The Used World (27 page)

“It was amazing the place lasted as long as it did,” the man said as he led them inside what remained of Second Chance Furniture and Collectibles. “I’m Myles,” he added, shaking first Claudia’s hand and then Rebekah’s.

“Were you the owner?” Rebekah asked, studying him as if he were an apparition. Myles was tall, black, densely built. He wore a charcoal gray suit and a black overcoat, along with a dark gray fedora and a gold hoop in one earlobe.

“No, no. I own the building, but the store belonged to a young couple who’ve already left town. You can see they took the wheat and left the chaff.”

The storefront was dirty and smelled of stale cigarette smoke; the few pieces of furniture remaining were cheap and worn—bunk bed frames, sofas and recliners that had been cheap when new and now were shiny with grime and age. There was a stack of mattresses leaning against the wall, and a bouquet of halogen floor lamps gathered in the middle of the room, the sort that heat up to three thousand degrees and routinely incinerate whole apartment complexes.

“Whew,” Claudia said, walking toward the back.

“What are we here to pick up?” Rebekah asked, trying to imagine Hazel purchasing any of this kindling. “It can’t be much; she told us we didn’t need the truck.”

“No, it’s just some boxes, and a trunk I’ve got set up on a handcart. Even the trunk isn’t worth anything; it’s pressed paper, like the kind a kid might take to college.”

“Wha—what would Hazel want with it?” Rebekah put her hands in her pockets, shivered slightly.

Myles shook his head. “Couldn’t tell you. You want me to roll the trunk out? It doesn’t weigh much of anything.”

“No, we’ll do it,” Rebekah said, watching Claudia load the last of the boxes in the backseat of the Jeep, parked half a block away. She rolled the handcart most of the way down the sidewalk, where Claudia lifted the trunk as if it were empty.

“Thank you, Myles,” Rebekah said, returning the cart to him. “It was nice of you to meet us here at—you know, this hour. And all.”

“Nah, my pleasure. I’ll be glad to get this place cleaned out. It’s on the market, if you know anyone who’s interested in buying property in a ghost town.”

“Maybe you should hold on to it, turn it into a tourist attraction,” Rebekah said, turning as Claudia walked up beside her.

“It was a pleasure meeting you,” Myles said, taking Rebekah’s hand. He turned to Claudia. “And you, too, sir.”

Claudia smiled, said, “Likewise.”

1968

It was the year the cat arrived. In the late summer: Hazel had been at the kitchen sink, cleaning up her dinner dishes, complaining (inwardly, as no one else cared) that the slate sink, original to the house, had been designed for midgets. It made no sense to her. The ceilings all soared, and the fixtures were so low Hazel had to bend over to reach the dishes she was washing. And the house had been built when
Lincoln
was president.

“I’m going, and don’t think you or Mother neither one will stop me.” Edie was sitting at the table, flipping through the novel Hazel had been reading with dinner. Edie wasn’t reading it, merely looking for all the scandalous bits.

“Leave my book alone.”

Edie read a section, whistled. “Hazey, I didn’t know you had it in you.”

Hazel turned and threw her wet washcloth at Edie’s head. “You’re too young to even understand what you’re reading. Put it
down.”

Edie caught the washcloth, tossed it back good-naturedly. “‘I am Myra Breckinridge whom no man will ever possess.’ It doesn’t
sound
sexy.” She closed the book, sighed. “I’m going is all I’m saying.”

Hazel straightened her back, spoke to the wall in front of her. “I wouldn’t stop you. I wouldn’t even try to dissuade you. I think it’s the perfect place for you, maybe the
only
place for you.”

“But not for you. Because you’re old. And ruined. You’re ruined by living here with Mother and Daddy, living as their slave person, and you can’t see the truth when it’s right in front of you, you can’t see what’s beautiful nor true either one.”

Hazel turned and looked at her sister, considered an act of violence involving the skillet from which she was trying to wash out the remains of her grilled-cheese sandwich. Edie had one leg tucked up under her voluminous patchwork skirt, and she was twirling a length of blond hair.

Hazel put the skillet down in the sink. “Edie,” she said, pulling out a chair and sitting down across from her sister, “you are seventeen years old.”

“Nearly eighteen.”

“Actually, no. You’re seventeen. Go to San Francisco if you wish. Attend this Be-In or Wallow-In or whatever it’s called. Take your place among the unwashed. But don’t tell me I don’t understand the counterculture because I choose to live like an adult.”

“Who gets to say what’s adult? That’s the question you ought to ask yourself.”

Hazel rested her head in her hands. “Adults determine what is adult, and nature determines it, Edie. Listen,” she said, leaning toward her sister, who only periodically made eye contact with anyone these days, and rarely with Hazel, “have you read the Port Huron Statement? Do you understand what the Marxists are arguing, or what’s at stake with the Cuban revolutionaries? Do you in any way, Edie, understand that dressing a certain way and smoking pot until you’re blind
is not the point
?”

“I understand that I want to be free and I believe in Love. Isn’t that the point?”

“Hello, girls,” Caroline said, walking through the door that separated the kitchen from the clinic, studying a patient’s chart. “I trust you’ve eaten.”

“Can I fix you something?” Hazel stood, still watching Edie. Maybe it was the nature of their relationship, or perhaps there was actually something unique in her sister, but Little Edna was not transparent. Her stubbornness was so complete it seemed a form of stupidity; her resistance defied reason in the same way certain animals would rather drown or die in a fire than allow themselves to be saved.

“No, thank you, dear, I’ll…what is that?”

Hazel followed her mother’s gaze and saw a cat sitting by the radiator. He looked first at Caroline and then at Hazel with eyes the color of pumpkins. He was young, black, with a white blaze on his chest. A slight underbite revealed his pink lower lip.

