothing of interest in the log. Lily waited on Stanley Blom at about six o’clock that morning, and when she told him she liked his portrait, the old man smiled and said, “It ain’t a pretty sight, but then a fella like myself can’t hope for that.” Lily had avoided looking at Stanley’s hunchback then and mumbled something about the picture having “character.” “That’s just a nice word for ugly,” he said. And when Lily blushed, the man laughed so hard that he started coughing. In the afternoon, Ed painted Mabel, and Lily watched. The weather was hot, but not too hot, and when Lily recalled that the storm had roared through town only last Tuesday, it seemed impossible. It feels like months ago, she thought. That was the day I buried the shoes. When she thought about slapping Dolores now, she suffered acute discomfort, but it wasn’t quite as bad as it had been, and she was beginning to think that she was the only one who knew about it anyway. Dolores had been dead drunk. At rehearsal that night, Lily kept her distance from Martin, and he didn’t speak to her. He had rebandaged his hand, so the cuts were invisible. Jim said he’d heard that Martin cut himself at the Grastvedt farm fixing the fence, and Lily believed it. In fact, during those hours of practice, her suspicions waned. What were they made of anyway? Hearsay, rumor, the stories of drunks and crazy people, and the wacko speeches of Martin Petersen himself.

At nine-thirty on Tuesday morning, it all changed again. Lily heard Professor Vegan’s voice rising above the hum of conversation in the cafe and turned her head to listen. He came in once a month with three other retired professors. The four men called themselves “The Over-the-Hill Gang.” They ate big breakfasts, and once their stomachs were full, they would launch into Kierkegaard. Lily had been told that they’d been chipping away at the philosopher for three years, word by word, sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, as patient and relentless as the day is long. This year there had been only two books, and they had the grimmest titles Lily had ever seen:
Fear and Trembling
and
The Sickness unto Death.
But the men joked and ribbed each other, and every once in a while Professor Schwandt laughed until he cried. It was true that weather, sports and politics got mixed in with Kierkegaard from time to time, but the men’s doggedness impressed Lily—and they tipped well. “The creature had wings,” Professor Vegan was saying, and Lily moved toward the table of professors with the coffeepot.

“If Gladys had been alone, I probably wouldn’t have paid much attention. Gladys, as far as I can tell, is very nearly a Holy Roller—evangelical in the extreme. I can’t remember the name of the sect she belongs to, but they do their fair share of trembling and moaning. Marit, on the other hand, is a hard-headed woman if there ever was one, and I would never doubt her powers of observation. She saw the darn thing, too, in broad daylight, only yards from the house.”

Lily poured Professor Hong coffee even though his cup was nearly full and watched Professor Vegan. He had an ironic smile on his face and lowered his voice for effect. “It came walking along the creek bed from the north very quietly—a translucent being in white with a gigantic pair of wings.” He gulped his coffee and watched the faces of his three colleagues. “And”—he paused—“there’s the matter of the suitcase. After all, who would invent that detail? A supernatural being trudging along with its belongings in a bag.”

Lily looked intently into the coffee and clenched her teeth.

“Send a memo to the religion department,” said Professor Nichols.

“A seraph,” said Professor Hong, “on the loose in Webster.”

The men laughed.

Professor Schwandt shook his head. “It’s the suitcase that bothers me. An angel with luggage. Smells of heresy, doesn’t it?”

Professor Nichols smiled. “Yes, I’ve always assumed that divine messengers travel light.”

“I wonder what it was, really.” Lily interrupted them. “Who it was.”

Professor Vegan shook his head and looked at Lily. “Beats me, but when I came home, both Marit and Gladys were pretty shaken. Whatever they saw, it must have looked not just improbable, but impossible.”

