The Enchantment of Lily Dahl (23 page)

“I’ll stand,” Lily said.

Dolores threw back her head and hooted.

Dick continued to look at his cards. Then he raised his eyebrows as though he were surprised by what he saw.

Dolores laughed again.

The laugh seemed to remain in Lily’s ear even after it was over. She looked straight at Dolores. “On second thought,” she said, “move over.” Lily crawled over Dick’s legs and nudged Dolores forcefully with her elbow. “Make room, honey,” she said, emphasizing the word “honey.” The bed sank further under her weight, and for an instant Lily thought it might go crashing to the floor. She crossed her legs Indian style and beamed at Dolores. “This is comfy,” she said.

“Well, how do you do!” Dolores said. It was not a question. “For a minute there, I thought you was just a teeny-weeny bit scared of me, or maybe Dickie here?” Dolores patted the man’s trousers, and a small cloud of black dust rose from the cloth.

“No way,” Lily said and wiggled her shoulders in an exaggerated gesture of getting comfortable. Dolores’s sarcasm relieved Lily’s guilt. She really is a bitch, Lily thought. “I want to know exactly what you saw that day in the field—when you said you saw Martin Petersen,” she shouted at Dick. He didn’t look at her. A bird whistled outside, three distinct notes, each one higher than the one before.

“Why?” Dolores said.

Lily’s leg brushed Dolores’s hip. The contact made her uncomfortable, and she felt her face getting hot. “Dick,” Lily began and corrected herself, “Mr. Bodler says he saw Martin Petersen carrying”—Lily rubbed her face—“me”—she paused—“across the field out here last Thursday night, but I wasn’t there.”

“You?” Dolores squinted at Lily.

“Remind you of anything?” Lily said. “Like Jesse James?”

“No,” Dolores said, but her lips were parted in an expression of confusion.

Dick sat up.

“Well, let’s face it,” Lily said, “it wasn’t Jesse James.”

Frank had turned to Lily, and he stepped forward.

Dolores looked at Lily and spoke between her teeth. “I saw Jesse, and I saw me. I know what I saw, and it scared the bejesus outa me. It wasn’t Martin Petersen, and it sure as hell wasn’t you.”

Lily shouted at Dick. “How did you know it was Martin? Wasn’t it getting dark? I’m not saying you didn’t see anything, but how could you be so sure? In the police log last week there was a report about a man carrying an injured woman just outside of town. It’s the same thing, don’t you see? I’ve got it right here.” Lily dug into her back pocket for the clipping and waved it in front of Dolores. “You didn’t call the police, did you?”

“I never call them clowns,” Dolores said. She took the clipping from Lily, stared at it and sucked the inside of her cheek.

Frank walked over to Dolores and held out his hand for the clipping. She gave it to him, and he read it for at least a minute. Kindergarten speed, Lily said to herself. “Wonder whose pig it was,” he said finally.

“You’re sayin’ Marty Petersen’s walkin’ round town with a dead woman and that’s what I’ve been seeing?” Dolores said, “Wearin’ cowboy duds? That it ain’t visions? Is that what you’re sayin’?”

“Maybe,” Lily said. “I’m not sure.”

“What about the music?” she said. “I heard music.”

Lily ignored her.

Still holding the bit of wrinkled newspaper, Frank sat down on a crate piled with magazines and spat into the coffee can. “That boy was born with thin blood,” he said. “Runs in our family.” He spoke slowly.

“Who’s he talking about?” Lily asked Dolores.

“Must be Marty.”

“You and Martin are related?” Lily said in a loud voice.

Frank nodded. “As I was sayin’, he inherited it, thin blood, female-like, if you know my meaning, a little like Dick here.” He lowered his voice when he mentioned his brother. “Only Dick ain’t clever, and Marty’s wicked clever—not just with his hands neither. He reads a lot a books, comes here and pages through every one we get in to see if he wants it, and takes whatever he likes. He’s got big ideas ’bout things, an’ when he ain’t cursed by stutterin’, he goes on and on till I can’t take it no more, a regular chatterbox he is, once he gets goin’.”

Lily interrupted him. “How are you related?”

Frank looked at her. “Our mother and Martin’s grandmother was sisters.”

“I had no idea.”

Frank nodded. “Norwegians,” he said. “Those girls was born here, but their parents come from a little place in Sogn Valley, name of Underdahl. Took the name from there: Underdahl.” Lily watched the back of Frank’s head in the mirror and saw his bald spot wave in the reflection.

Dolores looked at Lily. “Like you.”

“There are lots of Dahl names,” Lily said, as if an explanation was called for. “It means ‘valley’ in Norwegian—Overdahl, Grondahl, Folkedahl—lots of them.” She heard her voice drop. She knew it was silly, but the coincidental overlapping of her own name with Helen Bodler’s maiden name unsettled her.

“Sure,” Dolores said. “I went to school with a girl called Hallingdahl.”

They were all silent. Helen Underdahl, Lily said to herself, and burped. It was a silent burp, but she tasted vomit in her mouth and swallowed to get rid of it. She looked at Frank and in a loud measured voice said, “Do you think Martin is capable of—” She stopped. “Would Martin hurt anybody?”

Frank leaned forward on the crate. “The truth is, Miss Dahl, you can’t know nothin’ about nobody now, can you? Seems to me you yourself could hurt somebody if the time and place was right. That’s so, ain’t it? Even them that’s closest to you, you can’t really know ’bout them. One day you wake up and find out. Folks say, ‘It ain’t possible, can’t happen.’ You live a little longer, and it happens.” Frank nodded his head. “People are full of surprises. I seen a lot a things that weren’t supposed to happen, Miss Dahl, and it ain’t so easy to say who’s to blame. That’s the nature of things. The day comes when you wake up in the mornin’ and look out the window and you can’t see nothin’ but grasshoppers so thick they black out the sky. And then before you know it, a drought sets in, and your fields burn as sure as if you’d taken a torch to your own crops. That’s just the way of nature, but then the price of eggs goes so low, it ain’t worth sellin’ em. Costs more to raise the chickens. An’ whose fault is that, Miss Dahl? Was it them politicians in Washington, don’t know a heifer from a steer?” Frank shook his head and stuck a pinch of tobacco into his cheek. He narrowed his eyes. “And the day comes when a goddamned inspector from the goddamned Twin Cities drives up in his fat car and tells you you gotta slaughter your animals, every last one of ’em. Hoof-and-mouth, he says. But it turns out, Miss Dahl, they wasn’t sick. Them cows wasn’t sick.” He raised a fist at Lily. “And the day comes when you don’t know your own people, don’t know what they are or what they’re thinkin’, and that’s gotta be the worst. They turn their backs on you and leave you high and dry. It don’t matter that it ain’t you done nothin’. You’re mixed up in it somehow, and that’s all that matters. Pity’s cheap, Miss Dahl, and those that pity don’t like to come too close. They stand at a good distance cluckin’ their tongues and shakin’ their heads, but they won’t get their hands dirty, and that ain’t much when all you’ve got left is a patch of land with the devil’s mark on it.” He nodded. “Folks surprise you. That’s all there is to it. You’re askin’ me if that boy could do somethin’ bad. I’m tellin’ you, you bet he could, but that don’t make him much different from nobody else.”

Lily looked at Frank. The length of his speech had astonished her. In a low voice she said, “Martin’s got pictures and articles of dead people on his wall—murdered people—did you know that?”

“You think that’s different from havin’ the pictures in here?” Frank tapped his temple with a finger.

Lily’s mouth was dry. “I, I don’t know,” she said.

Dick was stirring on the bed, and when Lily turned to look at him, she saw that he was sitting up. He let go of the cards and watched them scatter onto his lap and the bed. Until then, she had felt the man had been absent, absorbed only in the numbers and the faces on the cards in his hand. Lily didn’t know what he had heard or not heard, but his face took on a sudden expression of joy. He threw back his head, opened his mouth and laughed without making any sound, his chin bobbing. He hugged himself and began to rock back and forth on the bed, bumping both women with his shoulders. Lily moved out of his way and knocked Dolores in the shin with her knee.

“He don’t mean nothin’ by it,” Dolores said to Lily. “It’s one of his peculiars.” She smiled. “Peculiarities. Every once in a while it comes over him—just like that.” She snapped her fingers. “I think we oughta leave him alone. Frank’s the only one who can get him out of it, if it don’t stop by itself.”

Lily looked at Dick and shouted at him, “I have to go now, Mr. Bodler.”

The man stopped his motion instantly, looked her straight in the face and said, “You’re leavin’?” He looked at his brother. “Miss Underdahl is leavin’?”

“Dahl,” Frank said. “Just Dahl.” He didn’t speak loudly enough for Dick to hear. Lily knew he had made the correction not for his brother, but for her.

She crawled over Dick’s legs and got off the bed. The moment her feet touched the ground, he returned to his rocking and noiseless laughter. Lily saw her image wave in the dark mirror ahead of her, and she turned her head to avoid it. When she looked around, she saw Dolores giving Dick’s leg a friendly pat as she moved to the edge of the bed. Dolores’s dress caught the mattress, slid up her thigh and revealed the top of her stocking and garter. Lily remembered then that Dolores hadn’t been wearing a garter the other night.

Lily shook hands with Frank and resisted a momentary impulse to wipe her palm on her jeans. Then she noticed Dick waving at her, and she understood that he, too, wanted to shake hands. She reached out to him. He took her hand, and Lily felt his warm, oily palm against hers, and when she looked at him, she saw recognition in his eyes. He must be mistaking me for someone else, she thought.

Drained of curiosity and somehow wounded, Lily stared at the Folgers label on the coffee can near her feet. Seeing the brothers and listening to Frank had picked at some old sore inside her, and although she felt the pain of it clearly enough, she didn’t know what had caused it. She left the room behind Dolores, and walking through the second room, she noticed the peonies through the window. One fat, fading blossom was pressing against the dirty glass.

On the stone step outside the door, Lily blinked in the sunlight and noticed a dragonfly hover near her knee, then fly to her right toward a junk heap. When she turned to Dolores, she saw that the woman looked different outside. The wind blew the pink dress against her thighs, and the fine wrinkles in her face were plainly visible.

“You got a car?” Dolores said.

“No, my bike,” Lily said, pointing at it.

“Go and get it. I’ll give you a ride. We’ll stick the bike in the trunk.”

Lily didn’t answer. She felt immobile and stared at a wheel in a pile of junk. Then she lifted her eyes toward the telephone wires strung along the highway and looked at a line of sparrows sitting on the wire: a row of small dark bodies. One turned its head abruptly to the left, alert to some invisible sound or motion, and then, an instant later, every bird spread its wings and flew up into the sky.

“Go on,” Dolores said. “Get the damned bike.”

Dolores drove fast, and Lily heard her bicyle bump in the trunk behind them. She stared out the window and thought about the girl’s shirt under Martin’s desk. It’s hers, she thought. She smelled skunk from the road and turned to Dolores. Every time I lay eyes on her, she’s different. It could be the booze, but you can’t pour personality out of a whiskey bottle, can you? Lily studied the woman’s lap, looking closely at her thigh under the dress. She tested her feelings, but she felt nothing, nothing at all.

“You’re spooked,” Dolores said suddenly. “I can see it.”

“What do you mean?”

“Just what I say. You’re spooked.”

“I wouldn’t say that,” Lily lied to the road.

“I would,” Dolores said. “Only Dickie ain’t quite in his right mind. You can see that, can’t you?”

“He’s a strange person,” Lily said. “But then so are you.”

Dolores opened her mouth and after a moment, she laughed. “Me?”

“Ed said you were unusual or extraordinary or something like that. He doesn’t know quite what to make of you.”

Dolores smiled at the road. “That ain’t the same as strange, honey. He’s an odd duck himself, don’t you think?”

“Ed?”

“Yes, Ed.” Dolores mimicked Lily’s intonation of the man’s name, and this little cruelty put Lily on guard. “Most of the time, that man ain’t here, if you know what I mean.”

“No, I don’t,” Lily said. But she was lying.

“He lives in them pictures of his. You must’ve figured that out by now. Then, once in a while, his pecker drags him away.”

Lily stiffened. “So that’s what you think, is it?”

“I do. Nothing wrong with that.”

“He was pretty worried about you the other night, and I don’t think it had much to do with sex. If it hadn’t been for him, you’d have woken up in your own puke down by the river.” Lily’s voice shook as she spoke.

“I’m on the wagon, case you hadn’t noticed.”

“I noticed. I was there, too.”

“I know.” Dolores said. She smiled at Lily. “All I’m saying is, if I wasn’t in paint, I don’t think he’d give a damn.”

“I’m not ‘in paint’ and he cares about me,” Lily said.

Dolores smiled. “How old are you, honey, eighteen?”

“Nineteen,” Lily said.

Dolores nodded. “And our painter friend, he’s ’bout thirty-five, wouldn’t you say?”

“Thirty-four.”

“That man’s got tricks up his sleeves you ain’t even dreamed of yet.”

Lily sat on her hands and looked out the window. She spoke slowly. “That day in Ed’s room when you said he ‘plays rough,’ what did you mean?”

“If you don’t know, I sure as hell won’t tell you. That’s not my job, for Christ’s sake.”

They drove in silence for a minute or two. Lily studied the fields under the big sky through her window, and then she said, “Why did you hide from your mother when you were a little girl?”