5.01
i’m still here.
Divine
the water wasn’t cold.
Colin
four weeks and four days after I began the latest version of my novel, which is to say, thirty-two days after Lucy Robinson was kidnapped, I finished it. I finished it in the afternoon, after my morning quarrel with Cora and before my evening quarrel with Divine; in between those two events I managed, finally, to write the scene that led up to and concluded with the last line that had been eluding me for over twenty years, and as soon as I finished typing it I packed the whole thing up, the handwritten manuscript, the various pen-scratched typed copies, and the final, finished version, into several cardboard boxes, and I was still packing many hours later, when I got the call from Wade, telling me about Divine. I will admit that for a moment I thought of ignoring his summons; what more could I do, I asked myself, hadn’t I already done enough? But eventually reason—I was going to say compassion, but I don’t think, really, that it was compassion—won out, and I left my boxes behind, went to see what aid I could give to Divine, or, failing that, to Wade. I was gone for less than an hour—what could I do, after all; hadn’t I already done enough?—but still, it was time enough: when I returned to the limestone house, my manuscript was gone.
5.04
on the morning of our eighth day I left him. He was easy to leave. He was just a large dark figure, arms and legs sprawled across white sheets that had gone yellow from too many washings. He snored as I dressed, snored as I wrote Thank you in the light coating of dust on his mantel beneath the smiling pictures of the two girls whose names I still did not know, snored as I opened the front door and put the morning paper on the couch. Everything was fine until then; everything, I mean, made sense—far too much sense—but as soon as I left his house I got lost. I knew where the corner grocery was, I knew the café that made the best ribs and the café that made the best pie, and I knew the way to the incredibly long and narrow cinema whose tiny screen seemed no larger than a television’s when you sat all the way in the back row, where we had sat, but still, I got lost because I wasn’t looking for any of those things. I was looking for my car. It took me nearly an hour to find it, and as I wandered his neighborhood I watched for him nervously. I didn’t know how I would explain myself to him should he find me, should my feet betray me and lead me back to his house. How could I tell his stubbled face and bumpy flattop that I had only wanted to know what they would feel like, how could I tell him that even after seven days of cooking and eating with him, of watching TV, of laundry and vacuuming and not one but two new ties, after seven days of all that I would still remember not him but the feel of him, the little spiraling hairs of his stomach pressing into mine, the broad soft fullness of his lips sucking on my skin. How could I tell him I was ashamed, not of him or of what I had done with him, but of myself, of the way I had thought of him. I had succumbed finally, after all these years: I had thought of him as black before I had thought of him as a man.
And then, when I found my car, I also found a note tucked under the windshield wiper. I thought it was a ticket at first—it was tucked into a clear plastic envelope in the way that parking violations are, to protect them from rain and snow—but when I pulled the paper out and unfolded it I found only seven words written there. My name is Wallace Anderson, the note read. Goodbye Webbie.
5.05
Justin
abandonment is impossible. Memory persists, despite all the odds, despite all our efforts. Amnesia is like the color black: it effaces by inclusion. Excluding nothing, no one thing can come to prominence. And so I return to my abandoned beginning, my false start: If it’s after midnight it’s my birthday. If it’s after midnight then I have somehow managed to live for twenty-one years, and now I embark on my twenty-second. For the past five of those years Colin has orbited me like the moon orbits a planet, and what seems like years and years before Colin I orbited another man like a planet orbits a sun. But now I declare myself to be a comet, a celestial body with its own path, neither dependent upon nor depended on by anything else. This book is a telescope. Look through it; look for me: my bright and shining eye, my halo, my tail, stretching out behind me. You might view that tail years after I’ve passed by; I might have imploded, exploded, collided with something else and disintegrated, I might have run out of gas or, who knows, I might be blazing still, but in any case my tail lingers on, fading, but fading so gradually that you’ll never know if what you see is real, or merely a shadow burned into your eye.
5.06
Divine
then it was cold. Goddamn but it was cold. I guess it must-a took a second for the water to soak through my clothes or something. I mean I let go-a the rope, I heard the ice break, I knew the water had to be cold if there was ice on top of it, but all the same there was a good long moment before I felt it, felt the cold or even felt the wet for that matter. For a second I just felt suspended, loose and slippery and all over the place like a jellyfish, and then but suddenly then the cold of the water pushed—no, not pushed, squeezed, it squeezed through my clothes like a vise grip, and my like arms and legs snapped shut and I rolled into a ball and fell head over heels and I just sank like a stone. I mean I tell you what: it was like the devil’s hand reached up outta hell and pulled me straight to his bosom. But he don’t scare me, the devil, or the thought of hell. In the space of three years I’d lost Ratboy, I’d lost my parents and Wade and now I’d lost Colin Nieman, I’d even lost the name I was born with, and somewhere in there it seemed like I’d lost my soul too. If Satan wanted a piece-a my ass, well, he was just gonna have to take his place in line is all I have to say, cause I can’t give him what don’t belong to me no more.
5.07
Colin
myra robinson had holed up in her house since the February night on which she had destroyed her feet. Divine had it from T.V. Daniels that after the box containing Lucy’s severed fingertips had appeared she no longer dared open her mailbox; she never answered her phone either, and one day in late spring I called her, only to find that it had been disconnected. Later that afternoon I drove past her house and noticed that her car was fast disappearing under a tangle of quick-growing itch ivy, and when I saw that I made an arrangement with Vera Gatlinger at the I.G.A. to have groceries delivered to Myra’s home, and after a little hemming and hawing Vera let me know that Myra had already made arrangements with Joe Brznski, the proprietor of Sloppy Joe’s, to receive a bottle of Jack Daniel’s every Monday. Joe and Vera and T.V. were the only people in Galatia who had any occasion to visit Myra—certainly Lawman Brown, who had made absolutely no headway on the case, avoided her house—and they all told the same story to anyone who asked: Myra was doing nothing. Absolutely nothing. She sat in an odd electronic rocking chair that Bea had given her, her lifeless feet suspended on the footrest in their orthopedic boots, and if anyone dared mention Lucy’s name to her she would smile brightly and mumble something about someone named Angela; she would accept the whiskey or the food or the mail that was offered her, and even as she vacantly drank or ate or read she would ask her benefactors if they knew her beautiful Angela, her angel, her little gift from God.
Well. I didn’t manufacture a new name for my missing book, but I was, all the same, possessed by the same inertia which had taken over Myra’s life. Whoever had stolen my novel had taken not just the final version but all the manuscripts and notes and dribs and drabs that had led up to it, leaving me with not one single physical reminder of what I had written. For a week after it disappeared I could not even get out of bed—I suspect that had as much to do with what happened to Divine, and with the fact that I was also no longer welcome at Cora’s or Wade’s or anywhere else in town—but when seven days of bed rest had done nothing more than put five pounds around my waist, I got up, I took my morning run, I made my own coffee and took my place at my desk, and then I did nothing.
For eight or ten or twelve hours a day, for five months, all through the bitterness of winter and the blandness of spring and the beginning of summer, I did nothing. Oh, I suppose I didn’t just sit there. While it was still cold I would build a lovely fire in the fireplace; the room’s bookshelves had been filled with thousands of leather-bound worm-eaten volumes when we’d moved in, and it was these I burned. At first I checked the books to make sure the pages inside were actually ruined, but after a while I just grabbed them indiscriminately and threw them into the flames with a little malevolent laugh. The damp bindings and mushy pages didn’t burn all that well, so keeping the fire alive took some effort; often I would have to prime the flames with a few fresh, crisp, dry—and blank, I must tell you, painfully blank—sheets of my own writing paper
Then spring came, a tiny two-week affair in April that yielded almost immediately to the listless ninety-degree days of an early Kansas summer, and when it grew too warm for a fire I found other things to do with my time, other invented tasks that would take me out from behind my desk, where I started each morning by typing the words The last line of this story is inevitable, and where I ended each evening by typing the words I never saw him again. That was all I typed, each day for five months, because even though I could recall each and every scene that had occurred in my novel with the sort of precise detail with which victims of car crashes remember the last few moments before their accidents—I felt the enveloping warmth that surrounded the narrator’s body as he swam in Otto’s healing sphere; felt, deep in the pit of my stomach, his terror when he discovers the pyramid of discarded books—I still could not remember a single one of the words I had used to describe these scenes, and it seemed to me that unless I could exactly duplicate my missing manuscript then I would have . . . what? I would have failed. Failed what or failed whom I didn’t know, and so I sat there, taunted by those first and last sentences, lost in a silence as labyrinthine as Myra’s and as vacant as Justin’s, until finally night fell, and under cover of darkness Divine would emerge from wherever he had been hiding in the house or the fields like a copper-colored cocoa-buttered ghost. Divine. He coiled his fragrant, flexible arms around me like a memory, kissed me softly atop my big bald useless head, he cooed sweet nothings in my ears with the softened sweetened voice of the dead, and then, for the duration of the night at least, I let myself get lost in him.
5.08
thin, frail, sweating, the tiny form of Rosemary Krebs leaned into an overfilled grocery cart. She was so caught up in her struggle that she was oblivious to the eyes of the three or four other women in the grocery store, who all watched her with amused and slightly spiteful smiles on their faces, and I was no exception.
I had been back in Galatia for less than an hour. I was buying the ingredients for the winter stew my father had asked me to make the week before.
Rosemary Krebs had made the mistake of wearing a cream-colored silk suit to do her shopping, and she was sweating so profusely that faint stains were visible at her underarms and the small of her back, and a fur stole hung off one shoulder like a misstuck tail. Her low heels gave her feet no purchase on the I.G.A.’s linoleum floor, slick with melted snow, and sometimes her legs slipped about so wildly that she seemed like a two-tailed spermatozoon.
She seemed to sense eyes on her, and she looked up suddenly. Seeing me, she released her cart and straightened to her full height; the cart’s handle came to her sternum. She was panting slightly, but still managed to speak in her soft even voice. “Webbie Greeving,” she said, “good evening.”
Sometimes you know things you don’t know you know. Sometimes you do things and you don’t know the reason why. “Would you like a hand?” I heard myself saying, and my own expression must have been as surprised as Rosemary Krebs’s.
“Beg pardon?”
“It looked like you were struggling.”
I had come close to her. I could smell her perfume, and, barely, her sweat. I thought, This is what the Mayor smells after they fuck. Some part of me—not my mind—remembered Wallace when I thought that, and I shook myself slightly.
Rosemary Krebs waited for my spell to pass and when it did she was smiling her politic smile, and I doubted that she and her husband had ever fucked. “A lady doesn’t struggle, Webbie, although sometimes a lady does have . . . difficulties.”
“Yes, well,” I said, and then, catching sight of my father’s stew ingredients in my own cart, I said, “If you’re done shopping, perha—I mean, maybe you’d let me push your cart up to Vera.”
Within her tiny chest Rosemary Krebs’s shrunken heart beat a dozen strokes; my own heart seemed to beat slower and slower, until finally she spoke.
“Why, thank you, Webbie. That would be most appreciated.”
Vera looked at me as if I’d grown a third eye and a second nose as I wheeled Rosemary Krebs’s cart to her register, Rosemary Krebs a step in front of me, like a good Muslim leading his wife. Without asking, I began to unload Rosemary Krebs’s groceries onto the conveyor belt, and Vera, after a further speechless pause, began to ring them up.
“Sure is a lotta groceries, Mrs. Krebs,” I said.
“Phyneas and I are entertaining at the weekend. A belated New Year’s festivity, if you know what I mean.”
I put a head of broccoli on the belt.
“Belated?”
Rosemary Krebs’s smile was nearly beatific. “After the fact,” she said.
I put another head of broccoli on the belt, a handful of spring onions.
“I declare, Mrs. Krebs,” I said, and then, for good measure, I said it again. “I de-clare, Mrs. Krebs, you are the busiest woman this town has never seen. What with all your community service and the Development Fund and the regular business of taking care-a a man, it’s a wonder you find the time to throw so many parties.”
“It is difficult,” Rosemary Krebs conceded, as if forced to do so.
“And the food,” I said. “Mmmm-mmmm good.”
“Well, we women just have to be a bit more resourceful than our menfolk.” She laughed briefly, and when I looked up I saw that she looked not at me but at Vera, but Vera wasn’t having any of it. She blindly punched numbers into the cash register and stared at me over the top of her reading glasses, and I returned her gaze but kept my face as neutral as I could.
“Vera,” I said, “when did pot roast get up to twenty-five dollars a pound?”
Rosemary Krebs looked alarmed. “Excuse me?”
Vera started visibly, then busily scanned the long tape hanging from the register. “I’m sure it’s just a keying error, Mrs. Krebs.”
“Two-fifty I think is the price,” I said, and as Vera voided out the sale I gave Mrs. Krebs a knowing smile. The cart was unloaded by then, and I moved to the other end of the checkout counter. “Do you like paper and plastic, Mrs. Krebs? Or just plastic?”
“Just paper,” Rosemary Krebs said, her thin voice filled with authority. “And I always double-bag.”
“Of course.”
Rosemary Krebs leafed through the television supplement idly, indolently, sometimes glancing at her watch or at the other women in the store while I filled her cart with brown-bagged groceries. Vera was ringing up Tamara Atkins, Lee Anne’s mother, and Rosemary Krebs and I faced each other over her cart.
“Mrs. Krebs,” I said hesitantly, “I don’t wish to seem forward . . .”
I let my words trail off, and Rosemary Krebs, her voice as quiet and eager as a fisherman testing a nibble on a line, said, “Yes?”
“Well, I know you’ve been, you been looking for someone to, um, to do some work for you. Around your house, I mean.”
Again, Rosemary Krebs allowed herself only the one word, but a slight tremor in her voice added an extra syllable. “Ye-es.”
“Well, truth is, taking care of, care-a my . . . daddy don’t take up nearly all my time, and, well, Christmas time always lets me know that I could sure use some extra pocket money just like everybody else.”
A trace of suspicion limned Rosemary Krebs’s face. “I thought you worked down to the municipal library.”
“That’s volunteer work actually,” I said, and waved a hand. “Besides, those books ain’t going nowhere. Not round here anyway.”
Rosemary Krebs paused a moment. In a tone of mild reproach she said, “You shouldn’t underestimate the power of the written word, Webbie. It can change your life.” I just smiled at her while the cogs and wheels whirred in her brain, and at length she spoke in a voice that rang out above the cash register’s renewed clanging. “Webbie Greeving, are you asking me for a job?”
Vera stopped ringing again, and this time she turned and stared openly. Tamara Atkins, less bold, searched for a penny at the bottom of her voluminous purse.
“Why, yes, ma’am, I do believe I am.”
Rosemary Krebs peered at me intently, incredulously, her face animated by suspicion—and also by a delight so undisguised that it took all my effort to keep the loathing out of my own expression.
After a moment she shook her head as if to clear it. “My goodness, just look at the time. It’s nearly the Sabbath. Hardly the time to discuss business.” Her voice had changed suddenly, slipping into the tones that generations of her foremothers must have used when they addressed their maids and slaves. “Webbie, why don’t you drop by my house Monday morning, and we’ll discuss this further.”
“Eleven o’clock all right, Mrs. Krebs?”
“Eleven o’clock would be fine.”
She put her hands on her cart then, attempted to turn it. It didn’t budge. Slipping quickly between her and the cart, I turned it around. Rosemary Krebs was already walking toward the door, and to her back I said, “Allow me.”
5.09
Justin
only an infant can be among people and be silent. Even then it must tolerate the big-toothed mouths of adults cooing words and half-words and quarter-words over its head: “ma-ma, ma-ma,” “da-da, da-da,” “coo-coo, coo-coo,” “ca-ca, ca-ca.” But if you stop talking that doesn’t mean you stop thinking, which is what I really wanted to do, and in the first few weeks after the attack, when the memory of it wouldn’t go away, and the sights and sounds and smells of it wouldn’t go away, and when, especially, the words wouldn’t go away—the words my mind added to the too-silent scene, the words I used, as if to write the scene out in my head—I almost repented of my vow, because after I found that I couldn’t swallow the words then I wanted to spit them out. But I knew it would do no good, it would make no difference. Words hadn’t saved my mother, hadn’t stopped my father, words hadn’t kept me innocent or restored health or life to any of my dying or dead friends, and I knew that even if I had been able to speak on that icy road, to reason or shout or just to beg, it wouldn’t have saved Lucy. And don’t tell me that isn’t what words are meant to do. What else are they for? I tell you: if I could have found the words to fix things, I would have spoken them. It’s not that I wouldn’t speak: it’s just that I no longer knew what to say.
5.10
Divine
somehow i think I managed to give the impression that I was like in love with Colin Nieman, or well at least that I wanted to be in love with him. Well, I didn’t. I wasn’t. I’m not. I mean, whatever I am, I am not now and never was in love with Colin Nieman. But what I did want, back then anyway, when I still wanted things, what I wanted was for him to love me—what I wanted to do was make him love me. Colin was a lot of things, he was beautiful especially, God you can’t imagine how beautiful he was, beautiful and talented and on top of it all he was rich, and despite what I said to him he was a pretty good lay, and for a while I thought he was my ticket outta Galatia. But the one thing he never was and never could-a been was my lover. I mean I guess I could see how someone could love him, but I didn’t. I don’t. And I won’t, not ever, cause that prize belongs to Ratboy.
Ratboy.
He was five feet five inches tall and if he jumped up and down he could just push the scale over one twenty, but he walked with the bow-legged swagger of a horse-breakin’ cowboy twice his size, and if he even thought someone was looking at him funny he’d attack, just like a rat, he told me, hand, hand, foot, foot, tooth. In two years I never saw him win a fight—I never saw him even come close—but I never saw him run away neither. He might be all covered in bruises and blood and barely able to stand or see to swing a punch, but it was always like the other guy who left first, leaving Ratboy kinda wobbling there, yelling with what was left-a his voice, “Yeah, that’s it, you pussy, you run away before I really get mad.” I don’t think I ever saw him without a black eye or dried blood under his nose or a bruise on his body that felt like a orange buried beneath his skin, and then too there was the white scar in the pink of his upper lip from where somebody or other’d introduced his face to the open edge of his locker door. It almost looked like a harelip scar, that scar did, but Ratboy wore each and every one-a his marks with pride. “I sure taught him,” he’d say as I washed out his cuts, sprayed a little Bactine onto the open flesh. “He won’t bother us no more.” He wouldn’t never let me put a Band-Aid on him. “I want em to see my wounds of war,” he said. “I want em all to know what I go through, just for you.”
