BEN APPROACHED THE HOUSE FROM further down the road. He’d parked well out of sight, then cut up through the woods, pushed through the brambles and hobblebush, clambered over the degraded logging debris, for a moment wondering if he’d gotten his direction right. Here in the deep woods, mid-summer afternoon, it was easy to miscalculate. Deer flies assailed him and when he caught one against his cheek, it was a pleasure to feel it pop between his fingers.
At last, he reached the pond, wildly ringed with reeds, and from here he could discern the old path, kept worn now by deer and moose. He wondered where Ammon had been putting his traps, and why. No one cared about coyotes up here, and the price for pelts was nickels on the dollar, so it was likely just spite. Spite. It would be on his gravestone: May he rest in spite.
Ten minutes along the trail and Ben glimpsed the house through the thick stand of trees. He felt his ears attune to the possibility of human voices. But it was quiet, only the tilting lilt of wood thrush and the insistent hammer of a downy woodpecker. As the trail opened into the overgrown cow pasture, Ben became more discreet, hugging the edge of the open land, weaving in and out of the screening trees.
Her car was gone, as he’d calculated. He had an hour for her to get to Kamp Wahoo and back.
His key worked; there’d been no need to change the lock. Junkies from town would simply smash a window if they wanted to get in. Everyone else either came with a key and a reason, or stayed away. He stood for a while in the mud room, listening, but there was nothing to hear. The walls were mute, as they had always been.
In the deep silence of the still house, he moved swiftly from room to room. Kay’s possessions and those of her children lay on the surfaces, a dense residue, while the obsessive order underneath remained undisturbed. The order was a symptom of Frank’s madness. Or perhaps, Ben mused now, the opposite: his attempt at sanity—to control what he could control. The crazy tidiness was the tick-tock; for the broken bits were all the way inside Frank, the tiny springs and screws and levers, bent and smashed, deep down.
He went upstairs, moving efficiently through the bedrooms, and at last to the room Kay had claimed. There was a stack of books on the table beside her bed, thick novels, a copy of Africa Today.
Also: a bottle of skin lotion with a nice lemony scent which he rubbed into his worn hands. He wondered if she rubbed this onto her scar. What had happened to her? It looked as if she’d been sawn in half, a magic trick gone wrong. He was almost reassured by the scar. She was damaged. He sat on the bed, and despite himself, leaned over to smell the pillow.
He imagined her, head thrown back, lips parted, taking him into her. He imagined himself the man he might be for her. “Shit into one hand and wish into the other,” Ammon liked to say. “See which fills up first.”
Focusing on her desk, he considered turning on her computer. But he knew very little about them. He worried that she would know someone had trespassed. He flipped through a stack of notebooks, frayed and worn, certain pages stained with what looked like wine and maybe coffee. He couldn’t read the writing, it was shorthand, only occasionally strange words: Owale Ndugu, Lira, Juba, Lokchoggio, Mwangi Micah, General Christmas, Gol. Were these names, places, codes? What was she doing with all these words, these pages and pages of notes? She was a journalist. Was she writing a story? About him, about Frank, their grubby drug dealing?
On the floor, under the desk, was a box containing more notepads. He realized they were dated—a start date, an end date—some reaching back into the mid-’90s.
He pulled the one with only a start date, two weeks ago, flipped through. And there, nestled among the impenetrable squiggly lines, were names:
• Frank, Maria Wilson
• Ben Comeau
• Paul Steiner
• Ammon
Was it possible she was a DEA agent? Not a journalist. All this was a ruse. Did she even have kids? Undercover bitches. His heart was pounding. There was roaring in his ears, and he had the idea that what he needed to do was go and get Jake and run, out West, maybe Canada. Right now, forget Slim, forget Shevaunne. But he knew in the next breath the impossibility. He needed money, they needed money, they needed a fresh start—a life, free and clear; not hiding under freeways, not the cash-only jobs even illegal Mexicans wouldn’t take. He’d never wanted anything, and now he did, and what he wanted was simple and wildly complicated; he wanted to be safe, to be quiet, hollowed in, he and the boy, the days and years before them, Jake in a cap and gown graduating from high school, and when he threw the cap in the air it twirled in slow motion.
Ben regarded Kay’s notebooks. He was like one of Ammon’s coyotes: he could sense the trap, he knew it was there, underneath the leaves, the dead bracken. But he had to keep walking on the path, there was no other way.
Leaving the basement until last, he hesitated at the top of the stairs. There was nothing to fear. He opened the door and he hated this house and he turned on the light and he hated this house and he took a step downward and then another. The inventiveness of Ammon, he thought, so inventive, so creative, all that effort, and then he pressed his hands against his forehead, as if it might physically stop his thinking. It sort of worked, his mind spool merely spluttered with the squealing, the shapes moving. The rest was mercifully redacted.
At last he was in the basement, the solid floor beneath his feet. Frank and Maria had cleaned, painted, ordered it, in their Tyvek suits and masks, spraying first bleach then this sterile white. Ben swelled with respect for Frank, the courage it must have taken him to come down here, let alone attempt repossession.
Right away he saw the plastic tubs. One wasn’t perfectly square on the shelf, so Ben knew someone other than Frank had touched it. He peeked inside: Frank’s mother’s prize-winning quilts, Maria’s recipe books. He hadn’t known she’d used books; she’d always struck him as improvising or remembering, her ingredients spread out on the counter, her mortar and pestle, her jars of spices, the bunches of herbs. The healing power of Maria, as if stews were magic potions. Maria, who had painted and scrubbed and bleached, who had hired a Mexican witch from Littleton to exorcise the house’s bad spirits. If anyone could have mended Frank, it would have been that small, round woman who somehow managed to love Frank or some approximation of love, kindness, and loyalty, whatever the trade to bring her boys here.
Straightening the tubs, he thought about her tamales, something he’d never eaten before, the steamed cornmeal surrounding green chile and melting cheese and tender beef, all wrapped so delicately in corn wrappers.
“Te gusta?” she’d giggled, serving him three more. “Eat, eat, Ben, I find you a wife, like me, good Mexican lady.”
Ben checked his watch, realized he’d been longer than he meant. He climbed the stairs, left through the kitchen. Outside, the shadows grew bolder. A flock of jays passed overhead, their sharp shrieks grating the late afternoon. Kay would be back soon. He could almost feel her. He almost thought he might stay, he could convince himself she was a lonely housewife here on vacation with her kids, that was all, and he was her lover; she was here because of the house, and it was a different house with her in it.
But the house was only one house. It had only one owner, no matter the occupants.
Ben turned and jogged back down through the overgrown cow pasture. Just before he entered the woods, he glanced back, upstairs, the bathroom window. Frank was hiding there, tucked into his cupboard, and Ammon was looking for him. The pigs were ready, the pigs were waiting.