Lily poured more coffee all around and left the table. She watched Frances Herda pat Lynn Strom’s shoulder and say loudly, “Keith Ellingboe just isn’t worth it. If you want my opinion, he’s been acting like a horse’s ass for three weeks.” Lynn picked up her orange juice glass and sniffed into it. Wings, Lily thought, and a suitcase. Frances turned her head, and the tiny gold earring in her right ear gleamed for a second in the light from the window. She moved again, and the glint disappeared. Lily carried the coffeepot toward the door. She wanted to go back and ask Professor Vegan whether his wife had mentioned the size or weight of the suitcase and whether she had thought the “thing” was a man or a woman. Lily had met Marit Vegan. Her oldest daughter, Iris, used to baby-sit for her, and the whole family had always struck Lily as indomitably sane. The Vegan house lay on the land above the creek, only a quarter of a mile from the Bodlers’ on the other side of the highway, and it was close to the caves. Suddenly, she wondered what she had done with Martin’s map. She walked past Bert and stood near the door. The light outside was so bright she couldn’t look into it. She squinted toward the street. They saw something, all right, she thought. The suitcase Lily had found in the garage had disappeared into thin air. A man carrying an injured woman, she said to herself, near the city limits. Warm liquid ran onto Lily’s foot. She opened her eyes and saw that the coffeepot had tipped in her slack wrist and that coffee was running onto her white sneaker.

Behind her she heard Vince yelling, “Watch the pot!” She turned around to look at him and set the coffee near the cash register. “You okay?” he said. Lily didn’t answer him. She was thinking. I can’t just let this go. Somebody has got to do something. I can’t stay here and pretend nothing’s happening. Lily wiped her shoe with a napkin and faced Division Street again. The bright sunshine was hard to look at. Lily reached for the screen door and opened it. I’m going now, she thought. It can’t wait. She walked out into the street, turned right and then right again up the alley to her bicycle.

Lily rode past the Ideal Cafe and saw Vince standing in the doorway in his white apron. He waved a spatula at her and roared, “Where do you think you’re going! Get back here! If you don’t get your ass back here in two seconds, you’re fired!”

She didn’t pay any attention to him. Vince was standing in another dimension, like a person in a movie she could watch without him affecting her directly. He had fired her twice before, but both times he had rehired her within twenty minutes, and both times it had been his fault for being such a hothead. Now she was the one who had walked out on him, and it seemed only fair that he should fire her. There was something oddly pleasant about the uproar she had created: the fat man screaming in the doorway, the startled faces in the cafe. It had been so easy, had taken only a couple of seconds to turn the Ideal Cafe upside down. Lily knew where she was going. She was looking for someone—a nameless girl hidden at Martin’s or at the Bodlers’, in the woods or in the caves. Whoever she was, she must look something like both Lily and Dolores. Whoever she was, Lily felt she had to find her. Just beyond the Webster city limits, Lily imagined the suitcase lying abandoned in the woods, and she imagined her fingers on the lid pulling it open a couple of inches, and then in the fantasy she slammed down the lid to shut out the horrible contents.

*   *   *

Standing outside Martin’s house, Lily felt excited. Her excitement outweighed her dread, maybe because Martin’s truck was gone and the house looked unoccupied. She walked onto the porch, opened the door and peered into the room. The rocking chair had been moved back to the corner, and she could see the black cloth, the collage of crimes and advertisements with its blank center. She walked inside. This, too, was easy. You put one foot in front of the other, she said to herself, and you’re in. She touched the black cloth for an instant, but dropped it quickly. The chemical smell remained strong in the house, and again she wondered what it was. When she looked for the knives, she saw that they had disappeared. Lily remembered Dolores yelling about being cut, remembered Martin’s hand, and, as she walked through the open door into Martin’s bedroom, she thought that cuts like the ones she had seen on Martin’s hand couldn’t have come from fixing a fence. Stacks of books lay on the floor, and on a table she saw the copy of
Gray’s Anatomy
that had been in the other room before, a book of photographs called
The Nude,
and a fat white book entitled
Prosthetics.
A fly buzzed past her cheek, and Lily listened for cars on the road, but there were none, only highway traffic in the distance. Lily moved to Martin’s desk, pushed away the chair and opened the desk drawer: bank receipts, several index cards, paper clips, a copy of
Playboy.
Then, looking down, she noticed a dark heap on the floor, bent over and reached for it. Clothes, she thought, just clothes, but when she pulled out a blue T-shirt and looked at it, she noticed it had a tiny bow at the neck and a tag inside that said “Lady Susan, size 7.” Lily stared at the tag, took a deep breath and threw the shirt back under the desk. From somewhere outside she heard a dog barking, and she ran out of the house. Pedaling up the gravel road toward the highway, she suddenly remembered she had forgotten to shut the desk drawer.