His real name was Lamoine Wiebe but no one ever called him that. For a long time people called him Dwebey, or just Dwebe, but then somebody or other said that he had kind of a rodent look around the face, kind of a ferret face, kind of a rat’s, and then I don’t know if it was somebody else or if it was Lamoine hisself but pretty soon everybody including Lamoine was calling Lamoine Ratboy.
Ratboy.
My hero.
I was only twelve when it all started, and he was sixteen, but even then I knew he was crazy as a loon. That didn’t mean he wasn’t still my hero, and my lover too.
5.11
he wouldn’t tell anyone what happened. He wouldn’t, I should say, tell me or Wade: he wouldn’t tell us how it was that he drove away from my house early on a January evening wearing a brown and white shearling jacket, a long-sleeved white T-shirt, thin skintight black pants, white socks, and black slip-on shoes; and showed up in the early morning hours at Wade’s house, bereft of jacket and shoes—and, as well, of his car—the remainder of his clothing soaked through with ice-cold water and muddied to a uniform grayish brown. The gel had been doused from his bleached hair, which had dried by the time I arrived and floated off his head in an airy eerie light-filled afro; it ringed his face like a halo when I arrived, and vibrated as he shivered violently on a chair. Wade had got his clothes off him by then, dried him with a towel, covered him with a heavy blanket; the heat was turned up so high that it slammed into me like a wall when I came through the door. His face was streaked with trails of dirt and water; grit was packed under his fingernails, which were wrapped tight around a cup of steaming liquid that he refused to drink, and he refused also to speak, or even to look at us. His lips and the hollows beneath his eyes were still blue, and he stared at a spot that wasn’t in the room. He shook and shivered and shimmered even, seemed almost to be fading away, until finally I pried his cup from his clutching fingers and laid him down on the couch and tucked the blanket deep under the cushion to hold in the warmth, and hold him in place. Wade retreated to a corner as soon as I arrived, a stricken, helpless look on his face, and he stayed there until Divine had fallen asleep, and I looked at him then, across the expanse of Divine’s body—it was not to be the last time I looked at Wade in such a manner—and on that first occasion I said, He’ll be okay, which is not what I said the second time I put Divine’s body between mine and Wade’s. When I returned home, as I said, my novel was gone.
Like me, Divine stayed in bed for a week. His silence was not as complete as Justin’s, but all the same he refused to tell either me or Wade what had happened. I specify us, because I suspected there was one person Divine did tell: the person to whom he spent the next seven days writing a single letter. Wade said that Divine stole one of his sketch pads—Wade used that word; he used the word stole—and he propped it on his knees in bed, and he wrote so slowly and carefully that, according to Wade, it was almost possible to believe he was drawing on the pages, not writing on them. Every so often he ripped a page from the pad and crumpled it up, and these he stuffed in his pillowcase and guarded carefully until, a week after he’d taken to bed, he got out of it. In one hand, Wade told me, he had a single page filled with tiny writing; in the other he had the pillowcase stuffed with his abandoned efforts. He put the former in an envelope, sealed it, addressed it, never once let go of it; he put the latter in a barrel in the back yard and burned them, pillowcase and all. He bathed, groomed, dressed himself, and then he took his letter and Wade’s car and left Wade’s house. He and the car showed up at the limestone house sometime later, but the letter was already gone. He let himself in and made his way to my bedroom, where, smiling mischievously, he did a little striptease for me. He started out silent, but as he danced and stripped he began humming, and then mumbling a little, under his breath, and then singing, and by the time he was naked he was shouting at the top of the lungs. The song he shouted was the “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” each and every verse of it, and when, several hours later, I asked him why he had chosen that song of all songs, he said that it was the only song he knew all the way through, and when I asked him why he knew it all the way through he said, Cause it’s Reverend Abraham’s favorite song, that’s why.
5.12
Webbie
you enter a building, an office, a restaurant, a house, differently as an employee than as a guest. With the exception of the limestone house, compared to which it seemed like nothing more than a prettified farmhouse, the Krebs home was the largest and most opulent in or around Galatia—it was twice as large as my father’s—but in my three or four visits I’d never taken too much notice of it. Usually when I entered that house I was thinking about how quickly I could leave, and after I began working for Rosemary Krebs I still thought about that, but I also thought about how much time I would have to myself while I was inside, and in order to get that time alone I had first to earn Rosemary Krebs’s trust.
Trust is the wrong word—so is earn for that matter—because Rosemary Krebs wasn’t the kind of woman to trust a domestic, let alone a black domestic. Faith? Confidence? I don’t know; trust will have to do. Words slipped away from me when I was around Rosemary Krebs; it was almost frightening, in fact, how easily they vanished. Couldn’t come across like no uppity nigger, could I, with book learnin and too much attitude? For all Rosemary Krebs could tell, the only words I knew were “Yes, Mrs. Krebs” and “No, Mrs. Krebs,” although soon enough I settled into “Yes’m” and “Nome” in my best “I-don’t-know-nothing-bout-birthing-no-babies” mode. Rosemary Krebs seemed not to notice. I suppose, to her, that was just the way a black maid talked.
On that first Monday she opened the front door for me. It took her a long time to open the door, and I realized as I waited that I should have gone to the back door, that servants did not use the front entrance. The bland curves of her face wore an expression that was ever so slightly strained, impatient. She looked at her watch and then she directed me to a tiny room at the back of the house, into which a spindly chair, thin dresser, and narrow bed had been crammed. The bed bothered me. Did she think I was moving in? A black blouse and skirt hung from a peg on the wall. They were old and well-worn but had been made from good heavy cotton, and the apron and cap that accompanied them were fringed with handmade lace; they seemed to me not just antique but anachronistic, and after I had changed into the uniform I surveyed myself in the mirror that hung on the back of the door. I had thought that I would look like an impostor, at best an actress, but I did not. In some way the room and the uniform and the old flecked mirror were more than me, and I looked like a maid.
When I reported back to Rosemary Krebs, she handed me a feather duster, and then she led me through the rooms on the first and second floors, explaining what needed to be done to each room, and when, and where, and how.
“Of course,” she said, when we had finished, “this house was built by Phyneas’s family.”
I wasn’t sure what she meant by of course, but I just said, “Yes, Mrs. Krebs.”
She was silent for a moment, and then she sighed. “Well,” she said, “I did what I could.”
A reply seemed to be expected, so I said, “Yes, Mrs. Krebs,” again.
She scrutinized me then, so hard that I thought I had given something away. But after a moment she only said, “Please arrive in your uniform and ready for work at ten o’clock. And Webbie?”
“Yes, Mrs. Krebs?”
“For the future, may I suggest nylons.” There was no question in her voice, and I didn’t answer. “White,” she said, “no seam. A seam, my mother always said, is unseemly.”
I smiled at her mother’s wisdom—I sensed that I had not yet earned the privilege of laughter—and that, then, was that.
5.13
Justin
by may, wade’s yard was a riot. A sprinkler system on a timer kept it wet all the time, but that was the only care he took with it. Bright green Bermuda grass lay flat, too long and heavy to support itself, and when a breeze blew the grass shimmered silver. A lone catalpa was in the process of shedding mushy white blooms, the barbed-wire fence—a pasture’s fence, not a yard’s—was green with arrow-leaved vines, morning glories perhaps, or maybe some of the local itch ivy, and bedraggled roses rested against the walls of the house. Through it all the wool of a cottonwood stand flew through the air like snow, but the house itself remained spare, white, square, silent.
No one answered when I knocked. I knocked again; again no one answered. Then I went back to the studio. I hadn’t been there since our first visit to the town. It’s hard to call it a studio when it so obviously was what it was: a house. An unloved house, which, for all the enforced sterility of the building Wade actually lived in, was not a feeling that that cube gave off. The screen door whined a reproach as I opened it, the wooden door flinched when I knocked, each of Wade’s footsteps was an audible sore point on the staircase, and when, finally, he opened the door, he regarded me for a long time with an expression that looked very much like regret on his face. His eyes were very clear, but the rest of him was coated in pale dust. Eventually, he spoke.
“I suppose talking to you is pointless, but I’m not very good at mime. Do you want to come in?” He stepped aside and I stepped inside. Wade and the house smelled alike, smelled as he had when I first met him, only more strongly. The chemical odor was almost narcotic, and I found myself inhaling deeply. “I should probably open a window, you’re not used to this,” Wade said, but then, after watching me for a reaction, he said, “Ah, why bother. You know how to open a window.”
He left me then. It surprised me, shocked me even. I don’t know what I’d expected, but I hadn’t expected him to turn his back on me. I wandered the rooms for a little while, looked at all of his beautiful, beautiful paintings. I wondered if he ever made a mistake, or if he threw his mistakes away, or if the sheer abundance of canvases rendered any flaws unnoticeable, like flowers in a garden. I wandered the first floor, made my way to the second. One room was locked. Supplies, I thought. I avoided the room Wade was in, but soon enough he came out. I expected him to address me, but he just walked past me into the room adjacent to the one he’d been working in, and after a while I realized he had merely shifted locations, and then, without knowing what else to do, I followed him.
The room was small. It gave off the feeling of a nursery, the extra bedroom. All the paintings in it were white, touched only occasionally by color. “This is an amazing room in the winter,” Wade said out loud, and I nearly jumped. “That tree there”—he pointed at a large maple perhaps twenty feet from the window—“sometimes gets covered with snow, and the light it reflects is almost blinding. White,” he said, “seemed the only color. But now it’s spring.” He paused; he looked at the white square on the easel. The paint was clotted and rutted, like a busy dirt road a few hours after a blizzard. With a sigh, Wade dipped his brush into a dirty can; it came out dark; it laid a thin green vertical line near the center of the canvas. A second dip, a second line, this one horizontal and bisecting the first. Wade looked at the green cross, and then he looked at me. He shrugged his shoulders. “So,” he said. “Now it’s spring.”
5.14
Divine
the first thing you got to understand in order to understand the secret of Ratboy’s success is that the dick bone is connected to the brain bone in teenage boys, and the second thing you got to realize is that the dick bone always wins out over the brain bone, and the third thing is that, for teenage boys, every issue is a dick-bone issue.
Ratboy used to make a mint of beating other boys at pinball, is what I’m trying to say.
This might sound surprising, given that there’s like only about five thousand souls down to Bigger Hill, and only, like, a quarter of those folks are kids, and outta all them only a few hundred of their parents ever let them hang out at Arcadia. I mean, you’d think word would-a gotten round that Ratboy was the best damn pinball player ever, and in fact word did get round, and that’s why Ratboy made so much money. A teenage boy, see, a good all-American red-blooded virgin-fucking teenage boy, he can never resist a challenge, and especially not from some skinny runt with a split lip and a girlfriend who looks pretty suspiciously like a boy. That’s the nature of the dickbone. The fact that most of the boys who hung out to Arcadia had pimples and wore glasses and the closest they ever got to a naked virgin was a look in the bathroom mirror only made it worse for them. Arcadia was, like, the closest thing they had to a football field, and they really really really wanted to be champion. But they never had a chance, cause Ratboy was hands down the best pinball player in all-a Cadavera County, and the one time we drove down to Wichita he was the best pinball player in Wichita too, and I’m sure he’s the best pinball player wherever he is now, if he can still find a machine to play on.
Whenever I could I’d go with him to Bigger Hill, to Arcadia. There was hundreds of machines there, Arcadia was like the size of a basketball court and they had everything from those stupid games where like a ground squirrel pops its head out the hole and you got to hit it with this like one-ounce plastic bat, to, like, foosball and pinball and every possible video game there was in existence then. Western Kansas may-a been a little slow in other ways, movies always took a couple extra months to make it in from one coast or the other and I mean let’s not even get started on fashion, but video games we was always right up on, the latest, the greatest, and the best. But Ratboy always went past all-a them, “modern decadence” I remember he once called video games, and he went straight to the back to the little dusty corner where a half dozen pinball machines sat around, mostly I think to fill up a space that’d be empty otherwise, and he changed one dollar and one dollar only, and lined up the quarters on the machine. In all my time with him I never saw him change a second dollar, even when they upped the price to fifty cents.
The secret is in the hips is what Ratboy used to say.
“It’s all about thrust,” Ratboy said, and he popped his pelvis against the machine. Lights flashed, explosions boomed. I heard a whoop and realized it was my own.
“That’s right, baby,” Ratboy said. “You cheer for me. You cheer for your man.”
Eventually a crowd gathered round. Someone would pass by, glance at the oddball, the pinball player, notice the score or maybe the number of credits he had coming to him or maybe the fact that he didn’t seem to lose a ball, ever. The machine’s pop as it gave him a free game almost always brought someone over, and if all else failed then I’d go round Arcadia and stump for him myself, because in the first place Ratboy liked playing to a crowd, and in the second place the best way to make sure some freckle-faced redhead redneck would make a five-dollar bet was to make sure all his friends was watching. Ratboy said he played best that way, and the one time I said I never saw him play bad, ever, he chucked me on the chin and called me sweet-tart, which was one-a his names for me. Sometimes when the crowd around him had passed to that special level of silence which is like how teenagers show their awe, Ratboy would stop midgame. He’d catch the shiny steel ball with the left flipper in midfall—always the left flipper, cause I always stood on the right side-a the machine—and with his left hand holding the flipper up and holding the ball in place, he’d reach out and put his right hand on my neck and pull me over to him and give me a kiss, a big one or a little one, tongue or no tongue, it don’t matter, a kiss is still a kiss, goodbye is still goodbye. “This here’s Reggie,” Ratboy’d say to his audience. “Reggie brings me luck.” Without taking his eyes or his right hand off me, he’d snap the flipper button with his left hand and there’d be lights and explosions, and then the electronic crack as the machine gave him a free game would shut up any noise the crowd might-a made at his display of Q.P.D.A. Me, I never honored them with a glance. I couldn’t look away from Ratboy even if I’d wanted to, and I waited for the quiet moment after the machine had settled down. In the quiet moment Ratboy always said, “I couldn’t do it without Reggie,” and even though I knew there was something wrong with what he was saying I was never quite sure what, although I guess now I know. The plain truth was that he could. He could do it without me. They all could.
5.15
Colin
he slept over that first night. I won’t say that he feigned sleep, but it did seem to me forced: I shook him once or twice, but he would not wake up. He had curled his arms around my waist and clasped his hands together to hold them there, and the breath coming from his open mouth coalesced on my abdomen and left a little puddle of water there. I lay awake, trying to decide what to do, but soon enough a choice was made for me: Justin came in. He didn’t actually come in; he only stood in the doorway, a stick-thin silent figure dwarfed by the door frame’s outlandish dimensions, and when I first noticed him I had the impression that he had been standing there for hours, innocuous, unnoticed, not watching us, not even waiting for us to finish, just standing there. “Justin,” I said, but of course he didn’t answer. There were only snores from Divine, the puddle of breath on my skin, and, when I spoke, a half word that my stomach seemed to have shook out of him. At the sound, I looked down at Divine, and when I looked back at the door, Justin had gone. I don’t know where he slept that night; at any rate, he never slept with me again.
So it went: first he stopped speaking to me, and then he stopped sleeping with me, and then he began spending all his time at Wade’s. Early in May I discovered a pillow and a blanket on the floor of Justin’s cupola. I say discovered, but what I mean is that I spied them through the door’s keyhole, because Justin never left the room unlocked. After that I didn’t worry so much, knowing that during the day he was in Wade’s concrete bunker, and at night he slept within the citadel of the limestone house. Perhaps I was just relieved to have one less thing to worry about. I didn’t worry about Justin, but instead turned my attention to Divine.
Clothed or not, his was a naked soul. He sat at my feet if I wouldn’t let him in my lap; he followed along behind me like a devoted dog. If I was within his sight he stared at me constantly; neither magazine nor television nor nuclear explosion could shift his gaze, and if I met his eyes even for a moment he started talking. Let’s go, is what he said most often, let’s just go, and my reply was always the same: “I can’t go.”
“That’s a load-a malarkey,” he said one day.
“‘Malarkey’?” I said.
Divine ducked the question. “You can go anytime you want,” he said. “Nothing’s holding you here.”
“You’ve changed,” I said. “Before your . . . accident, you would never have used the word malarkey. You would have said a load of bullshit, or a load of fucking bullshit, or a motherfucking load of motherfucking fucking—”
“All right already,” Divine said. He shrugged; he waited; he shrugged again, but refused to look at me. “Can’t we just go?”
I didn’t answer him. I sat at my desk, my hands on my typewriter, open and unmoving, like a Buddha’s. Today’s sheet of paper stared at me, crested as it always was with the words The last line of this story is inevitable. Divine sat beside the typewriter, and, with one finger, without looking at me, he traced a line from my right hand, up my arm, around my shoulders, down my other arm, to my left hand. His body followed his hand; he slid off my desk and walked in a slow arc around my body.
“No one won’t stop us,” he said again, when he’d finished. He hovered behind me, his fingers kneading my shoulders. “They’d be just as happy to get rid-a us.”
“I can’t go,” I said again, and then, as an afterthought, I added, “until it’s found.”
And then I typed the words, but what came out was: I can’t leave until she’s found.
“They ain’t never gonna find nothing,” Divine said. “Lawman Brown couldn’t find his own heinie to wipe it, or his own hand to wipe it with.”
“‘Heinie,’” I repeated, but my eyes were staring at the words I’d typed. I was realizing something I hadn’t really known until I’d typed them: that I could not, in fact, leave until she was found. A nauseating ball of guilt formed in my stomach then, and for a moment I thought I might actually vomit. How could it have happened that Lucy Robinson had been displaced by a few pieces of paper?
Divine’s hands had gone slack on my shoulders; I wasn’t even sure if they were still on my shoulders, until, after a long silent moment, I felt them float off me. Divine emerged from behind me, made his way to the side of my desk; he walked with an exaggerated slowness, and I knew he did it so that I would have plenty of time to look at his ass, and I admit it: I looked at his ass. I had seen it so many times that it lacked any power to arouse me. I don’t think, in fact, that it had ever really aroused me. It wasn’t Divine’s ass I was fucking.