Edie had risen from her chair, was leaning over the table. “That’s not one of our barn cats.”

“How did it get in?” Caroline walked back through the kitchen door, glanced at the outside entrance. “The door to the outside is closed.”

Hazel walked toward the cat, careful not to alarm him. He watched her, blinking slowly. He yawned. She knelt in front of him, held her palm flat a foot above his head, as she’d seen Finney do, and the cat sat up on his hind legs like a squirrel, stretching out his long neck until his nose bumped Hazel’s hand. Hazel lifted him up, settled him into the crook of her arm, where he curled up, purring. He was thin, long-legged, probably hungry, but his nose was cold and wet and his eyes were clear.

“He came in on his own,” Hazel said, rubbing the top of his head with her nose.

“Well, put him back out,” Caroline said, looking back at her chart. “Your father doesn’t like animals anywhere near the clinic, and certainly not in the house.”

“He came in on his own,” Hazel said again, not looking at her mother. “If I put him out he’ll just come back in.”

“Hazel?” Caroline’s voice was chilled, with a slight edge of confusion. “I asked you to put the cat outside.”

“I heard you,” Hazel answered, scratching the underside of the cat’s chin, causing him to close his eyes. “But this is my cat, and I’m keeping him.”

“I beg your—”

“This is Mercury, this is my cat, and I’m keeping him.” Hazel turned and headed toward the servants’ staircase. “Edie, open a can of tuna and put it in a bowl for me. Bring some water, too. We’ll be in my room.”

“My sister
disobeys,
” Hazel heard Edie say behind her. “Far out.”

By December 23 of that year, Edie was long gone—swallowed up in the great experiment. First they heard Berkeley, then Haight-Ashbury, and finally word reached them that she’d been spotted on a commune in Vancouver, using the name Karma. Hazel knew it might be Edie in Vancouver, or it might be someone who looked like her, given that
everyone
that year looked like her.

True to his name, Mercury came and went without the permission of anyone, Hazel included. She could close him in her room while she was working, and come up between patients and find him gone. Later he would reappear on the front porch, scratching behind an ear or rubbing a paw over his eyes like a sleepy baby. He had grown, become dense and languid, loved only Hazel. When she walked down the lane to the mailbox, he walked behind her like a dog; when she spoke to him, he appeared to listen. Hazel felt herself becoming foolish, becoming that sort of woman, the one who never leaves home, who is bound forever to her mother and to her mother’s secrets. Hazel loved the cat, she understood, too fiercely, he was too much her companion. Nights when he went to bed before her, she could slip in beside him and he would conform to her, and in this way—the warmth, the fit, the drowsy lingering in the mornings—the years with that cat were the closest she ever came to a good marriage. And yet she would have denied him his liberty had there been a way to do so, had he not been so peaceably defiant, a magnanimous animal, a credit to his species. Caroline and Albert said nothing. They had lost one daughter already.

In the beginning, working alone, Caroline had not known how to keep records of her individual patients. She was not by nature a deceitful person, and when Hazel joined her, she had been surprised to find that Caroline had more or less told the truth in the charts of the women she saw after hours, even though most of them used false names. Hazel decided to create a code known only to herself and her mother, and to transcribe her mother’s charts into it before burning the originals in the fire ring beside the barn.

Why keep records at all? Caroline had been elusive on the subject, and Hazel suspected that her mother’s professionalism was, in this case, a liability of destructive proportions. She had spent hours begging her mother to do away with every trace of her work, but Caroline was firm. Hazel consulted her father’s books on the code breakers of World War II to invent the system she would use, and only when it was complete did Caroline admit that she intended to donate the records to an appropriate medical research library, perhaps to Indiana University Bloomington, at the end of her life or at such a time as they might be used to better understand the past.

Caroline took cash from the women if they offered it, but asked for nothing if nothing was offered. The money went into a safety-deposit box registered in Caroline’s and Hazel’s names jointly, out of the way of the government, the husband, the father. Left alone there, the money grew and grew.

Every number, every word—even the vital signs—were a code for something else, and only Hazel and her mother knew what it was. And Finney. But Finney would never tell.

Her parents had gone to the Elks Club Christmas party, an event wherein the men, Hazel imagined, flushed with county power and whiskey sodas, moved in a parade of self-congratulation, stuffed into their best suits like meat in casing. The women stayed at the tables, smoking, making daring pronouncements about the men, their marriages, their disappointing children, all of which would be regretted (or forgotten) the following day. And at eleven o’clock something happened—or maybe it was eleven minutes past eleven—there was an Elk call, a silent thrill in the blood, that caused all the men to stand and chant their Elk oath. This was the part that baffled Hazel: the swearing of an oath to anything, to anyone, when the truth or reliability of such an act could not be trusted even at the moment of its issuance. There was no such thing as ‘Elk,’ and thus no possible reason to swear fealty to it. The men were not pledging themselves to one another, as the slightest downturn in fortune or small-town propriety could cause a man to be exiled without hesitation. Albert’s reasons for standing at the sacred hour and repeating the primitive mantra were clear—he would do anything, he had already done everything a man could do, to proclaim the real estate of Hopwood County his fiefdom.

It was Caroline whom Hazel least understood; Caroline, who was, in her way, the most subversive person Hazel had ever met, and who was, on a steady basis, subverting the moral code her husband seemed to embody. Caroline never shirked what her community declared her duty, and every year she attended the Elks Club Christmas party in her elegant black dress. She locked the holiday pearls around her throat, touched the upsweep of her hair for reassurance, and went gliding out the door into the dark and cold anticipation of the soul’s nativity, lying, lying, lying.