Two cars were parked in the Bodlers’ driveway: the twins’ truck and a Pontiac that Lily thought looked familiar. Lily jumped off her bicycle and ran to the door. She rattled the screen and called inside, “Hello! It’s me, Lily. I have to talk to you!” Yelling into that house, Lily felt that she had temporarily given herself permission to act wildly, but could withdraw that permission at any second if she had to.

She yelled again. “Let me in! It’s important!” Heavy footsteps came from the next room. Frank appeared in the kitchen.

“Hold yer horses,” he muttered. As he trudged across the kitchen floor, he pulled at his trousers, and stopped behind the screen. He raised his bloodshot eyes to her and grunted.

“I have to talk to you again, to you and Dick, about what he saw.” Lily hesitated. She looked intently at him to show the urgency of what she was saying and then added, “It could be a matter of life and death.”

She wasn’t at all sure, but Lily thought she saw a hint of amusement in Frank’s eyes. “Easy does it,” he said and stared at her without blinking. He did not open the screen door.

“Mr. Bodler,” Lily said, “let me in.”

Frank scratched his neck. “Dick’s restin’.”

“This won’t take long.”

Frank rubbed his nose with the back of his hand. Then he lifted a finger slowly toward the ceiling like a person testing the wind and said, “Hold on.”

Frank disappeared. Lily heard voices from inside the house while she waited. Listening, she thought she heard a woman’s voice, but Dick’s voice had the timbre of a woman’s, and it could have been him.

Frank returned, motioned for her to follow him, but said nothing. He led Lily through the second room and then kicked open the door to the third. The kick gave her a start, and she braced herself as she followed him into the bedroom. The room was incredibly dark. She saw nothing but a bar of hazy light straight ahead of her. Two or three seconds later, she realized that the light came from a window, its opening obscured by a tall stack of boxes, and that the visible glass was coated with a thick, yellow film. A hulking dresser with a cloudy blackened mirror above it stood against the left wall, and when Lily turned to look at it, she saw the blurred reflection of two people lying on a bed. The mirror’s distortion confused her for a moment, but she turned to her right and saw Dick Bodler and Dolores Wachobski together on a small bed that sagged under their weight. Dolores was sitting, wedged close to Dick, who was lying down, his head propped on an uncovered pillow. Bolt upright near the end of the bed were Dick’s boots. Their long, creased tongues hung out from between knotted laces, giving them a vaguely doglike appearance. Dolores was wearing a thin pink dress that buttoned up the front, and because that dress was the only clear color in that dark room of muddy browns and grays, her body looked separate from everything else around her. The puking, bloated, whiskey-logged woman of three days ago had been replaced by a steady, sober person in pink. The transformation was so complete, Lily found it almost supernatural. This wasn’t the Dolores she had shaken and slapped the other night. Holding a neat fan of playing cards in two hands, Dolores turned her head to Lily and said, “You look a little mussed up, honey. Anything wrong?” Then she lowered her eyes to her cards. Dick hadn’t shown Lily any sign of greeting or recognition. He lifted a hand that had been hidden behind his thigh and brought several badly smudged cards up to his nose. Then he narrowed his eyes. Lily shifted on the floor, felt her foot knock something, heard a sloshing sound and looked down at the floor. Her toe had knocked into a coffee can that was serving as a spittoon. She smelled rancid tobacco juice and felt thankful she hadn’t spilled it.

Lily tried to focus her eyes. The vague light, the dust that floated in the room made it hard to see, and she felt that the momentum of the afternoon had suddenly been lost. The world had slowed down and then collapsed into this funny, filthy room. But she spoke anyway. “I want to ask you about Martin Petersen.” She took a step toward the bed. Nobody moved. Frank stood in front of the tower of boxes and surveyed the three of them with blank eyes. Dolores and Dick looked at their cards. “Martin Petersen,” she said again.

After several seconds, Dolores patted the bed. “Join us for a game of gin?” Her voice was bright and clear.

I’m tired, Lily thought, really tired. “No,” she said. “I just want to talk.”

“Sit down then,” Dolores cooed. She smiled and motioned with her head to a spot on the bed near the boots.