When he reached the side of my desk he turned around and slipped his hip onto the desk. “I’m not so sure I understand,” he said quietly. There was a smile on his face as he spoke, and it was an awful smile, a clown’s smile, having nothing to do with the expression in his eyes, just as the tone of his voice had nothing to do with his words. His expression and his tone were both full of uncertainty, fear even—whether of me or of something else I didn’t know—but, at any rate, all Divine seemed to know to do with his fear was to say, “Maybe you should explain it to me,” his voice as hollow and empty as that of a porn star who thought neither of his line nor of the coming scene, but of the hit of cocaine he’d be able to take as soon as both were over.
I looked down at my typewriter.
The last line of this story is inevitable.
One of Divine’s legs began to swing back and forth.
I can’t leave until she’s found.
“You think it’s sexy, don’t you? You sit there with your tight pants and swinging leg and you think maybe I’ll just bend you over my desk and fuck you?”
The tempo of Divine’s leg swing increased, but he didn’t say anything. I was still shouting though, shouting words that seemed as distant from my thoughts as Divine’s swinging leg seemed from his.
“Well, come on then, let’s do it. Turn around and drop your pants. You want a little rape fantasy? You want me to tie you up, stuff a sock in your mouth?” I grabbed his hand then, jerked him toward me. “Right here, Divine.” I threw him, chest first, onto the desk, heard his chin bang against the typewriter.
“Ow!”
“Am I hurting you, Divine? Of course I’m hurting you. You want me to hurt you, don’t you?” I grabbed his hair then, used it to point his face in the direction of the paper in the typewriter. “Read,” I said. “Read out loud.”
“What?”
“Read!”
Divine’s voice shook. “The last line of this story is inev, inevitable.”
“Not that!” I jerked at the page, pulled it halfway from the typewriter, pointed at the second line there. I was bent over him with my groin pressed against his ass. “That!”
Divine panted and trembled. He started to speak, but nothing came out except a choked cough. He licked his lips, tried again. “I, I can’t leave until she’s found.” He was still for a moment, and then, very suddenly, very quietly, he started crying. I could feel his sobs in my fingers, which were still entangled in his hair.
“Very good,” I said, the anger gone from both my voice and my body. I released his hair. I stroked it once, just once, smoothed it as much as the gel-stiffened strands would let me. Divine’s body quivered under mine but he kept his sobbing silent, and neither he nor I reacted when the phone rang.
The last line of this story is inevitable.
The phone rang again.
I can’t leave until she’s found.
The phone rang one more time.
It was a perverse urge that made me reach over and around Divine’s body. I put my hands on the typewriter and I began to type the words that always ended my day. I never saw, I began, but I stopped, because I didn’t know what pronoun I should use. Him? Her? It?
The machine clicked on. There was a long empty moment of the tape recording silent air, and then an unidentifiable throat cleared itself, and Lawman Brown’s drone filled the room. “Colin Nieman,” he said, “Sheriff Brown here.” There was a pause, and then he said, “I think we found something here, Mr. Nieman.” Another, longer pause, this one filled with what sounded like rustling pages. “I never saw him again,” Lawman Brown said. “If that sounds familiar, Mr. Nieman, then I guess you maybe wanna come on down to the station.”
I got home a few hours later. Divine was asleep on the couch. His cheeks were puffy and grimy and he’d obviously run his fingers violently through his hair because it now puffed around on his head in the same golden afro I’d seen that night in Wade’s house. Under one arm, I held a wrinkled and slightly muddy sheaf of pages, but it was complete, it was my novel, it was the final version and it was all there.
Divine didn’t awaken when I turned the light on, and he didn’t awaken as I set the recovered pages on my desk. Like almost everything else—like all those other parts of Lucy Robinson’s body—they had showed up in Myra Robinson’s mailbox, and T.V. Daniels had found them on his afternoon delivery. T.V. said that Myra hadn’t received any mail for days, though, not even a catalog, and of course she never mailed anything out, so the manuscript could have been there for a week or more.
The crumpled sheet of paper was still in my typewriter. The last line of this story is inevitable, I can’t leave until she’s found, I never saw, and Divine didn’t awaken when I pulled it from the typewriter and laid it atop my novel. He didn’t awaken as I started a fire in the fireplace with a few blank sheets of stationery and a tattered titleless volume I pulled from the shelves, and he didn’t wake up as, one by one, I fed the pages of my novel to the fire. Dozens of opening lines flashed past my eyes before disappearing in a blaze of fire and a column of smoke, The last line of this story is inevitable, Most people have seven holes in their head, I offered you a truncated version, A steel shutter scrolled open, It happened in an alley, When I awakened, but Divine didn’t awaken, it seemed nothing could wake him, and when, finally, I had finished destroying the thing I had made, I joined him on the couch, and I lay there listening to the fire burning out behind me and I tried to find words for what I was thinking, but the only thing that came to me was a cliché.
Up in smoke, I thought. It’s all gone up in smoke.
5.16
obsequiousness paid off sooner than I expected. Rosemary Krebs was a busy woman who, like a businessman, preferred to conduct her affairs out of the house, and one week after I began working for her she presented me with a key that, she told me, would only open the back door, and thereafter she resumed working out of the Municipal Annex, which is how she referred to the PortaShak behind the police station. The office there was ostensibly the Mayor’s, but he, when he wasn’t out pressing the flesh or tending to the imagined needs of his town, preferred, like a housewife, to do his business at home, where he was easy to keep track of because he always shut himself up in his little office on the third floor, loudly declaiming something he called his “stump speech,” and even when he left his office to use the bathroom or raid the refrigerator he continued speaking, and a trail of “working together”s and “sharing our strength”s marked his path through the house like the bleep of a radar icon.
The Krebs house—Rosemary Krebs once referred to it as “Phyneas’s family seat,” which made it sound, to me, like a communal toilet—was a manifestation of Victorian grandiosity, not as old as it looked but in worse shape than it should have been, given its age. It was divided into far too many heavily draped rooms stuffed with furniture that might best be called “pioneer baroque.” Everything that could be braided was tasseled, and every surface that could be abraded was carved into representations of Greek and Christian parables. They were scored into the legs and sides and surfaces of couches and tables and armoires to such a degree that dusting became a sort of history lesson, or, more accurately, a lesson in morality: the Lord can invade your body with impunity, as a tongue of flame or a swan; defy God and the whale will swallow you whole or the world be placed atop your shoulders; love yourself too much and your beauty will be rendered into the fragile and impermanent form of a flower.
In addition to her love of ornament, Rosemary Krebs, along with her other Southern peculiarities, was a staunch believer in displaying anything that even hinted of family history, prestige, or, failing that, simple wealth. Crystal, silver, porcelain figurines: Rosemary Krebs had them all, and she had them all out, and arranged in patterns that rivaled the displayed objects for intricacy and elaboration. What’s more, she had the history of each piece memorized: if, in her presence, I picked up a silver spoon to polish it, Rosemary Krebs would lose her eyes in a distant gaze and say, “My Aunt Carolinia, my mother’s sister, a Hoovier until the day she died”—a spinster in other words—“first brought that spoon into her house, long before Daddy ruined us.” If I responded to what she was saying with a group of words arranged in a comprehensible sentence—if, in other words, I spoke to her—Rosemary Krebs would immediately silence herself, but if I continued to work obsequiously, proffering only a “yes’m,” then she would continue to talk for a while, offering me some ostensibly notable chapter in her family history, yet always, with comments like “before Daddy ruined us,” hinting at the sordid, which, I suppose, in that grand Southern tradition, Rosemary Krebs preferred to think of as tragic. At any rate, I annotate her possessions not just because they were ostentatious and vulgar, but because they were impossible to clean. After a week in her house I was able to respect Rosemary Krebs on at least one front: anyone who kept that house as immaculate as it had been, and still managed to meddle in everyone’s business, was a resourceful person indeed.
Still, it was hard to imagine that in such a house, where as much as possible was placed front and center, anything could be hidden, but the more I became acquainted with Rosemary Krebs’s endless collection of bric-a-brac, the more convinced I became that all this display was just an elaborate mask, and the true face of Rosemary Krebs’s house had yet to be seen. The basement and the attic, when I finally managed to penetrate them, were as fruitless as I’d expected them to be, yielding only the usual assortment of old hooped dresses and pictures of a plantation house flanked by live oak draped in Spanish moss. The four-pillared Greek revival porch of the plantation house was the forerunner of the porch Rosemary Krebs had added to Phyneas Krebs’s house when she took possession of it; the dresses, I later learned, were a source of chagrin to Rosemary Krebs, who confided in me that all of the Hoovier women had worn each other’s clothes, but no amount of tailoring could scale them down to her small frame. In addition to the pictures and the dresses there were chests and crates—cardboard boxes weren’t good enough for even discarded Hoovier heirlooms—full of tchotchkes, most of them broken, the individual fragments wrapped in tissue or packed with straw. Still, a winter’s worth of searching yielded nothing more incriminating than an exchange of almost erotic letters, many spiked with verse, between the young Rosemary and her father on the occasion of each other’s birthday, a charged correspondence which terminated sometime after her seventeenth birthday.
It was the Mayor who finally pointed me in the right direction. I walked in on him one day in the library, and I was so surprised that I gasped, not at encountering him, but at the open volume in his hands. I suspected Phyneas Krebs’s reading to be confined to the three books on his office desk—Winning Big in Small Town Politics, How to Be an Effective Leader, and Everything I Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten—and, as well, the inscription carved on his headboard: For God so loved the world. The craftsman had carved the words big, and just like the magnet on my father’s refrigerator, the rest of John 3:16 had been elided in the Krebs bedroom—as had, I realized, the words in the book the Mayor held. He snapped it shut, but not before I saw that it was hollow, and then he grinned sheepishly as he shoved one closed hand in his pocket and replaced the book on the shelf with the other. He stood there awkwardly for a moment, the grin still plastered on his face, and then he cleared his throat.
“Say, Webbie,” he said. “Say, could I maybe ask you a question?”
I smiled at him, but my eyes were noting the book he had just placed back on the shelves. “Of course,” I said when I had located it, and then I added, “Sir.”
“Now, correct me if I’m wrong, Webbie, but you are acquainted with Mr. Nieman, aren’t you?”
My smile faded. “Acquainted, yes. I wouldn’t say I knew him well.”
“Well, yes, I mean, no. I mean, I didn’t mean to imply that you knew him, I mean, well.”
I smiled again.
“Anyway, I was wondering if you maybe knew . . .”
I ran the feathers of my duster over the palm of my hand, as if I were eager to return to work. “Yes?” I prompted.
“Well, I mean, well,” he stuttered, and then he spat out, “Was he really a revolutionary?”
I felt my smile stiffen on my face. “Beg pardon, Mr. Mayor?”
“It’s just that, you know, Eustace had that copy-a Mr. Nieman’s book down to the station house the other day, and I kinda snuck me a peek.”
“I’m sorry, sir, I still don’t understand. Did Colin, did Mr. Nieman claim to be a revolutionary in his novel?”
“Well, now, that’s just what I’m not sure of. I mean, everybody’s been saying he was writing about Galatea and all, but, you know, when I picked this book up all I saw was stuff about the desert and the ocean. And then there was this stuff about, like, tattoos and eye contacts and steroids and stuff, none-a which I ever seen Mr. Nieman have, or, or use, or whatever, but then this guy Mr. Nieman was writing about was a writer himself and so, well, I . . .” He looked at me with an expression of genuine fear on his face. “You don’t think he’s got something like that going on here?”
“Something like . . .”
“I mean, there is an election coming up.”
It was a long moment before I trusted myself to speak without laughing, and even then I had to address his shoes, which shuffled nervously under my gaze. “Well, sir, I should think Mr. Nieman has more than enough on his plate right now, without . . .” I allowed the sentence to remain unfinished.
“You think?” the Mayor said.
“I do, sir.”
“Well. Well then.” He giggled a little bit, and I risked a look at his face, and when my eyes met his he giggled again, and then he said, “Well, I guess I oughta be getting on with things. You’re doing a real nice job, by the way, I never seen Rosemary so happy since you come to work.” He mumbled a farewell then, and stumbled from the room.
“Thank you, Mr. Mayor,” I called behind him. “You have a good afternoon.” When, a moment later, I heard the front door close, I ran to the shelves.
The book the Mayor had held turned out to be an ancient encyclopedia volume whose eviscerated innards had been stuffed with cash. I replaced the book immediately—money I didn’t need; I had cashed my paychecks only to allay any suspicions Rosemary Krebs might have—and then I set to cleaning. I chuckled under my breath every once in a while as I worked, sometimes at the thought of the hollow book on the shelves, sometimes at the Mayor’s notion of Colin Nieman as some kind of revolutionary sent to foment political strife in Galatia. What, I wondered, was his book about—but as soon as I asked myself that question I rushed back to the shelves. The book that contained the Mayor’s stash was labeled M-Money, and I suddenly found myself pulling other books off the shelves—well, it was foolish of me to think they ever read them, wasn’t it?—and as I worked I remembered that these books, like virtually all the furniture in the house, had originated not with Phyneas Krebs’s family but with his wife’s. It took fewer than a dozen attempts before I found another hollow tome, a leather-bound copy of Moby-Dick within which were several pearl-topped hatpins. I thought pearls, as sea things, formed the connection to Moby-Dick, but then I realized that the pins, like my father’s collection of canes, were ivory, and I was willing to wager that, like the corsets in the basement, the ivory was whalebone.
In the next few weeks I discovered that Rosemary Krebs’s mania for display was matched by an even greater mania for hiding, and, like any obsession, it seemed to have far more to do with action than object. In the same way that T.V. Daniels ate anything placed in front of him, be it TV dinner or T-bone steak, Rosemary Krebs hid anything she could find a place for, as long as she could devise a suitable system of correspondences between the object and the place in which she hid it. Thus, the Mayor’s extra cash was stashed in a volume marked money—which, by the way, remained there, suggesting to me that the Mayor hadn’t mentioned our encounter to his wife, or that he had and she was testing my honesty. I soon discovered that the primary function of all the ornate carving on Rosemary Krebs’s furniture wasn’t beauty, or parable, or even, as Wade suggested, distraction, but the concealment of hidden springs and buttons that provided access to the compartments that were scattered throughout the house. Guests sipping iced tea in the sitting room had no idea that their elbows rested inches above a bound folio of lace swatches, each intricate square an ivoried hint of a dress, a veil, a glove never worn; the armrest that concealed the lace was carved with a relief of Arachne, first weaving at her loom, then being transformed into a spider for her excessive pride. Dinner guests passed their plates over a cache of blueprints, grandiose versions of the town library, a civic center, a hospital, and even more grand designs for a mayoral mansion, a county courthouse, a mall, a Burger King. In a matter of weeks, once I knew what I was looking for, I had found dozens of hidden things: thimbles, earrings, letters, a bullwhip, dried flowers, a plastic doll, a stack of old 78s. Most of these objects were so thickly covered in dust I knew they hadn’t been touched in years, and most, as I have already noted, seemed to be worthless, hidden not for their sake, but for the sake of hiding itself. Behind a panel in a closet door—the panel was carved with a blank scroll of parchment—I found an ancient quill, its nib stained with dark, dried ink. Beneath the false bottom of a porcelain vase enameled with Chinese dragons I found a cache of wooden matches in boxes that bore the names of European hotels (someone should have told Rosemary Krebs that dragons didn’t breathe fire in Chinese mythology). At the bottom of an umbrella stand—an umbrella stand, in western Kansas, with an average annual rainfall of twenty-two inches—I found what was perhaps the most poignant hidden treasure, a bottle half filled with water, stoppered and sealed with wax. A curling yellowed label had been tied to the bottle with a piece of string, the words on it, written with a broad-nibbed fountain pen whose ink, like blood, had faded to a light reddish brown:
R—
Rainfall, tenth birthday.
—E.
“E” was Eminent King, Rosemary Krebs’s father, although, at the time I found the vial, his name was about all I knew about him.
So many things: tiny books hidden inside larger ones, a marble nestled in a tin of tea so old that it had disintegrated into a powder as fine as ground peppercorns. Fall leaves, still so bright they seemed painted. The ivory bishop to an ancient chess set, his face cracked and blackened with age just like a real man’s. So many things, and all, as far as I could tell, completely useless to me, meaningless; they left me clueless, if I may use a loaded term, but even so I kept digging, convinced that among all the useless bits and bobs and trinkets there must be at least one real treasure. But as the months passed I came to doubt that I would ever find anything of value, and I grew sick of breathing in the fumes of ammonia-laced water and burning my hands with the caustic polish Rosemary Krebs had me apply weekly to her silver, and it became harder and harder to look down at her tiny, birdlike feet tapping on the parquet floor that I had swept, mopped, and waxed on my hands and knees, muttering “Yes’m” and “Nome” and resisting the urge to pop her with the scrub brush I held in my hand. And then, finally, unexpectedly, perseverance paid off. Perhaps perseverance isn’t the right word; perhaps I should just say that dumb luck and a lack of any other options led me to it, the second most important thing I was to find in my long, odd search for Lucy Robinson, although by that point I wasn’t quite sure what I was looking for. My searching had taken on some of the qualities of Rosemary Krebs’s hiding: it was just something I did, because I had nothing else to do.
It was in her bedroom. It was, in fact, in her bed. It occurred to me one day that the o in the word God carved in the headboard was rather suspiciously oval, eyelike I mean, or egglike, and it only took a single firm push to open the door to a small compartment that contained a fat Bible, which, in place of the books of Deuteronomy and Exodus, contained a slim volume filled with Rosemary Krebs’s own law and her own journeys: her diary. It was an odd account, beginning when she was seventeen and continuing sporadically for over twenty-five years, until shortly after Kenosha burned down and Galatea was founded. It was this diary, and the clipped brittle anecdotes that Rosemary Krebs occasionally related to me, that enabled me to create a cohesive narrative line. It was an odd story, complete in and of itself, and yet taking me, on its own, absolutely nowhere. The metaphor that comes to mind is that of a railroad track: Rosemary Krebs’s history was a single rail, and even as I laid it I knew that there was a second track I had not yet begun. I worked in fits and starts, stealing glimpses at the diary whenever I changed the bed linen or cleaned the bathroom in the master bedroom, and I assembled the evidence as I had in my days as an historian, on note cards that I ordered and reordered as the sequence of events became clear to me, and that I, like Rosemary Krebs, kept hidden from prying eyes. And as I worked I remembered Justin’s comment about humanity’s need to reveal itself through written confession. Nothing is ever written down solely for the eye of the writer, he’d said: it’s always intended for an audience. And that, I realized as I made my own notes, was as true of me as it was of Rosemary Krebs.
5.17
Justin
he put me to work. He showed me how to make a stretcher, pull canvas over it, prime the canvas, paint it. I shouldn’t say that he put me to work: he taught me to paint. “I’m not an art director,” he said. “I’m not an idea man. And I’m not old either. I do my own work.” The stretchers I built, I used, rickety things, as shaky as the strokes I laid on them. Wade gave me paint and brushes, an easel, a place out of direct sunlight, but after that I was left on my own, and, since I didn’t know what to do, I tried to emulate Wade. I used the same colors he did, pulled and pushed and daubed with the brush as he did, but my canvases just looked like a wall painted by an epileptic. Wade never criticized the things I painted, but sometimes he would criticize the way I made them; reshaping my hand around a brush, he would say, “Gently. gently, it’s a paintbrush, it’s paint, not a needle and thread.”
One day a flickering shape outside the window distracted me. It was a bird, but it moved so quickly and stayed for such a short time that I had no idea what kind of bird. An image of the walls of the cupola sprang into my head. On a corner of my canvas not already discolored I tried to copy one of the birds from the cupola’s walls, a meadowlark, magenta-backed and lavender-bellied and speckled all over with neon-green dots. Those were the colors the original painter had chosen; I, with the colors Wade had mixed, merely did my best to re-create them. As I finished I remembered that one of the meadowlark’s trailing feet had clutched a vine that looked a lot like seaweed, and I added it at the last moment. I stepped back and looked at my lopsided creation. I thought that, like a bee, it shouldn’t have been able to fly, but it did. Then I realized Wade was staring at my painting.
“That’s good,” he said, very quietly, very strangely, and, in spite of myself, I blushed. Wade stood silently for a moment, and then he drew a thin-tipped paintbrush from a mason jar and dabbed it in a dark smear on his palette. He stepped up to my bird and with a few deft gestures corrected its form slightly. At first I just thought he was making it look more like a bird, but as he worked I realized he was making it look more like the bird, the bird on the wall of the cupola. When he’d finished he stepped back. “Bea must have taken good care of that room, for the murals to be intact. They weren’t very sturdy to begin with.” He smiled. “Yankee Carting’s TruValue doesn’t exactly make their plaster from the same materials the Romans favored.” He looked at the painting when he spoke. “I must have been fifteen or sixteen when I painted that. Bea was in her late sixties, Hank was already dead. It was the first time I was ever paid for my work. Well, no,” he corrected himself, “no, it was the second.” He paused, sighed; he didn’t tell me what had been the first time he was paid for a painting. “Bea was vague” is what he said. “All she wanted were birds, all they had to do was fly heavenward. ‘Heavenward,’ she said, ‘toward Henry.’” He stopped again. This time he went to the mason jar, picked up another brush, a flat one perhaps half an inch wide. He whited its bristles. “It must be fading now,” he said. “Faking. I mean flaking. Is it flaking?” He looked at me but I didn’t move. “Ah, I forgot,” he said, smiling slightly. “Justin doesn’t talk. Justin doesn’t even nod his head. Is it flaking, Justin, like this?” He stabbed at the painting; what was amazing, I thought, was that in a single, seemingly violent gesture he managed to produce a mark that looked like the flaking plaster of the room. “I had this idea,” Wade said, “not a bad idea for a fifteen-year-old, that the lark trailing a piece of seaweed would be a Plains version of the dove carrying the olive branch back to Noah on the ark. Proof, you know, that somewhere, out there, there was water.” He laughed. “And she already had the ark, too. Who knew?”
As he said that I remembered the gap in the cedar hedge that had allowed me to see clearly the fire that consumed Noah Deacon’s ark, and I wanted to tell Wade that whoever Bea had been, whatever she had known, she had known about the landlocked boat on her property. But I didn’t tell him, and Wade continued speaking. “Now, I suppose, now that dream must be flaking off in chips and pieces, falling to the floor in a little spray of dust. Falling hellward.” As he spoke he stabbed again and again at the bird, and it disappeared in flecks of white. “Soon it will be gone, won’t it? Maybe I’ll outlast it, maybe I won’t, but you certainly will.” He stabbed and stabbed. “Soon the wall will be bare again, a hint of faded color here and there, and then what will you have to look at? Will you look at this, Justin?” He jerked his brush at the obscured blob on the canvas, and when I didn’t follow his brush with my eyes he turned my head for me with a hand that stank of paint. “What will you see in it, Justin? Will you try to see that lost bird, or perhaps the real bird, the one that was sacrificed to make that mural? Or will you look for the only thing it can really show you?”
He stopped suddenly. “Oh, Justin, don’t cry.” I stiffened, sniffled; I hadn’t realized I was crying. I had been thinking of the remnants of Colin’s latest novel that I found in the fireplace in his office, and I had been thinking of an earlier attempt at that novel, one that I had destroyed myself, and now I was crying. After a moment of hesitation Wade took his hand off my cheek, and then, slowly, tenderly, he put it back on. The smell of paint was stronger on him than it was on me, and I relaxed against his hand. Wade took my relaxation as an invitation, and his arms enfolded me and pulled me against his body. His hold was awkward, the hold of a man who knew how to embrace someone, but not how to give them a hug, and his voice, when it came, was right in my ear, almost painfully loud.
“The first time I was paid for painting I was thirteen. I won a statewide competition to repair the mural of John Brown in the Capitol Building in Topeka. Do you know that mural, Justin? Do you—oh.” He laughed a little, his hot wet reath dampening my ear. “It’s very famous, that mural, very silly but very famous. John Brown stands there in his buckskins, a rifle in one hand, a Bible in the other, and a fierce, fierce look of determination on his face. He doesn’t look like a liberator at all, he looks like a crazy man, which, at the end of the day, is what he was. But at the time he didn’t look like much of anything because the paint he had been created from had never been properly fixed, and the humidity was causing it to peel off in flakes like a sycamore trunk shedding its bark. For some reason our local politicians decided that it would be a good thing if a Kansan did the repairs, and, as I said, they held a competition and I won. The competition was anonymous, and I think everyone was a little surprised to find out that the winner was only thirteen, but then they decided it made for even better publicity. I was photographed with half the state senators, with the governor even. I can’t remember his name, but I pretended to shake his hand for something like twenty minutes while the cameras flashed, and then they put me up on top of a scaffold, just like Michelangelo, I thought at the time, just like Michelangelo, and they left me alone. Well.” He laughed again; his grip had softened as he’d spoken, and the fingers of his left hand were idly scratching the small of my back. “I don’t know why I’m telling you this,” he said. He sighed. “I did an okay job. I didn’t do anything wrong. But I was thirteen. I thought of myself as some kind of young radical, although, really, I was then and have remained a reactionary. What I mean is, I put my own slogan on John Brown’s Bible before I finished. I painted John Brown was right, and as soon as I had, I painted over it, but it’s up there still, underneath a nice thick coat of vellum-colored brown and these fake hieroglyphics meant to represent letters but that are nothing more than little swirls and hatchmarks and dots and dashes. John Brown was right. I thought of it as my own contribution to history. Oh, Justin,” he said, his voice changing suddenly, becoming deeper and more desperate. “Don’t end up like me,” he said, “please don’t end up like me.” His breath caught in his throat and he stopped, and I knew that I should have spoken. But I said nothing, and Wade said nothing, and after a moment he let go of me and picked up a wide flat paintbrush and with a few deft strokes he painted over the bird, over the canvas and over the words he had written on John Brown’s body and over me, and left behind nothing but a smooth slick sheen of white. breath dampening my ear. “It’s very famous, that mural, very silly but very famous. John Brown stands there in his buckskins, a rifle in one hand, a Bible in the other, and a fierce, fierce look of determination on his face. He doesn’t look like a liberator at all, he looks like a crazy man, which, at the end of the day, is what he was. But at the time he didn’t look like much of anything because the paint he had been created from had never been properly fixed, and the humidity was causing it to peel off in flakes like a sycamore trunk shedding its bark. For some reason our local politicians decided that it would be a good thing if a Kansan did the repairs, and, as I said, they held a competition and I won. The competition was anonymous, and I think everyone was a little surprised to find out that the winner was only thirteen, but then they decided it made for even better publicity. I was photographed with half the state senators, with the governor even. I can’t remember his name, but I pretended to shake his hand for something like twenty minutes while the cameras flashed, and then they put me up on top of a scaffold, just like Michelangelo, I thought at the time, just like Michelangelo, and they left me alone. Well.” He laughed again; his grip had softened as he’d spoken, and the fingers of his left hand were idly scratching the small of my back. “I don’t know why I’m telling you this,” he said. He sighed. “I did an okay job. I didn’t do anything wrong. But I was thirteen. I thought of myself as some kind of young radical, although, really, I was then and have remained a reactionary. What I mean is, I put my own slogan on John Brown’s Bible before I finished. I painted John Brown was right, and as soon as I had, I painted over it, but it’s up there still, underneath a nice thick coat of vellum-colored brown and these fake hieroglyphics meant to represent letters but that are nothing more than little swirls and hatchmarks and dots and dashes. John Brown was right. I thought of it as my own contribution to history. Oh, Justin,” he said, his voice changing suddenly, becoming deeper and more desperate. “Don’t end up like me,” he said, “please don’t end up like me.” His breath caught in his throat and he stopped, and I knew that I should have spoken. But I said nothing, and Wade said nothing, and after a moment he let go of me and picked up a wide flat paintbrush and with a few deft strokes he painted over the bird, over the canvas and over the words he had written on John Brown’s body and over me, and left behind nothing but a smooth slick sheen of white.
5.17
Divine
the first time was in his daddy’s barn. I was twelve, he was sixteen, we was in a empty stall between this old gray gelding that was just about ready to take its final walk to the glue factory and some sow nursing next year’s breakfast bacon. I’d known him for one week, seven whole days.
Ratboy said, “I wanna tell you how it is between us.” He turned me toward him, took me by the shoulders. I was taller than him by a hair, but I bent my knees a little so he wouldn’t be self-conscious. He said, “You’re a faggot and I’m a faggot lover, and that’s just the way it is. People like us, people who fit, we got to stick together.”
I’d been called a faggot before, but I’d never heard of a faggot lover, and even as I accepted his definition of me—so it is true is what I remember thinking—I waited for him to tell me what a faggot lover was, what he was. And it’s not like I didn’t know about sex or nothing, it just never occurred to me that they might enjoy doing it themselves, as opposed to doing it to me, and I was right in the middle of some kinda thought like that when Ratboy just leaned forward and kissed me. Instinct or something made me bend my knees lower, so my head was beneath his. The position was so awkward that I started to lose my balance, but Ratboy just caught holda me and held me up with a strong arm—I may-a been taller than him but I weighed less cause there wasn’t really nothing that you could call muscle on my body yet. Later on Ratboy said that was one-a the things he liked about me, but that day he just pulled his lips from mine long enough to say, “I’ll always catch you, if you wanna fall.”
And then he pushed me down in the hay.
So. His Daddy’s barn, his Daddy’s bed, his bed, his car, on blankets in fields. We never did make it out to Noah’s ark, I guess I couldn’t bring myself to bring a white person there or something, but we did it a couple-a times in the Cave of the Bellystones—Lawman Brown may-a put some lock on there but it was a pretty simple thing to unscrew the hinges the lock was nailed to and open the door that way, and judging from the cans of food and used rubbers and stuff that me and Ratboy found there, we was hardly the only ones doing it. Once we did it in the locker room, the other boys gone but Coach Carting still whistling some stupid song to himself in the shower. “Hey, Water Boy,” I remember Ratboy said that time. “Ratboy wants a drink.”
Finally, my house. My parents was on a day trip to Hutchinson—my Daddy, among many other stupid acts, bought hisself a Japanese car, and Hutch was the closest he could take it for a tune-up, which, as you might expect, it needed fairly regular. My momma went for the shopping, such as it was, at the mall.
Ratboy and me cut school right after first period. I let us in the back door, the kitchen door, and right away he pushed me down on the linoleum. “Every single room” was what he whispered in my ear.
I blew him in the kitchen. He did me the first time over the dining room table, my nose right in the pepper shaker. We 69’d in the living room, all the way through Family Feud, and we just made a mess out of my room is all I can say. In the bathroom we got all clean again, and then he took me into my parents’ room. There was just something about defiling that he liked to do. He was naked, dripping from the shower, and he fell on the bed, flat on his back, bounced up off it back on his feet. “That’s a good box springs,” he said. The outline of his wet body showed up on the white bedspread.
Ratboy opened up drawers one by one until he found the one with my momma’s underwear. My momma was a small woman, you understand, which is one-a the reasons why she only had me—another was the fact that she didn’t like sweating, and it’s pretty hard to make a baby at either end of the process without sweating. I wasn’t exactly a big boy, and the long and short of it was that all her things fit me, pretty much, Ratboy used a little toilet paper to fill out the sag in the bra, and he showed me how to tuck, and there I was: high heels, white nylons, garter belt, black panties (lace in front, just a string in back, Momma, who knew?). The bra was a little pointy push-up thing with about a inch of padding sewn right in, which surprised me, cause I always thought my momma’s cleavage was natural, and the wig, the color of what Cora likes to call dirty honey, which is to say the unfiltered stuff, smelled like dust all around my head. My lips was as red and blurry as cherry pic filling, and Ratboy just looked at me and said, “Baby, you look divine.”
So there.
I watched him in the mirror. It was the first time there’d been a mirror—believe me, if you’d ever seen Carol Wiebe you’d know why there wasn’t no mirror in that house. Ratboy, kissing me all over, then me kissing him, or rather him making me kiss him, him moving my face from place to place on his body, the little quiver in his butt cheeks when he did me, the straw nest of his hair after my fingers had messed it up, the wig coming off in his hand. Afterwards we spooned back to front, and in the mirror I could see the pale outline of him all around my body like a glow, and little red blurs on my skin where his kisses had transferred my lipstick back to me.
He pointed to the mirror. “I bet you never knew your parents liked to watch themselves fuck, did you?”
“You the first white person ever been in this house.”
“I bet they was watching themselves as they made you. I bet they was saying, We gonna make the prettiest little black boy the world never seen.”
“I don’t know if they’d be more upset if they found out I was doing it with a boy in they bed, or if they found out I was doing it with a white boy.”
“In they bed,” Ratboy said.
“. . .”
“And that black boy’s gonna be so pretty, they was saving, so pretty that no one’ll be able to resist his charms.”
“I guess I’d be surprised to find out my parents ever had that much to say to each other in they whole lives, but you certainly do have a way of saying things.”
“I have a way of saying things?”
“Whatever you say sounds like the truth. ’N if it ain’t true, you make it true.”
My momma and daddy, they was so stupid. They thought I dressed up some girl in my momma’s lingerie and diddled her on they bed. As if. My daddy grabbed me by the hair and drug me into his room and pointed at the outline of a body on the crinkled bedspread. “And what is that, young sir?” is what he screamed at me, and me, I could only look at it and after what Ratboy and me’d said and done, I mean, how could I lie? My momma was standing in the doorway with her arms crossed over what I now knew was a manufactured bosom, kinda biting her lip and frowning, and I looked at her and I looked at my daddy and I said, “That’s Ratboy,” and I fastened my eyes on Ratboy’s shadow, left behind just like Peter Pan’s, ’cause let me tell you: nothing holds a water stain like cheap satin. My momma kinda caught her breath in her throat and my daddy just stood there dumbstruck for about two minutes, and then real slow he pulled his belt from his pants and pulled my pants off-a me, and my momma said, “Aw, Ronnie, don’t hurt the boy,” but as it turned out my daddy never beat me. Instead, he saw the love bites there, other little pieces-a Ratboy left behind, left on me, and I think he was still willing to give me the benefit of the doubt but there was no way he could deny the smile that was spread across my face. My daddy dropped the belt on the floor and barely made it into the bathroom before he started puking, and me, I didn’t even have the good sense to pull up my pants and hightail it outta there. I stood stock-still, staring at Ratboy’s outline on the bed, and then when I looked over at my momma I understood for the first time just what Ratboy’s power was. My momma was still like in the same position she’d been in before, but she’d kinda shrunk a little too. It was like suddenly there was one more thing in the world, and it took up space at her expense.
Sometime after that my daddy caught us holding hands, and he walked right up to us and punched Ratboy so hard I heard something go snap! He was on the ground for a good long time while I just stood there, frozen, and my daddy stood there, spit dripping off his lips, and then, before me or my daddy knew what was happening, Ratboy was up off the ground and he had ahold-a one-a those lengths-a two-by-four that always happen to be around when you need one, and he whupped my father so hard upside the head that he knocked him out cold. Then he took my hand again, and we walked away.
So I guess Ratboy did actually win one fight.
We slept in his car for a week, and then Lawman Brown put Ratboy in jail for another week, and I went home. My daddy tied my hands to the bedpost and he whaled on me with his belt for ninety-seven minutes straight—I watched the clock the whole time cause my momma had turned the bedspread facedown—and then finally my daddy dislocated his shoulder and for the next two weeks not only did he have a bruise the shape and pretty near the size-a the state of Kansas on his cheek, but he had his arm in a sling too. And I wasn’t as bad hurt as you might think because my daddy didn’t take down my pants. He started to, but then he changed his mind.
5.19
Colin
i might have wanted my novel to disappear, but someone else did not. Just days after I burned the first recovered copy, a second one showed up. It was a photocopy of the original manuscript, and it showed up in Howard Goertzen’s mailbox. Howard didn’t give the manuscript to Lawman Brown; he called me himself, and when I arrived at his father’s pig farm I found it waiting for me in a box filled not just with my novel, but also with a good helping of pig shit. I took it home, where I doused both box and contents with gasoline, and burned the whole thing on the obsidian moat that surrounded the limestone house, but a few days later another copy surfaced. Literally: it was sealed in plastic and floated in the tank at the base of the windmill in Galatia’s park, and it was found by none other than Reverend Greeving and his Church Ladies on their way to Sunday-morning services. One of the Church Ladies delivered it to me personally; which one it was I wasn’t sure, but she stood on my porch and blinked her eyes against the Thursday-afternoon sunlight and glanced occasionally to her right and left, as if looking for the two women who usually flanked her. “The Reverend just asked me to tell you that he finds your reading of the Scriptures a might peculiar” is all she said to me, and then she turned and carefully picked her way across the rocks to her car.
And so it went: another half dozen copies of my novel showed up here and there; no one else had the gumption or the inclination to deal with me personally, but instead used the intermediary of Lawman Brown, and I took each progressively more deteriorated photocopy he procured for me, and burned it, and waited for another to appear. At some point, as I watched my novel disintegrate into ashes for the fourth or fifth time in as many weeks, I was reminded of the story of the phoenix, and after that I dug out my paper shredder and used that to destroy the returned copies instead. I could have used scissors, but there was a reason why I didn’t use scissors—a reason why I owned the paper shredder in the first place. But the shredded pages only reminded me of the first novel I’d ever lost, and so, in the end, I dug a hole in the obsidian and buried them there, one at a time, week after week, until, as suddenly as the stolen copies had begun appearing, they stopped.
I wasn’t surprised. The point had been made, I supposed, the objective reached: the objective being, as far as I could tell, that everyone in Galatia should know what sort of things I had written about them, and about myself. By the time the pirated copies of my novel stopped showing up, rumors about town had it that I was a junkie, a prostitute, a spy, a terrorist even, a mad scientist, a nymphomaniac, and, of course, a jewel thief. The erroneous conflation between author and character seemed to me so obvious as to be comic; and yet it made no sense. I was here; I existed; the details of my biography and of my character were readily available, but still people found it necessary to invent one outlandish story after another to explain my presence. But as soon as Lucy Robinson disappeared, so did all talk of her. On most days it was easy to believe she had never existed, or that she had died long ago and was best forgotten, and even as her kidnapper provided us with clue after clue, if not to her whereabouts then at least to her continued suffering, less and less was said about her. But it occurred to me, as well, that what was happening to both of us, to me and to Lucy Robinson, was in some ways the same thing. Both of us were being effaced, I by lies, she by silence. It felt in some way as if she had died, and I had come back as her ghost, to haunt Galatia. And that only strengthened my resolve that I would haunt Lucy’s town until she was exhumed, or I was exorcised. If that was all I could do for her, I would do it faithfully, and as well as I could.
Webbie
daddy ruined everything.
This was the first line seventeen-year-old Rosemary King wrote in her diary, which, as first lines go, was as catchy as any Colin ever spouted off for his novel—his missing novel, I suppose I should say.
For an entire week that was all I had to go on, Daddy ruined everything, because no sooner had I cracked the brittle spine of Rosemary Krebs’s diary than I heard the distinctive tap-tap-tap of her hard-heeled shoes on the stairs. They were my best defense, those floors, old, slightly warped, and hollow: even a footstep as light as Rosemary Krebs’s echoed throughout the house.
Eventually I gained access to the bedroom again, and to the secret compartment in the headboard, and I was able to learn that the man Rosemary Krebs had once called Daddy had been born Justice Eminent King, called Judge by his family, Emmet by his friends, and His Eminence by the local newspaper. This last is the most telling detail. In the young Rosemary King’s words: “Momma always said there were two kinds of people who should never refer to a Southern gentleman by his Christian name: a Negro who don’t work in his house and a newspaper reporter—and even if the Negro does work in his house he can only use his employer’s Christian name with permission, and only if he calls him Mister first.” It is perhaps gratuitous to mention that the i of “Mister” seemed to have been inked over an a, but I mention it anyway, if only for the sake of accuracy. At any rate, Rosemary King’s point seemed to be that it was the fault of the gentleman himself if such a thing happened, for only a man who lost the respect of his peers would be so abused, and, in the case of Judge King, one didn’t have to look too far to find his vices: Rosemary had set them off in a neat numbered column on the second page of her diary.
Vice’s
Gambling
Liquor
Loose women
Under the heading Borderline she had written Too much vetiver and Too long of hair, and under the heading Questionable she had written String ties.
Loose, I soon realized, was in this case a euphemism for black.
Judge King’s courtroom was hereditary, like his home, Seven Oaks—or the Seven Deadly Sins, as the paper called it, when it wasn’t just calling it King’s Castle—and as a result most of his time was spent perfecting the art of leisure, in the pursuit of which he managed to gamble and drink up what remained of the family’s antebellum fortune. When Rosemary King was eleven, Seven Oaks was sold at a bankruptcy auction, the big house bulldozed and cotton planted in its place, and the defrocked justice took his wife and daughter to live with a “minor cousin,” a spinster called Aunt Syrene, “a woman too loathsome to contemplate, let alone describe.”
Aunt Syrene lived an hour west of Wichita, in Hutchinson. “Like cattle,” Rosemary wrote, “she had been driven across the country.” Her diary was sketchy about the years they spent with Aunt Syrene, but she describes the house as “good-sized but shabby,” stuffed with Aunt Syrene’s junk and “packing crates in which the treasures Momma herself had salvaged from Seven Oaks were lodged like gold in the silt of a miner’s pan.” Worst of all, though, was the fact that the house was located in a neighborhood that, like her father’s passion for vetiver cologne and long hair and string ties—the picture that comes to mind all too clearly is that of Colonel Sanders—was “borderline.” “Why, one morning,” Rosemary-recorded, “I went to the corner store to fetch Momma some fresh eggs and lemon, and I walked past two darker-skinned women who were talking to each other—and they weren’t speaking English!”
Aunt Syrene’s flood of male callers was matched only by Judge King’s tendency to dine out. “June 17: Daddy dined out; Momma taken to her bed; another dinner alone with Aunt S. In a transparent effort to hide the fact that she was drinking—she caught me sniffing her glass last week—Aunt S. poured her gin into her soup and spooned it up with none too steady a hand. The soup was tomato and Aunt Syrene’s dress white (if you can believe that!). The stains told their own story.” Still, the teenaged Rosemary seemed to have lost none of her admiration or love for her father, and even though these diary entries were written years after that love had disappeared, its shadow could still be felt in her words. “He was a King, after all, and married to a Hoovier, and the King path was noted for its bumps and detours but always it had ended up smooth again, and sure, and in the right place, and I believed it would lead us back to a decent place once again.”
Rosemary’s mother, the Hoovier—Rosemary refers to her once as Rubella, but I find it hard to believe that she actually bore such a name—remained a silent figure throughout these years, but the one thing that was clear was that Rosemary reserved her true contempt for her. Mrs. King liked a fried egg sandwich in the morning, a weakness bred in her by her black nanny. She “forebore” lunch but served tea: cucumber and cress sandwiches and a silver pot of Earl Gray. “Momma always put a pitcher of milk on the Fall of Troy tea tray, though she, of course, only used lemon, and she decided who would be invited back for a second visit based on whether or not they poured milk into their tea like a commoner, which meant that we soon took tea by ourselves, with only the occasional company, if you can call it that, of Eleanor Vanderbilt, an old woman not nearly as grand as her name made her out to be—and who, as it turned out, was unable to properly digest lactose. Dairy, apparently, made her flatulent, and so, unfortunately, did tea, and soon enough it was just Momma and me.”
Still, despite these refinements, Mrs. King was a failed woman. Aunt Syrene, on the other hand, was simply a fallen woman, not worthy of the attention that contempt would entail, and Judge King did the only thing required of a gentleman: “He never left the house dirty or drunk, and if he ever came home in either of these states he made sure that none of his womenfolk saw him that way.” Any other faults he had, then, were too minor to mention, and they were, besides, his wife’s responsibility: according to the code Rosemary had learned from her mother herself, it was a wife’s only responsibility—to preserve her husband’s appearance in society, which in turn preserved her own, and her family’s—and Mrs. King’s inability to do so made her, in the eyes of the young Rosemary, not a fallen, but a failed woman. “My mother neither smoke nor drank nor ever admitted to being hungry in front of someone who wasn’t a relative, and her response to a dirty glass in the parlor, even after we were forced to let our last servant go, was to ring a bell. All of these efforts to maintain her own dignity were as naught, however, for she could not maintain her husband’s, and, as she herself taught me, a wife’s dignity at the expense of her husband’s was a thing as useless as a sail without a mast to hang it on.”
Just as I was closing the diary to go and scrub Rosemary Krebs’s toilet, I glimpsed a couple of words—mistress was one of them and another indiscreet—and I was eager to see just what such words could imply in the context of the King family. But it was nearly three weeks before I found out: two days after I read the passages I have just relayed, Lucy Robinson’s fingertips showed up, and for the next ten days neither Phyneas nor Rosemary Krebs, nor anyone else in Galatia, did much of anything. It seemed that only the farmers and I still worked each day, and I almost lost my will—not to mention my mind—waiting for the day that Rosemary Krebs would return to work. What I did lose was Lucy Robinson. On some level I actually resented her for stealing the show as she always did, as though the severing of her fingertips were a sort of grandstanding on her part; and I could hardly contain my anger at Rosemary Krebs for loitering in her own house, or my excitement when she returned to work. As it happened, Phyneas Krebs was also out of the house that afternoon, and so I was able to read, unmolested, for nearly an hour.
There were dozens of entries after the last one I had read, each one shorter and more enervated than the last, detailing the humdrum daily details of existence in the King household. Mrs. King spent more and more of her time in her bed; Judge King spent more and more of his time away from it; Aunt Syrene got into whatever bed she could; and young Rosemary, just graduated from high school, drifted among the three of them, serving tea as best she could, and guarding what little remained of the Hoovier and King family heirlooms from her father and her aunt’s plundering. It seemed as if this state of affairs could have been perpetuated indefinitely, or at least until Rosemary had married into better circumstances, but her father finally, “and, I suppose now,” Rosemary Krebs wrote years later, “inevitably broke through the final barrier: he was indiscreet.” Or, rather, his mistress was indiscreet. She came to the King house in the middle of the night and called out to Eminent King with “coarse endearments,” but the first person she succeeded in awakening was Rosemary. “I curse the urge that drove me to the window,” she wrote, “but, like Eve, I allowed myself to be tempted by the husky, exotic tones emanating from Aunt Syrene’s lawn. As if the voice hadn’t made it clear to me: not even white trash could call out filth like that. But my eyes confirmed the horror. Daddy was carrying on with a”—and here, in the heavy blot appended to the tail end of the pen stroke on the letter a, I could almost feel Rosemary King’s struggle to find the willpower to write the word—“a Negress.” Eventually her father emerged onto the lawn, and, after an encounter that Rosemary “could not watch but could not look away from,” he sent the woman away. I wasn’t surprised, when I checked the date of the entry, to find out that Rosemary saw her father’s mistress less than a month after her seventeenth birthday—the last birthday for which she and her father ever exchanged cards.
There was a gap after this scene; the shorn stubs of three pages protruded from the diary’s spine like the stump of an amputated limb; and then the next entry, dated some six months later, indicates that, rather than transfer her loyalties from father to mother, Rosemary chose to redirect them outside the house. “He is as tall as I am small” is the first complete sentence to appear after the missing pages, and I knew immediately that she must be referring to Phyneas Krebs; I call it the first complete sentence because there was also a fragment at the top of the page, which, like a bodiless tail, seemed to spasm about on the page: “is what I can do.” Of her future husband, Rosemary King wrote, “I have no illusions as to his capabilities. He is a silly man. But he doesn’t drink or smoke, and when he does he has the good sense to lie about it. He refers to his Daddy’s farm as a ranch, and, most importantly, he is a believer. And I won’t have to change my monogram.” There was a courtship, ostensibly of Rosemary by Phyneas, but clearly orchestrated by her. There was an engagement. There was, finally, a wedding, which seems to have been a travesty on all fronts. Not only did Rosemary have to wear a store-bought dress, but Aunt Syrene, having discovered the hereditary Hoovier gown, wore it herself. According to Rosemary’s diary, Phyneas’s father only washed “what skin showed beyond his suit, which, being ill-fitting, was quite a bit.” The bridegroom’s mother cinched in her waist with a belt rather than a corset or girdle, making her look “like a sack of flower dumped on a stool. Unfortunately, unlike a sack of flower, she possessed the ability to speak.” Judge King burped aloud during her vows, and Mrs. King spilled champagne on her dress during the reception. It was Aunt Syrene who caught the bouquet; she tucked one yellow rose through a moth-eaten hole in the lace at her cleavage and tossed the rest of the flowers in the trash.
In what was, I think, the only conscious act of sentimentality ever recorded in her diary, Rosemary King retrieved a single petal from one of the flowers—a yellow rose, gone dingy and brown by the time I saw it—and pressed it in with the page, and it was a similar, albeit more hostile urge, that caused me to pull the petal from the page and crumble it to dust before replacing it and returning to work.
5.21
Justin
wade unlocked the door slowly, pushed it open, let me enter first. The room was small, dim, shaded by the wide leaves of a grapevine that scaled the outer wall of the house. I thought at first that the window was also shrouded by a thin white blind, but then I realized that sheets of paper had been taped to the panes. “A long time ago,” Wade told my back, “this was my room.” Now, it seemed, it had become Divine’s: hundreds of drawings of him covered every surface of the room, even the floor. The inside of the door, when Wade closed it, was covered; the papers taped to the window were also drawings, and the setting sun came through them and through the hollow outlines of Divine’s body that were drawn on the paper. There was something so repulsively pornographic about the pictures that I found it impossible to look directly at them. Even in the ones that didn’t reveal Divine’s face, just his hand or his foot, he still seemed to be staring out at his viewers, and the pictured limb was offered as an instrument for sexual gratification, although whether that offering was Wade’s or Divine’s was impossible to tell.
I looked at Wade then; he looked nervously back at me. “Right,” he said. He said, “You don’t have to take your clothes off, but that is the usual way.” Then he sat on the floor and busied himself settling a hard-backed pad on his knees, sharpening pencils—the shavings, and his feet, and my feet, smudged the drawings of Divine beneath us—and when he stood up he seemed surprised to find me standing in the same position as before. He hesitated a moment, then walked over to me, and then he awkwardly undressed me. I was wearing only a short-sleeved button-down shirt and a pair of loose shorts, so the process wasn’t that difficult, and when my clothes were off me Wade pushed a little on my shoulder, not pushed really, but pressed, guided, and I sat in the swath of light from the window.
Wade looked at me for a long time, and, to avoid his eyes, I looked at the pictures on the wall. Despite myself, I realized what Wade was doing, and what he was going to do. Before Wade ever started that first drawing of me I could see the changing face of the room, could imagine like pictures of me covering like pictures of Divine. As I sat naked in the middle of the room, I wondered which part of Divine would be effaced by which part of me. My neck? My thigh? Would he start with my penis, or with my face? Would he first draw a picture of my entire body and then dismantle me, or would he assemble me limb by limb, get to know me piece by piece?
“Could you cross your arms, um . . .” His voice trailed off. He leaned into me, and as delicately as a girl might arrange her doll on her bed he arranged me for his picture. I moved in his hands, felt his warm fingertips against my wrists, my cheek, my thigh. When he was done he sat down again, and I didn’t look at him. I couldn’t. I thought that if I looked at him, his eyes would draw words out of me. He sat still for a moment, and then I heard him say, “Divine always, he always looked at me,” and then I heard his pencil begin to scratch on the paper. It sounded vaguely familiar, but it took me a moment to realize that it sounded like Colin at work, pushing a pen over paper. I shivered.
“Are you cold?” No, Wade, I’m not. After a moment, Wade said, “Silly question,” and his pen resumed scratching. I closed my eyes, to avoid Divine’s. “Please don’t,” Wade said, but I ignored him. “Justin?” I continued to ignore him. After a moment Wade’s scratching continued. I felt it on my skin, as though he were tattooing me, but I sat still. A long time later, Wade shook me, and I opened my eyes. “Done,” he said. The hand that shook me was smeared with lead dust. “You fell asleep?” he said, as if he were not quite sure. He handed me my shorts. “I didn’t find any underwear?” In answer, I took my shorts and put them on. My eyes flickered to his pad. It was open but bare, and at the sight I shivered. Had I become invisible? “I put it up,” Wade said. He waved a hand at the walls, and my eye scanned them quickly but I couldn’t find myself. Wade put his arms around me in another of his awkward embraces. His bones were close to his skin and they pressed against me like, I thought, like pencils, or the stems of paintbrushes. “Thank you,” he said. He stepped back from me. “It’s my private vice.” My eyes rested on a picture of Divine clutching his erect penis. Did Wade expect me to do that? “Imagine,” Wade said, “me, still doing life drawing. Well,” he chuckled, “I guess I can trust you to keep my secret.”
5.22
Divine
things changed after Ratboy’s week in jail. We’d been going together for a year: he was seventeen and I was thirteen and I’d just started high school and he’d just dropped out and now he was talking about getting the hell outta Galatia for good and always. And that’s when he started going to the Big M.
Ratboy didn’t tell me what was up at first. Just one day I come outta school to meet him like I always did and he wasn’t there, which kinda fucked me up but good cause I’d had me some words with this doofus called Merle Potter and I was counting on Ratboy to either like kick Merle’s ass or get me outta there in his car, and instead Merle, who was this great big but sort-a doughy boy with crossed eyes that were set like half a inch apart in his face, Merle drug me behind the gym and he said I had a choice between one of two things making repeated contact with my mouth, which one of them was his fist and the other was his dick, and I said well can I see the dick so I know which is bigger? And can I just say too that I hope he’s learned a little self-control in the years since then or else he better find a wife who can come in like thirty seconds because I like didn’t even have time to decide what my attitude was like gonna be toward this. I mean, this boy added a whole nother dimension to the word premature ejaculation.
So anyway late that day Ratboy found me at what by then had become our usual place: the top of the grain elevator. You’d be surprised: right there in the exact center of everything, and for a year no one had ever once caught us going up or coming down, which Galatia’s—excuse me, Galatea’s grain elevator does have a covered ladder instead of a exposed one like most-a them, but still: I mean, we had to park on the street and walk across the highway and everything, and it wasn’t like there was any place to hide once you got up top. So. It must-a been about eleven o’clock, maybe midnight, before Ratboy come over the side of the elevator. He had a kind of sheepy—sheeply? sheeplike?—smile on his face and I like made up my mind to stay mad at him but I never could, not with Ratboy, he just sat hisself down next to me and put a arm around my shoulders and gave me the littlest tenderest kiss on the cheek and right away all my anger melted into a little puddle at my feet. And right away too I knew what he’d been up to cause I could smell it on his breath, could smell it all over him really, and I thought well shit, maybe I should be mad at him but then what had I just been up to?
He had a fresh black eye, but that was so not unusual I didn’t ask him about it.
And then Ratboy he pulled a wad of wrinkled bills outta his jeans pocket which the money he gave to me and said could I count it, and I did and it come to something like a hundred and ten bucks or something like that.
And even though no one had ever sat me down and like explained the concept of hustling to me I still knew what he’d gone and done and I said, “How many?”
And Ratboy said, “Just three.”
And I did some math and I said, “Three’s not bad.”
“There was more, but I bought me a good dinner.”
“More than three?”
“More money. But I ate at the Big M.”
“You was out to the Big M?”
“That’s where I met them.”
“The three?”
“In the parking lot.”
“. . .”
“Hey, little baby,” Ratboy said in his most tenderest special voice, and the arm that was around my shoulders squeezed me tight. “Is that tears I see? You crying on me?”
I tried to keep my voice steady but I didn’t have much luck. “You gonna leave me. You gonna keep doing this till you got enough money to take off and then you gonna fly the coop.”
“Hey,” Ratboy said again, his voice sweet and tender as stewed meat, his arm tight as a vise around my shoulders. “Hey hey hey. Hey hey hey hey hey-yay,” which the way he said it sounded like a lady cat getting fucked in the middle of the night and despite myself I giggled a little.
“Who you think you’re talking to anyway? Huh? This is Ratboy here, this ain’t no Merle Potter.”
“Dull,” I said, but then I looked up at his eye. “Merle did that?”
“You should see Merle.”
Merle Potter’s left leg was about the same size as Ratboy, and everyone knew how his parents had paid for him to take tae-kwon-do classes down to Bigger Hill to improve his self-esteem on account-a his being plump and cross-eyed. Ratboy would-a been lucky to land a punch.
I said, “Aw, you tired of cleaning up after me “
Ratboy did the thing with the hey-hey-hey-yays again, and this time as he did it he shook me with his arm till my head wobbled back and forth like a Weeble.
“What I am is tired of this piss hole of a town.”
“See. I told you.”
“Which is why I’m gonna make us enough money to get us outta here.”
“Us?”
“I gave you the money, didn’t I?”
I looked down at the cash in my hands. “You giving this to me?”
“For safekeeping. You know how . . . impulsive I can be.”
He smiled when he said impulsive—and he took his hand off my shoulder too, and he undid his belt buckle.
“Yeah, I know. You pretty impulsive.”
He was pushing his pants down then, and I kinda swallowed. We’d made out and stuff up there, but we’d never like, you know, done it, right under the eyes of God.
“Reckless,” he said.
“Yeah, you that too. You reckless.”
He was pulling his dick out.
“Wild.”
“Wild.”
And then he was standing up and walking over toward the edge of the grain elevator and I was saying Ratboy? but he just kinda shot me a look that I didn’t understand and kept on walking toward the edge of the grain elevator, or shuffling I guess you’d say, his pants down around his ankles and his butt hanging out down below his shirt and even in the dark I could tell that there was like some dark grubby smears on his mighty white butt cheeks that looked for all the world like someone’d been digging at him, but I didn’t ask him about that cause for like one awful minute I thought he was gonna jump.
“Ratboy!”
He reached the edge of the platform and then he stopped, which I have to tell you made me breathe a sigh of relief, and then I started laughing because I realized he was peeing, he was actually taking a leak on Galatea—and I mean, yeah, he was peeing off the west side-a the elevator. There was maybe just the littlest bit of a breeze and it blew Ratboy’s pee off to one side-a him and broke it up into little tiny drops that sparkled just a bit in the moonlight and it was just like, you know? what? the littlest bit eerie I guess you’d have to say, watching him pee, because without his pee hitting anything like water or dirt or a tree it didn’t make no sound, no sound at all, which I guess I’d always sort-a thought, I mean well not thought but just took it for granted sort of, the sound a guy makes when he takes a leak. Without that sound, and with his pee sparkling in little drops in the moonlight, he could-a been pouring just about anything down on the town, I mean like a magic potion or fairy dust or what do they call them? pennies from heaven? and a part of me believed, or wanted to believe, that Ratboy really was taking the first step toward taking us away from there, he was making Galatea disappear, he was making it not exist anymore, which for some reason I knew had to happen if we was ever really gonna leave.
When he finished he stood there for a minute without pulling his pants up, and then he cupped his hands around his mouth and he shouted, “Fuck you, town!”
“Fuck you!” I yelled, but from where I was, cause standing near the edge of the elevator always made me dizzy.
Ratboy turned back to me.
He looked down at his dick.
“Well,” he said, and he shook the last few drops of pee from it. “Since it’s already out . . .”
After that Ratboy went to the Big M three-four times a week. Hustling turned out to be kind of like drugs: the first time is the best and after that you spend most of your time just trying to make do. I don’t think he ever turned another hundred-dollar day, except, well, except this one other time, but sometimes he made fifty, sixty bucks and he refused to leave the Big M until he had at least twenty-five, and, you know, it added up, and in a couple-a months I had a thousand dollars in a envelope which I kept duct-taped to the bottom of a dresser drawer, but Ratboy said it just wasn’t enough.
“’T’s an expensive world out there” is what he said.
Well, it was getting toward wintertime by then, and Ratboy was sick a lotta the time what with always standing around outside in the cold, I guess, and plus too there was the fact that his Daddy’d gone and kicked him out and he refused to spend any money on a motel room, he give it all to me and slept in his car, in the daytime, and he just like ate whatever it was he could scrounge up, a bag of chips or a can of corn maybe, cream corn I remember, Ratboy said he ate it right outta the can. It got to where he was down to the Big M practically every night, coughing or sniffling or whatever, but he said it was okay cause most-a those guys never noticed anything that was going on above the level of his belt. He said this to me when I saw him that maybe one time a week when he snuck over to my house to give me money. We hardly ever met up top-a the grain elevator no more, Ratboy said it was because it was just too cold up there but I sort-a figured out it was because he was too dog tired to climb up the ladder, and I couldn’t even remember the last time we’d done it ourselves. By then his eyes were puffy and always had dark circles under them what from always being out all night, and, you know, he wasn’t really getting into fights around Galatia no more cause he was never around but he was still showing up with bruises on him, they seemed to like to hit him in the face especially, or on his butt.
And so anyway Ratboy said It’s an expensive world out there, and I said, “But what’s it costing you?”
“Aw, don’t you worry about me. I can handle it just fine.”
And I was fourteen then, and he was eighteen, and then too Ratboy’d gone to some pretty big trouble to make sure I was the town faggot and I was getting beat up and other stuff on a pretty regular basis and nobody wasn’t giving me no money, that’s for damn sure, and I said, “And well then but what about me?”
At first Ratboy looked like he was gonna get pretty p o.’d, but then he took a couple-a deep breaths and it passed, and he said, “What about you?”
And I said, “You never got time for me no more. I’m lucky if I see you once a week.”
And Ratboy he just shrugged his shoulders and he turned a little bit away from me, I’d managed to get him up the grain elevator, which it seemed to take him hours to make it up that ladder, and his profile was just like a dark outline where there wasn’t no stars, and when he opened his mouth to speak it was like he was spitting out the stars I could see behind him, or maybe eating them up.
And after a really long time Ratboy said, “There’s some sick fucks out there,” he said, and after a even longer time he said, “I shouldn’t be touching you right now. Not with what I got all over me.”
And this time I didn’t say what about what was all over me cause there was something in Ratboy’s face that let me know it just wasn’t the same thing, cause . . . cause why? Cause the bottom line was that I was doing something which the truth was I liked to do even if I wasn’t doing it with people I liked doing it with, and Ratboy, he didn’t even like what he was doing but he was still doing it—doing it for me—and I guess I maybe wonder if that’s what the difference between a faggot and a faggot lover is, which, and I just have to say this shouldn’t come as no big surprise, which I had an idea that Colin Nieman would know the answer to.
5.23
Colin
on the first day of summer, Rosemary Krebs called.
“Mr. Nieman,” she said on the phone, “I wondered if you were free to meet with me?” She asked me to her office in town; I told her she would have to come to the house. When she resisted, I insisted, but she suddenly relented and said, “That would be good. I haven’t seen the inside of the limestone house in many years.”
I had not actually seen her since January, in Cora’s, and when I opened the door I was struck anew by her size. She was no bigger than a ten-year-old girl; her glazed hairdo was her largest feature.
She handed me a bag without speaking, and I didn’t have to open it to know what it contained.
Inside the house she made no attempt to hide her wandering eyes. “Perhaps you’d like a tour,” I said, and she nodded her head. Without waiting, she led me from room to room, and at some point I noticed that she looked not at what I had done to the house, but at the house itself, the detail of a molding, the thickness of a wall. At one end of the second floor hallway, she stood in the window and surveyed the property through one of the carefully positioned gaps in the hedge.
“Donald Deacon called that cedar break Stonehedge,” she said after a long pause.
“He did?” I said. “I didn’t know.”
“No,” she said. “You wouldn’t. Perhaps,” she added, “perhaps we might go for a stroll. I am eager to see how Kendan Regier is running the place for you.”
There was just the slightest pause between the word place and the words for you.
“He seems to be doing a fine job,” I said.
“Well then. A constitutional is always nice, yes?”
No was obviously not the answer she was looking for, so I smiled and said, “After you.”
Outside, she said, “The Deacon spread was always different from the other farms around here, more of a, a ranch really, than a farm.”
For a moment, I could have sworn she was going to say plantation.
“Most farmers have scattered holdings, a few fields around the house, a few here and there across the county. In some ways it makes for a nice system. It keeps one from becoming too isolated, which can be a danger of farm life.”
“But you,” I said. “Your”—I paused—“holdings”—I paused again—“aren’t exactly scattered.”
She stopped walking and turned her head up to look me in the eye. Her gaze was steady, level I want to say, leveling, and I mean that literally: it was as if I had become as small as she was. She nodded then, turned without speaking, and started walking again.
I followed her crunching footsteps off the stones of the yard. Her shoes were low-heeled things, but her gait was almost perfectly smooth, as if she were walking on nothing more ungainly than a deep pile carpet. Once off the stones, she did, however, point to them and ask, “Are you going to leave this?”
“For a while anyway. It’s quite beautiful. In its own way.”
Her voice slipped into a clipped, almost acerbic tone. “A Giacometti statue is quite beautiful,” she said, surprising me. “In its own way. But I wouldn’t want one hanging in my parlor.” She smiled slightly, and her voice resumed its normal light drawl. “I should expect it makes the heat even worse,” she said, a transplanted Southerner once again, and she waved one of her hands at the shimmering lines of the heat mirage that danced over the expanse of black stones.
“I should think that’s what Bea had in mind.”
“To accentuate the heat?”
“To accentuate the mirage.”
Rosemary Krebs offered me half a smile and a something that might have been called a snort if it had come from a nose less refined than her own, and then she turned and resumed walking. Her stride was firm and purposeful and I followed along behind her, admiring her careful steps, the way her arms remained primly at her sides rather than, as mine were doing, moving from side to side to help me maintain balance on the uneven ground. At the top of a hill was a barbed wire fence, and she turned and walked, knowledgeably, I thought, to a gate a hundred yards away. On the other side of the fence, ankle-high green wheat grew from slightly moist crumbly soil. About a mile away a huge sprinkling apparatus elevated on daddy long legs–type stilts sprayed water over a field. Rosemary Krebs walked carefully between two rows of wheat for a minute or two, until she reached the top of a small rise. In the valley, nothing but sky had been visible; here, the tops of the trees in Galatia’s park could be seen, and the steeple of Abraham Greeving’s church, and the bluffs beyond. In the opposite direction, the remains of Kenosha were made manifest by a dark cloud clinging to the ground. Rosemary Krebs turned herself around in a full circle where we stood, taking all this in, and something in the sight of her stopped me. I stood a dozen paces behind and below her and looked up at her tiny form. It seemed to tower above the landscape, and the only comparison I could think of was borrowed, from Stevens, from his poem about that jar in Tennessee, and the line that came to mind was of the jar taking dominion everywhere.
Rosemary Krebs cleared her throat, summoning me from my thoughts and to her side. “I doubt you have ever stood here before, have you, Mr. Nieman.”
I looked around for a moment, as if I might be able to distinguish this spot from any other on the featureless prairie, and then I shrugged. “I doubt it.”
“This spot is the highest point between the Bare Bluff and Kenosha. When Kenosha was still . . . extant, this was the only place where you could stand and see both towns. My daddy brought me to the seashore once, when I was just a little girl, and years later, when I first stood here, I thought that the line of Kenosha’s grain elevator looked like the tip of a cresting wave on the horizon.”
I looked at the cloud again. Nothing like a wave was visible. A storm maybe, although it seemed to me that that was just projection on my part. I looked down at Rosemary Krebs, who looked up at me expectantly. But I said nothing, and after a moment she turned from me, and her voice, when it came, was dramatically quietened.
“I had always planned on giving this to Lucy Robinson.”
“How could you give her something that wasn’t yours?”
“For a wedding present. Just the money, of course, nothing against the terms of Bea’s will. I intended to give her the money and she would buy it herself, and I had intended also to leave her my own land. Galatea would have been Lucy’s, Mr. Nieman. All of it. My dream would have been realized in her. But it seems now that that will never happen.”
In the distance the sprinkling apparatus seemed to shut itself off, and I remember wondering if it had been shut off for my benefit. This may seem like the height of paranoia, or it may seem like a logical reaction after the events of the past eight months. More than a few random acts had been committed for my benefit. And I remember also hoping that the sprinkler would turn back on, but it did not turn back on.
“Mrs. Krebs,” I said, and then I stopped. I cleared my throat noisily. “I just want you to know that I am very sorry about what’s happened.”
“I believe that you are, Mr. Nieman. Unlike Eustace Brown, I don’t feel the need to project false guilt on someone just because that person and I happen to have different lifestyles. There are things for God to judge, and things for man to judge, and I find it prudent to leave celestial matters to their proper sphere.”
“I suppose I should thank you for that.”
“Don’t thank me, Mr. Nieman. I am not your friend, and do not want to be. But neither do I consider you an enemy. An adversary perhaps,” she said, and then she turned around. She looked at me, her blue eyes made gray by the harsh sunlight. “I cannot buy this land, Mr. Nieman, but I can lease it, for a year, a century, forever. It depends on you, and you alone. You could leave. You could take Justin and leave.”
“I could leave now.”
“But you won’t, Mr. Nieman. You haven’t, and I must confess I do wonder why is that? I thought at first it was your missing manuscript, but that would no longer seem to be a consideration.”
I shrugged.
“Why do you stay, Mr. Nieman? What are you waiting for?”
I said, as simply as I could, “I am waiting for Lucy Robinson.” I said, “I can’t leave until she’s found.”
A look of horror crossed Rosemary Krebs’s face for the tiniest moment—not terror, not fear, but some kind of deep revulsion, and it occurred to me for the first time that some people did not want Lucy Robinson found. And then, when she spoke next, I realized that she, too, had read my book before she returned it to me.
“Ah,” she said, and there wasn’t a trace of sympathy in her voice. “You are waiting to find yourself.”
5.24
Webbie
rosemary krebs moved to Kenosha the day after her marriage to Phyneas Krebs, taking with her all of the Hoovier and King family heirlooms, but leaving behind, permanently, it seemed, the Hooviers and the Kings: no mention is ever made of her father, mother, and aunt again, not even the dates of their deaths; for all I know, they could be alive still.
The Krebs house was, even when Rosemary Krebs first took up residency there, closer to Galatia than to Kenosha—“an interesting geographic peculiarity that Phyneas had somehow failed to mention”—but Rosemary Krebs, like the rest of the Krebs family, conducted her business and social affairs in Kenosha. But Kenosha was an old small poor plains town, qualities that conspired to make it, in Rosemary Krebs’s phrase, “in some ways more Southern than the South itself.” All of her efforts to join what passed for society there were completely rebuffed, primarily because she possessed, in her own words, “only two attributes: breeding, and the Krebs family money, and both of these things were despised in a town that had neither.” To make matters worse, Phyneas’s pet name for her had somehow managed to escape the walls of their bedroom, and, though no one ever called her by it to her face, she heard it often enough whispered in rooms or shouted in streets behind her back. The Krebses had honeymooned in Maryland; the nickname was Crabcake. “Or Crablet. Sometimes he calls me his little crablet, and then indeed I wished I possessed a shell, so that I could crawl inside it—and away from him, and his misbegotten town.”
But she persisted. Her efforts were aided by the early death of her father-in-law, giving her, through Phyneas, control of the ranch, and it was she who, at twenty-one, had the foresight to drill their first oil wells, and it was she who persuaded Phyneas to use the proceeds thereof to open Kenosha’s first and only bank, and, a few years later, a second branch in Galatia. It was she who began remortgaging the farms that bordered the Krebs ranch, and, a few years later, repossessing them and adding them to the Krebs spread. She toyed with the idea of giving the ranch a name, but, in a rare attempt at humor, wrote, “What would I call it? The Seven Cottonwoods? The Seven Withered Elms?” She considered the idea of calling it Seven Fields for some time, but ultimately rejected the idea as too “abstract.” She wasn’t yet twenty-five when she wrote: “I want a single field, a huge field as wide as these barren plains, stretching from one ugly end of this horizon to the other. I want to be able to turn myself around in a circle and see nothing that isn’t mine.”
Time passed; months, sometimes years lapsed between diary entries. “My ledgers are my diary now”: the single line entry for 1969. It seemed that, however insignificant Kenosha’s resources, and however much Rosemary Krebs managed to increase her own, this tiny town and its denizens still possessed the power of condemnation or approval over Rosemary Krebs, who seemed to want not merely their approval, or their acceptance, but to be above the level of such base judgments entirely. The single most telling line she wrote about Kenosha was “It is their autonomy I despise: they move about like ants who have no discipline, no queen.” And so she hatched a plan, a plan that seems to come from a fairy tale rather than a history, a plan by which Kenosha would be not just effaced but erased, and a new town drawn in its place, and as I read those lines I suddenly remembered the platter I used to serve Rosemary Krebs’s tea each afternoon. The platter contained the single reference to the Iliad that I had come across in the Krebs house, and on its enameled surface Troy’s walls were toppled, bodies strewn about, smoke thick in the air, and the effect of the scene was made somehow more gruesome by the fact that it was rendered in the swirling blue lines of a faux Wedgwood pastoral. In the scene, Achilles stands atop the Trojan Horse with one sandaled foot on the fallen body of Paris; one hand holds his sword, the other Helen. Beneath them, the conquered city is in flames, and even as I thought of that I heard a door close downstairs, and I was only able to glance at the first line of the next entry before returning the diary to its hiding place: Kenosha, the line read, has got to go.
5.25
Justin
i made some dinner,” Wade said one evening. “a big pot of spring stew, all the early vegetables. Well,” he said then, “it’s Cora’s recipe, but I made it. Okay,” he admitted, as if I had challenged him, “she made it up for me and I just brought it home. I would’ve made it, but she said the recipe was a secret.” He smiled a little, almost goofily. “Anyway, I hope you’ll join me.”
He fed me. If I still spoke, what I would have said was that the stew looked a bit like one of Wade’s paintings, and tasted just as good.
Afterward he gave me his bellystone. “Please,” he said, “I know how much you loved it.” I thought it odd that he used the past tense, as if, without words, I was now without feeling.
Wade, artful seducer. You kissed me with lips that tasted of coriander and paint dust. I thought, Tomorrow you will draw my face. Tomorrow you will draw my dick. Tomorrow you will draw a complete portrait of my body.
You ran your fingertips over my eyelids, shutting them. You said, “Sshh.”
Wade, you devil you. Who would’ve guessed that you moaned like a teenaged boy. You pawed at me, managed to pull a few strands of my hair out as you pulled my shirt off. “Oh, you’re so beautiful,” you said, as if you’d never seen me naked before. You sucked as if for milk at my nipples, and I thought for some reason of Webbie, of my first meal here, and her hand on her breast.
There were no mishaps that night. You were sweet, and clumsiness kept you from being too tender. I wasn’t surprised that you didn’t use a condom, but I was surprised that I let you. I was surprised at your penis, at its durability, though after several hours it just seemed like another one of your limbs, flesh wrapped over bone, hardness its natural, its only state. I watched you sometimes, as you went about your business. A man like you, in ecstasy, must have served as an early model for paintings of Jesus. There were even faint smears of red paint over your heart where you had idly scratched yourself earlier in the day. When your eyes opened they didn’t see me, but that didn’t surprise me: I wasn’t in this house, I was in your parents’ house. I wasn’t in this bedroom: I was in your bedroom, the bedroom you had slept in as you grew up. But where were you, Wade, where did you lose yourself? Were you trying to take me there? Part of me wants you to take me there, but I know I can’t go. Wade, you and I and Colin and Divine—were they fucking at the very moment we were?—and Webbie, and Rosemary Krebs, and Abraham Greeving, and Myra Robinson, we’re all alike, with just the tiniest differences. But you, Wade, you stand just outside our circle, even farther than me. For you have gone where we all long to go. You have gone mad.
5.26
Divine
he come through my window one night and he just sat in my room for one whole hour and cried. He didn’t say nothing, didn’t hardly make a sound, but while he cried he pulled the biggest wad of money outta his pocket he ever made, it was all singles I saw after a moment, and one by one he unwadded them and laid them in as neat as possible a stack on the bed between us and I don’t know why but I knew to count them out loud, a whisper so’s I wouldn’t wake up my folks but out loud, and Ratboy cried and I counted one-two-three and so on and along about twenty-five or thirty my eyes’d got used to the dark and then I noticed these like little marks on his arm where it stuck outta his shirt, they was maybe red but I couldn’t really tell cause the light was off, and along about fifty or so I realized the little marks was cigarette burns and right when I hit one hundred I had a picture in my mind of more or less exactly what must-a happened, one-two-three-four-five-etc., except Ratboy he couldn’t-a said “et cetera,” he’da had to count all the way up to a hundred:
1
2
3
4
and so on, all the way to 100.
After that night Ratboy just started leaving the money for me. It was all I could do to catch a glimpse of him coming or going. Sometimes he’d leave a note with the money, usually the notes just said You know I love you but one time I remember Ratboy wrote down a p.s. which was You know what surprises me is most people don’t ever seem surprised.
In the meantime, in the middle-a all this, I was still in school. I was fourteen by then and I was a freshman and I was fast, and I mean fast, which seemed like a genetic accident more than anything else. My parents’d told me I was gonna have to go out for a sport and come spring I’d already skipped basketball cause I’m short and football cause I’m small and so track was all that was left for me cause I hope you don’t think I was gonna play tennis. And then like there I was, first day of practice, and what Coach Carting did was he lined us all up freshmen, sophomores, juniors, and seniors, and he said, I remember exactly, he said The one lesson in life that I can teach you is that somebody always wins and somebody always loses, and then he fired a gun that I swear was loaded up into the air and the next thing I remember was that the first person to cross the finish line was me.
The last person was Merle Potter, which is a fact that only means something to me right now. I mean, why didn’t I just run away from him?
And I guess that raises the question of why didn’t I run away from them all? Not just back then, but later on too. Why didn’t I run away from that man out to Noah’s ark, and from Wade, and from Colin? And why, when I did I run from them, why did I just run here, to the bottom of the swimming hole? I mean, I was scared-a them, sure, but I guess when it comes right down to it, I was more scared-a what I might run into than what I should-a been running away from. And. So. And. But. And. Anyway.
The long and short of it was that I’d won my first race and Coach Carting put me on the team and then on impulse when I won my first invitational I went out and bought a pair of spikes.
I bought them with some-a the money I was holding for Ratboy.
The money we was gonna use to get away.
In some ways I didn’t believe in the whole idea of it anymore. I mean, there was a lot of money under my drawer—under three different drawers actually, cause it wouldn’t fit under just one or even two, and it seemed like if we couldn’t get along on what was there then what in the world would it take for us to get along? And in some ways I didn’t even believe in him anymore, in Ratboy I mean, he was kinda like the tooth fairy except I didn’t have to give him nothing and he still paid off, and a whole lot better. I guess maybe I did believe in him, cause I sure as shit believed in his money. I guess maybe what I’m trying to say is I took him for granted.
“The issue,” Ratboy said, “is respect.”
Which is what he said when I showed him the spikes and after it’d come out how I paid for them.
I didn’t say nothing to him cause I knew even before he said it that I’d done wrong. I’d done him wrong.
“I guess you can run mighty far in those shoes.”
He picked one-a them up then. The burns on his wrist was kind of faded by then, it just looked like he’d maybe had chicken pox or something, like a month or so ago.
He dropped the shoe on the floor.
“Mighty far.”
He dropped what money was in his pocket next to the shoe.
And then he climbed out the window.
I never seen him since.
Something happened then—in the swimming hole, I mean, not in my bedroom. Nothing ever happened in my bedroom after that. Nothing at all. I’d been falling forever it seemed, for months and years and centuries, that when my feet finally touched the bottom of the swimming hole it was like a shock went all the way through me, and all-a the sudden I was planted ankle deep in this what felt like ice cold diarrhea and what I remembered was my socks, I was wearing white socks which really didn’t go with what I had on, and I thought, They never gonna come clean now.
But one more thing. My theory. Before I give up the ghost. About what happened. To Ratboy.
Okay. Deep breath.
Ha, ha.
Okay.
I don’t think he run off, see. I don’t think he left me. I think someone took him.
We’d been through too much—aw, what am I saying, he’d been through too much to just throw in the towel like that. I mean, Ratboy just wasn’t a quitter. And I mean he didn’t even take the money. But then I don’t know, cause the money always seemed more about me than about him.
One time, this was pretty early in his Big M days, I asked him if he liked it even a little bit. And it’s not just that he said he didn’t like it—it’s that he wouldn’t even say it. He wouldn’t even say what he was doing let alone that he didn’t like it. He just said, Like what? and I said, You know, and I put my hand on his ass, and he right away rolled off his stomach and onto his back and he stared up at the stars, which when you was laying down on top of the grain elevator the stars was absolutely the only thing you could see, and after a while he said How much we got? and I said Two hundred and seventy-six dollars, or whatever it was then, and then Ratboy rolled toward me, but just until he was on his side, he kept his ass turned away from me, and he said, Soon, he said, We almost there, and I remember I said, We almost where, and he said, We almost gone.
Which just leaves one thing I guess.
The money, I mean. There’s always the money.
The money I left taped to the bottom of those three dresser drawers. I never touched another cent of it, I never even took it out to count it and see how much was there. I mean, I’m only human, I make mistakes just like anybody else but I try never to make the same mistake twice, and if Ratboy did come back then I wanted him to see that every last goddamn dollar bill that he’d slaved for was still there waiting for him.
Except that it’s not.
It’s with my parents.
Who took it when they packed up and moved out in the middle-a the day cause they couldn’t really kick me out cause there was no place in Galatia that was far enough away that it wouldn’t be like I was still living in their house. I don’t know if they found the money when they moved or not, though I figure they didn’t cause they’d-a left some sign if they had, my momma and daddy was both greedy in they own ways and even if it was just that they’d stopped into Cora’s and bought a dessert in the middle of the day I’d-a found out if they’d had any extra money.
My feet was in that goddamn ice-cold muck.
The only thing about losing the money that bothered me was that the money was all I had left to remind me of Ratboy, and even though it wasn’t even where I looked at it, still, it was where I thought of it all the time, and so thought of Ratboy, and after that I didn’t think of him as often, or in the same way.
Black pants, white socks, black shoes, and that ice-cold muck.
For a few months after my parents left, the few months before I made Wade’s acquaintance, I still slept in our house. I slept in my bedroom. In the carpet on the floor the marks of where my bed and my dresser and my chair’d been was still there, and I used to sleep in between the four dots that marked the place where my bed’d been, and I used to go over to the four dots that marked the dresser’s spot and pretend to open it in the morning and choose my clothes, even though the only clothes I had was the clothes on my back. Not that any of this has any bearing on anything else. I’m just saying, is all.
I’m just saying that falling had been its own reward and once I reached bottom there seemed like nothing else to do but keep going, so I pushed, which of course sent me going back up, and the one thing that I did realize as I reached my hands out for the starry surface of the swimming hole was that in this case, in my case, going up was no different than going down. I realized that I could freeze to death in a desert just as well as in the arctic, I could fall a thousand miles without ever taking my feet off the ground, and it seemed to me that if I was going to drown I might as well drown on dry land, drown on air.
5.27
Colin
rosemary krebs had almost convinced me that she was telling the truth about her love for the land, but unfortunately for her she kept on talking; eventually her words acquired the false tone of a political speech and then I began to tune her out. We walked aimlessly; I tried to steer us in the direction of the limestone house, but the truth was I had no idea where it was. I tried to use the sun for direction but it was almost directly overhead, and, too, I realized that even if I could have used it to establish the points of the compass for me, I still would have had no idea which way to walk. At one point, however, Rosemary Krebs said something about “natural and archaeological resources,” and then in a flash of inspiration so unexpected that it struck me like a blow, I realized where Lucy was being held.
I could barely keep my voice level when I spoke.
“Um, Rosemary?”
“Pardon me, Mr. Nieman.”
“Excuse me—Mrs. Krebs. But isn’t the cave around here somewhere?”
“The cave?”
“Of the Bellystones?”
She paused then, an equivocal expression on her face.
“Mrs. Krebs, please. It’s a matter of some urgency.”
She didn’t have to look around to get her bearings. She pointed, down the hill we stood on and to the west. “I do believe it’s over there. Just beyond the next rise.”
I turned and started walking immediately, and after a moment I heard her steps behind me. “Mr. Nieman,” she called, “may I inquire as to your sudden interest in the cave. I mean, I take it from your inquiry that you’ve yet to make a visit there.”
“I’m sure you’ll understand me when I say that the events of the past eight months have pushed sightseeing to the back of my mind.”
“. . .”
“Did you happen to see the pictures, Mrs. Krebs?”
“. . .”
“Of Lucy. The ones T.V. Daniels found in February.”
“. . .”
“In the pictures Lucy appears to be lying on bare soil. Lawman Brown thought perhaps she was in an unfinished basement somewhere in Galatia.”
“Well, many of the older homes in town do have fruit cellars and—”
“—and one of the things you promised everyone who moved to Galatea from Kenosha was a full finished basement, the better to hold the groundwater which seeped into it each spring.”
“. . .”
“At any rate, Lucy was not found in either a fruit cellar or a basement.”
“. . .”
“Now, it’s my understanding that the Cave of the Bellystones is in fact a manmade space. An excavation, a dig, a, a—”
“It’s a hole in the ground, Mr. Nieman, approximately twenty-one feet by twelve feet by five.”
“Exactly!”
“Not that I’ve been down there myself.”
“Of course you haven’t.”
“. . .”
“Mrs. Krebs, has anybody thought to check the cave since Lucy was taken?”
“By anybody I assume you mean Sheriff Brown or, perhaps, the Mayor.”
“What I mean is, it’s right here. Less than two miles from town, less than a mile from the site of the abduction. It’s right—”
“—here, Mr. Nieman. It’s right here.”
We had crested the hill then—the rise, as Rosemary Krebs more accurately named it—and there, below us, in a gravelly valley, was the entrance to the cave. The sudden sight of a building after miles and hours of nothing but grass and sky, even one as rudimentary as that tiny plank-sided cone, was somehow silencing, and Rosemary Krebs and I stood together for a moment, just staring. Then Rosemary Krebs cleared her throat.
“Perhaps once a century,” she said, “the spring rains are so heavy that the south fork of the Solomon River jumps its banks and the flood waters travel a route that cuts across the western edge of Galatea and passes directly through this little valley here. The last time it happened was more than a hundred and twenty-five years ago, and when the waters retreated the cave’s entrance was discovered. It had been underground until that time, no one knows for sure how long, probably buried by the same process that later uncovered it. Phyneas”—she paused, and cleared her throat again—“the Mayor had the housing erected some years ago, both to ensure the integrity of the original structure and to safeguard against children falling down the shaftway.”
There was something forced about this speech as well, although it took me a moment to realize that she was merely telling it because she was stalling. She didn’t want to go down there.
“Do you have a key,” I said then.
“. . .”
“On you, I mean.”
Rosemary Krebs sighed. “Yes.”
“What a fortuitous occurrence. May I borrow it?”
Rosemary Krebs reached into a pocket of her suit and pulled out a single key. “Mr. Nieman,” she said as I advanced on the shack, “would it be logical to suggest that if the cave is still locked then it is doubtful that anyone is inside it?”
“Look at this.”
“. . .”
“Here,” I said, “and here, and here.”
“Are they—”
“Footprints. Very large footprints.”
“I can see that, Mr. Nieman. What I meant was, are they yours?”
“. . .”
“Although,” she went on, “I would assume they are not, as they appear to be quite old, and you have said that this is your first time here.”
“Mrs. Krebs,” I said then, “at the bottom of most padlocks there is a serial number. If you write away to the maker of the lock”—I fingered the large silver thing that held the door to the cave closed—“in this case, Master, they will send you a new key.”
“That seems to me a labor-intensive plan to gain access to a shack in the middle of a field. He could have just clipped it.”
“He clipped her fingers, Mrs. Krebs, because he wanted that act to be discovered. I expect he desired some element of secrecy in his lair. Although for all we know he could have clipped this lock and replaced it with one of his own.”
I fit the key to its slot then, and it slipped into the lock smoothly; a quarter turn, and the bolt clicked free of the body of the lock.
Rosemary Krebs cleared her throat. “But he didn’t.”
“But he didn’t,” I said, and then I said, “Mrs. Krebs, is this lock opened regularly?”
“To the best of my knowledge, it’s not been opened in eight years, unless Eustace—”
“Because it opened very smoothly for something that’s been exposed to the elements for so many years.”
“. . .”
“I’m just saying.”
After a moment I took the lock from the clasp. Humidity had caused the door to swell and stick in its frame, and I had to jerk on it in order to open it, and, as soon as it had, a fetid stench rushed from the cave.
“Jesus Christ!” I said.
“Oh dear Lord,” Rosemary Krebs said at the same time. She put a hand to her nose—but, I noted, she didn’t step away from the cave.
As soon as the smell hit my nostrils, I found myself strangely calm. Whatever was producing that smell was dead, and, for whatever reason, I was pretty sure that Lucy Robinson was not yet dead.
“Pardon me,” I said, pulling my T-shirt off. I bunched it up and pressed it to my nose.
“Mr. Nieman—”
I removed the shirt from my nose. “I’m going to have a look around.”
“Mr. Nieman, don’t be foolhardy. We should contact Sheriff Brown.”
“With all due respect, Mrs. Krebs, that would be foolhardy.”
Rosemary Krebs almost smiled.
“Is this your flashlight?”
“. . .”
“It was hanging here. Did you perhaps leave it here when you erected the shed?”
Rosemary Krebs shook her head.
I clicked the flashlight on and a bright beam of light stabbed into the shed.
I noticed that the flashlight had a light coating of dust on it, and noticed also that the dust turned muddy on contact with my sweaty hand.
“For the record,” I said, “I am leaving fingerprints on this flashlight now, and not at some point in the past.”
“Of course you are.”
I looked back at Rosemary Krebs. One of her tiny hands covered her nose and mouth, but her eyes were bright and unreadable.
“If I start to scream,” I said, “run.”
“And if you don’t?”
“Then run faster.”
I admit that there was something satisfying in saying these words, in evoking the pulpy narrative of a horror movie. Real crisis! Real danger! Here we go!
We stopped talking then, which was a good thing, because each bite of a word brought a mouthful of that stink into my body, and I was ready to vomit. I managed to tie my shirt around my head in an inadequate sort of cozy, and then, the flashlight pulsing its way ahead of me, I headed into the cave.
A little spiral pathway wended into what seemed like nothing more than a pile of smooth round stones; in just seconds I had twisted out of the sunlight and into darkness, and I noticed that many of the stones seemed slightly crystalline in nature, and they reflected my light in dizzying, almost hypnotic flecks of color. But any archaeological curiosity I had was cut short by the sudden end of the path. The flashlight showed me a gnarled and nobbled post sticking out of a smooth-edged hole in the ground. If anything, the stench was worse than ever. The flashlight had a looped strap at the end of it wide enough to fit around my hand, and I hung it from my wrist, grabbed the pole, and started down. At some point in the past—in another life, it seemed—Justin had told me that Webbie had told him that the shaft was only a dozen feet long, and so I just slid its length, figuring that if anyone was down there, surprise would be my only advantage. But I really couldn’t believe that anyone could have lived with that stench for any length of time, and remain sane.
My feet struck soft earth. I took a step back from the pole and even as my shoulders and head struck the roof of the cave my feet crunched against something metallic; in a moment the flashlight showed me an empty can, the kind that vegetables come in, its label just a charred remainder, and for a moment I was distracted by the can’s shape, how its alternating bands of ribbing and smoothness looked exactly like a truck-stop rubber. It occurred to me, too, that the label had been burned off because the food in it had been cooked right in the can, and in a moment the flashlight’s beam had found a half dozen other cans and the remains of a fire, all fairly close to the shaftway. Farther away, more cans, all empty, all with the labels burned off, and, as well, several shapeless brown masses I thought at first were rodent carcasses but then realized were the swollen shapes of books that had at some point been soaked in water, cheap drugstore paperbacks most of them, many of which had been shredded and fed to the fire. For a moment I was held by that: the arrangement of the few elements, cans, fire, waterlogged books, and, indeed, the cave itself struck me as somehow deliberate, deliberately symbolic, and I could easily imagine him reading by the light of a fire made with the pages of the books he was literally consuming, and eating the food he cooked in the flames.
He. Him. We spoke of him almost familiarly, as if we knew him.
The flashlight’s beam passed over the niches in the wall Justin had also told me about. I thought at first that they had collapsed or been partially filled in, but I realized that a box had been placed in each of them, and even in the dim light I recognized them as boxes that Justin and I had used to move. The one nearest me had the word Copper written on its side; it had contained a bowl made of beaten copper that Justin had picked up when we went to Cairo, a bowl etched with fake hieroglyphics that, we had been told, contained a spell granting immortality to whoever mixed a certain potion in the bowl. One of the spell’s ingredients, I remember, was a liter of human blood, and I remember Justin whispering to me his surprise that the ancient Egyptians had been familiar with the metric system.
“Mr. Nieman?” Rosemary Krebs’s voice was faint but clear. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine, Mrs. Krebs. Everything’s fine.”
In fact I didn’t quite believe that. It occurred to me that even more pieces of Lucy Robinson could be in those boxes—that she could in fact be dead, that she could be what I was smelling. I couldn’t bring myself to examine the boxes immediately, and so I cast the flashlight’s beam over the rest of the cave—twenty-one by twelve by five, as Rosemary Krebs had told me—and it was in the farthest corner of the room that I saw it: a cloth-draped mound.
He hadn’t gone to any trouble to disguise it beyond the blanket, and, whatever it was, it was too small to be Lucy Robinson. At least I hoped it was.
I picked my way to the mound. Maybe I had been conditioned by the movies, but I expected something—the hiss of snakes or rats, a concealed stake-bottomed pit in the earth, a trip wire loosing a fatal arrow—to make my descent into the enemy’s trap more dangerous. But the only sound was my own breathing and my footsteps; my greatest obstacle was the sharp edges of the lids of opened cans of vegetables. At one point I tripped over something buried in the dirt: a pair of boots, my boots. I had no doubt that they would match the prints outside, and on the road where Lucy Robinson was first taken. I went on then, slowly, walking nearly doubled over; still, soon enough I was at the mound, and I used my thumb and forefinger to fling the blanket away. I’d like to say the stench grew suddenly stronger but it already infused every cubic inch of the space in the cave, and the only dramatic element in my action was a faint squelching noise that I suspected was the ripping of rotting flesh.
The thing under the blanket had been dead for a long, long time. Stringy gelatinous flesh hung off a skeleton whose white bones showed through in more than a few places. In a moment I made out the cloven hooves—a calf?—and then I saw the slightly snoutish shape remaining to the nose and I realized it was a pig. In another moment I noted the broken ribs on its right side, and then I shone the flashlight directly on the skull and I saw the hole on the right side of the skull.
Charlene.
I stared at her for a moment, but she had no secrets to tell me.
Howard Goertzen?
Lucy’s suitor?
Charlene?
It occurred to me that it had been Howard Goertzen who found her dress, on the corner of Adams and First.
It occurred to me also that Howard Goertzen was a short man, but he was fat as well, and that his feet in my boots would leave deep footprints.
For some reason, it seemed necessary to cover her body again, and I manipulated the stiff sticky blanket gingerly. Something shiny flashed when I lifted it. I paused; I debated. Then I reached for it.
It was a piece of paper; I held it only by the edges. It was a card actually—not a business card, but a calling card. My calling card. My name stared up at me.
Colin Nieman.
After a moment I turned the card over.
Ikn w you would look h r for answ rs.
The line was taken from The Beast, from Justin’s book. The message had even been typed with my typewriter, the one I had discarded after throwing it at Justin.
Justin.
It occurred to me that just about anyone wearing my boots would leave deep footprints in mud.
For some reason I was possessed of the urge not just to destroy the card but to destroy it by eating it, and that thought, finally, brought up the gorge that had been building in my throat for the past ten minutes. I managed to turn to avoid Charlene, and I threw up all over the empty cans of food and waterlogged books, and then, slowly, carefully, I slipped the card in a pocket—my card, my pocket, with the message that I was sure had been written to me and not about me. I made my way back to the surface and to my house. Not my house, but the house, a house, a house that belonged neither to me nor to Rosemary Krebs, but to the unknown man—no one could convince me that piggy little Howard Goertzen possessed either the brains or the willpower to commit such an act—the nameless man who had claimed not just Lucy Robinson’s but, I now realized, all our lives.
5.28
Webbie
gene zwemmer worked as hard as possible at being Kenosha’s town drunk. He “reported for his first day of work today,” Rosemary Krebs wrote in her diary on May 13, 1973, “smelling like he’d gone swimming in the pool hall rather than drinking in it.” His reputation carried even to Galatia, and he could often be found at Sloppy Joe’s when the liquor wasn’t cheap enough in Kenosha. He was a short man with a mouth that hung continually half open, like a door slowly working its way loose of its hinges; he was bald as well, but sported nearly a foot of facial hair, a sort of woven vertical place mat that displayed the crumbs of his most recent meal. This beard was also stained to a nameless noncolor, neither brown nor yellow nor orange, from the perpetual cigarette that, lit or unlit, always dangled off his lower lip. No one was quite sure if he had a home or not; if he did, he never made it back there at night, and the morning sun found him more often than not curled up under someone’s shade tree or porch swing or in the back of their pickup, the matted mass of his beard flipped up over his face to keep the light out of his eyes.
This was the person whom Rosemary Krebs hired to be her handyman.
She never described him in her diary as I have, but immediately after Kenosha burned down a few pictures of him ran in various papers around the state, and as Kenosha’s surviving families settled in Galatea, they pooled their lore about the man who had, depending on how you looked at it, either killed their dreams or given birth to new ones for them, and they stored it someplace deep in their minds, crammed in there with stories about Buffalo Bill and Paul Bunyan and Mother Goose. But all Rosemary Krebs had written about Gene Zwemmer was that “he was less than a man. He was just an appetite, and what I saw in his eyes convinced me that I was justified in doing what I was doing.” The date on that entry was May 28, 1974, the very day that Kenosha was consumed by fire, and even though I believe that reconstructions make for poor, for dishonest history, I still found myself unable to prevent my imagination from seizing hold of that morning and shining its bright light on all the corners that the extant records left in shadow. And this isn’t a history, after all, it’s not even a story: it’s just an excuse.
Every day for two weeks the thermometer had pushed past ninety by noontime. Not a cloud in the sky, nothing more than a memory of a breeze. Still, spring had been early and wet that year, and harvest was nearly half over already. It was a fast crop but for the same reason it was a poor crop; yields were low, prices poor, and tempers in general were as hot as the weather. What a body could use was a nice calming drink, is what Gene Zwemmer was thinking to himself, something ice-cold but burning like fire all the way down. He was thinking of vodka—thinking of it, because the pool hall didn’t open till three—but what he ended up with, quite unexpectedly, was whiskey.
He was driving to work. He drove slow. He drove, in fact, at no more than ten miles per hour, and even glasses-wearing grandmas who still regarded automobiles as something of a novelty sped past him in their dusty LTDs and Crown Victorias. But one thing Gene Zwemmer had never done is he’d never hurt a soul in his life. School was out and children were about and his weren’t exactly the fastest reflexes in the world. He drove slow, all the way to Galatia, to Rosemary Krebs’s overgrown doll house.
She was waiting for him on the back porch. That was something Gene Zwemmer didn’t really care for: she wouldn’t never let him use the front door, she always made him come round back. Not that he ever actually got to use the door: she didn’t let him in her house at all, but even in the dead of winter came outside in one of her tiny, tidy gray skirt suits to give him his chores for the day.
But this morning—well, it was probably after noon by then—this afternoon she was standing on the back porch, and she gave him a little wave as he drove up, and she smiled at him as he made his way up to those rickety steps. He put his hand on the step railing but didn’t mount them. Never was a big fan of steps, Gene Zwemmer. Preferred nice flat level ground. Never saw a pool hall with steps, did you?
Rosemary Krebs stood at the top of the steps, and the extra height allowed her to look down on Gene.
“Morning, Gene,” she said.
“Morning, Mrs. Krebs.”
“And how are you this morning, Gene?”
“I’m fine, Mrs. Krebs, thank you for asking.” A pause, a squint. “’N’ you, Mrs. Krebs?”
“Couldn’t be better, Gene, couldn’t be better. Gene,” she said, “would you like to step inside for a moment?”
“Step?”
“Inside, Gene. Step inside.”
Well. Well, well.
Gene Zwemmer tightened his grip on the railing, and, carefully, he made his way up the four steps. Going up wasn’t so bad anyway. Going down though. Well, he’d cross that bridge when he come to it.
The back door led through a little mud room into the kitchen. There was all the usual stuff in the kitchen—sink, stove, fridge—plus a whole lot more. Long-stemmed crystal glassware hung upside down off racks like you see in fancy bars—on TV; there were no fancy bars in Kenosha—and dish towels didn’t dangle off drawer pulls but were, instead, draped neatly over dish towel-sized towel rods. A dozen cutting boards hung off one wall, and an enormous butcher block sat on the counter beneath them, so studded with knife handles that it looked like a magician’s prop to Gene. The last thing Gene noticed, before he noticed the table, was the nineteen white teacups that hung on hooks off one wall; there was a twentieth hook, and Gene wondered if its teacup was dirty or busted. It was busted, Gene: it had been broken before Rosemary Krebs ever took up residence in Phyneas Krebs’s house, and if Gene had pulled on the hook a little hole would have opened up in the wall, revealing the three fragments that, if glued together, would have formed the twentieth teacup.
Then he noticed the table, and on the table sat a large brown envelope, a box of cigars, a bottle of Jack Daniel’s, and two glasses, facedown. Of all the items that caught his eye, it was the presence of a second glass that captivated his attention. Why, Mrs. Krebs? Who knew?
“Do you know what today is, Gene?”
“Tuesday?”
“Ho-ho, Gene. Yes, it’s Tuesday. But do you know what else it is?”
He wiped his brow. “Hot?”
“Yes, it’s certainly hot, Gene. Gene,” she said, reaching out and turning one of the glasses face up. “It’s our anniversary, Gene.”
“Um, you and Phyn—you and Mr. Krebs, ma’am?”
“No, Gene, you and I. One year, Gene, we’ve been working together for one full year today.”
In fact, it had been one year and two weeks, but Rosemary Krebs had had to wait for the harvest to come in.
Gene Zwemmer didn’t say anything. He had never held a job for an entire year in his life, but he’d never tried to either. It didn’t strike him as something particularly worthwhile, or worth noting, especially not with a bottle of Mr. Jack Daniel’s himself. He noticed that the seal had not even been broken yet.
“Anniversaries are a big affair where I come from, Gene. In the South.”
“Georgia, ma’am.” Gene Zwemmer had heard more than once that Rosemary Krebs was from Georgia.
“That’s right, Gene. Georgia.” She reached for the bottle, but her hand stopped in midair before touching it. “Ah, would you? My . . . hands,” she said, and waggled her fingers at him, as if that meant something.
He reached for the bottle slowly, waiting for something to slap him down, but nothing did, and the hardness of the glass neck in his hand convinced him that he wasn’t dreaming either. Rosemary Krebs didn’t say anything as he opened the bottle, and you could hear the paper seal tear as he twisted the cap off. He set the cap on the table, but he didn’t pour.
“Gene,” Rosemary Krebs said. She smiled, and then, after a long pause, she turned the second glass over. “I just thought we should mark the occasion?”
“Ma’am . . .”
“With a toast,” Rosemary Krebs said. “To a successful year, and to all the successes ahead.”
“Ma’am.”
“Perhaps you would be so kind as to do the honors.”
“Ma’am?”
She didn’t say anything then. Just nudged the glasses.
“Ma’am!”
Gene Zwemmer grabbed for the bottle, then slowed himself down as he poured. Wasn’t any of Rosemary Krebs’s business knowing that him and Mr. Jack Daniel’s wasn’t regular drinking buddies.
He held up his glass. “To Lynchburg.”
Rosemary Krebs’s fingers were curled around her glass, but she didn’t pick it up. “Pardon?”
“Lynchburg, ma’am.” Gene Zwemmer pointed at the bottle. “Lynchburg, Virginia, home of the Jack Daniel’s distillery. In the South, ma’am.”
His hand trembled a little as he held his glass in the air, waiting for Rosemary Krebs to pick up hers.
“Oh, of course. Lynchburg.”
“Ma’am.” Gene Zwemmer made a one-handed toasting gesture with his glass. “To Lynchburg, ma’am. To the South.”
Rosemary Krebs smiled again. She lifted her glass and touched it lightly to Gene’s.
“To Lynchburg,” she said. “To the South.”
Gene Zwemmer nodded. “Bottoms up,” he said, or thought, he wasn’t quite sure, and then the drink was gone. His eyes closed as the liquor hit his throat. Coarse as honey, sweet as sandpaper, he thought, and when he opened his eyes he saw that Rosemary Krebs’s glass was also empty, and he saw too, with that crystal vision that only good alcohol will give you, the forming of seven tiny beads of sweat on her upper lip. Her eyes were wide, her nostrils flared, and he could hear her breath gushing in and out of them. A long moment after that, he heard her swallow.
“Well well well, ma’am,” he said. “We-he-hell.”
Rosemary Krebs smiled without showing her teeth. She didn’t say anything.
Gene Zwemmer poured them each a second glass. A third.
She held up her hand at the fourth, but motioned for him to go on without her, and as he poured and smelled and sipped and savored—what, he wondered, what wonders would their second anniversary hold, their third, fourth, fifth?—Rosemary Krebs pushed her hands through thick cotton air to the box of cigars. She flipped its lid open as though it were either very heavy or very delicate, and she regarded the brown cellophaned tubes with a mysterious smile on her face before she finally picked one up.
She held it end to end between two fingertips.
“It . . . looks . . . just . . . like . . . a . . . turd.”
“Ma’am?”
“Like a turd, Gene, like a long neat chunk of shit, like—”
No, I thought to myself. No, she didn’t say that.
Well. I too had read a copy of Colin’s novel. No one in Galatia had escaped that plague.
“No celebration is ever complete without a cigar” is what she said, and, a little addled by drink, she placed it right in Gene Zwemmer’s never-quite-closed mouth.
“Ma’am?”
The lighter was in the pocket of her jacket, a fancy thing made of smoky glass through which Gene Zwemmer stared dumbly at a bubble of air floating in lighter fluid. She struck it, and a tongue of flame burst from its top, and she held it to the end of his cigar. Her hands wobbled a little, making it hard for him to get a light off the flame, or to read the letters that had been etched into the glass of the lighter, but eventually the end of his cigar glowed red six inches in front of his face and he had made out the inscription.
J.F.K.
“Pardon me, ma’am. But that wouldn’t be the late president’s lighter, would it?”
“What?”
Rosemary Krebs would have been startled by a comment so far from the matter at hand. She would have looked at the lighter for a moment, and then, I suppose, then she would have seen Gene Zwemmer’s error, and she would have laughed.
“J.E.K.,” she explained. “Justice Eminent King.” She paused for a moment, and then she pressed the lighter into his hand, the one that wasn’t still curled around his empty glass. “It was my father’s,” she clarified. “But, seeing as neither Phyneas nor myself smoke . . .” She folded his fingers closed over the lighter, patted them, withdrew her hand.
With her own hands, with both of them, she poured him a fifth glass of whiskey.
“Ma’am,” Gene Zwemmer said. He took the cigar out of his mouth long enough to drink, and then he put it back in. “Ma’am.”
Rosemary Krebs tapped the envelope on the table.
“Just one little errand today, Gene. If you don’t mind.”
“Ma’am?”
“If you could just drop this off with Bruce Hennessy down to the grain elevator?”
When he left, the lighter was in his pocket and the cigar was in his mouth, the envelope full of reports and the box full of cigars and the upright bottle still half full of what Lynchburg and Mr. Jack Daniel’s did best were pyramided on his folded arms.
Rosemary Krebs remained seated when he stood up. She pressed her palms flat against the table and her tiny little bottom lifted perhaps an inch above her seat, but then it sank back down again, and she remained in her chair. She didn’t bid him good day.
The steps were something he hadn’t reckoned on, and the glowing tip of the cigar, five inches now, five inches in front of his eyes and filling them with smoke, just made it worse. But it was his anniversary, and damned if he was going to fall down four measly steps on his anniversary. