CELIA STOOD IN THE KITCHEN. The sound of the radio and the crackle of bacon frying. Green tomatoes lay sliced on a plate next to the stove. When the bacon was crisp she laid the slices out on a paper towel and then she dipped the tomato slices in milk and then flour before setting them into the castiron pan with the hot bacon grease. Smoke and hisses came from the pan and she listened for Colburn. He had been walking through the house, calling out all he noticed that needed doing. A sagging strip of crown molding in the hallway. The paint flaking on the ceiling in the living room. All your windows need stripping and caulking. A couple of spindles are loose on the staircase rail. The floor needs leveling. The whole place needs a paint job. She told him to get started when he wanted but this is what an old house looks like. At least my old house.
She turned the tomatoes. Listened for his next suggestion. But he was quiet. She lifted the tomatoes from the pan and set them with the bacon. She waved a towel around at the smoke in the kitchen and clicked off the radio and then she stepped out into the hallway.
She found him in her mother’s reading room, standing at the trunk with the lid open. A piece of paper in each hand.
“What is all this?” he asked.
“Stuff,” she said. “Just stuff my mother wrote down.”
“It’s all ripped up.”
“I know.”
She moved to him and took the strips of paper and she dropped them into the trunk and closed the lid.
“Come on,” she said. “Let’s eat.”
He ignored her and moved over to a bookshelf and he ran his finger along the spines.
“These are all over the place,” he said. He touched books on astrology, the occult, black magic, Eastern religions, voodoo, the saints.
“She was interested in lots of stuff.”
“Whatever they wanted to hear.”
“She wasn’t like that.”
“Then what was she like?”
“She was a believer.”
“In what?”
“In possibility, I think? That there are other things out there we can’t see or even know. Things that guide us and connect us. Save us.”
Colburn crossed the room and stood at the window.
“What about this valley?” he said.
“What about it?”
“You told me people say things about it.”
“Some people. There’s stories about voices.”
“Voices?”
“Voices or songs or whatever coming from the valley. Mostly it’s always been people who lived out here by it claiming such things.”
“Did your mother hear the voices?”
Yes, she started to say.
“I don’t know. You’d have to ask her. Come on. I’m hungry.”
She grabbed his hand and pulled him along. Out of the room and down the hallway and into the kitchen. They sat down in highback chairs at a table for two.
“There used to be a spring out there under all that,” she said. “It twisted way down to the bottom. When we were kids we would go underneath and try to scare the hell out of each other. You can pretty much move underneath the vines if you know what you’re doing. We found it then. I’ll show you.”
“I’m not going under there.”
“Why not? You scared?”
“I’m an adult.”
“Same thing.”
The freckles of her cheeks and nose rose with her grin. She sipped from her coffee mug.
“There’s other stuff,” she said.
“Like what?”
“A bunch of dogs disappeared in there. Not just old stray dogs that you see one day and not the next but it was dogs from town. Something would draw them out this way and they’d sniff about the edge of the kudzu and then wander in and that was it. Me and a couple of friends used to sit in chairs in the yard with some beer and watch. Here would come some dog trotting right alongside the road and then it’d go right in like somebody was calling it. Dog goes in. Dog never comes out. I bet I saw it happen three or four times.”
“I almost believe that,” he said.
“Maybe it was a killer dogcatcher living in that house under there.”
“What house?”
“Right about down in the bottom of the valley there’s this pretty wide hump with something straight sticking up. That’s a house and chimney. My grandmother used to say sometimes you could see smoke still rising from the chimney if you looked out there the right time of day.”
Colburn shook his head. Cut a slice of green tomato and stuck it in his mouth. He chewed and gazed out of the window above the kitchen sink.
“What time of day are you supposed to look?” he asked.
“Around dark.”
“You mean twilight.”
“I suppose.”
“Everything looks smoky in twilight.”
“I’m just telling you.”
“You need to get out of here,” he said.
“Out of my house?”
“Not your house. This town.”
“How so?”
“You just need to get out of here. Go somewhere.”
“And do what?”
He didn’t answer. And then she pointed at her head and said I’m so far gone already. I’m in a tent on the African savannah and I’m riding roller coasters built along the beach and I’m drinking hot rum sitting next to a fire with a white and frozen world all around me. Just because I’m here it doesn’t mean I’m here. He grinned. Something in him wanting to steal her. To keep her for himself.
“Show me,” he said.
“Show you what?”
“The spring. The house down in the valley.”
“Don’t make fun.”
“Then show me.”
“It’s all grown up to get to the spring and the house is way the hell down in there.”
“Where was the spring?”
“You go in under the trees on the other side of the shed.”
“Come show me.”
“I’m eating.”
He put down his fork. Sipped coffee. Wiped his mouth with his napkin.
“I got to go anyway,” he said.
“Where?”
“There’s only three places to go. Here or the bar or my building. I’m here now and the bar is locked.”
She laughed.
He stood from the table and then he leaned down and kissed her on the side of the head. Quick and awkward and she looked up almost surprised. He walked out of the back door and he paused to look at the shed. To look at the gathering of trees that stood behind it and the maul of vines that covered them. Then he walked around the house and climbed in the truck. But before he cranked it he reached into his pocket and took out the torn piece of notebook paper he had taken from the trunk. He unfolded it and read, making sure it said what he thought it said when he had heard Celia coming down the hall and he quickly tucked it away. The handwriting was sloppy and manic but it was legible enough and the words spoke to him from some deranged moment of time gone by, holding him now in breathless curiosity.
Somethins out there.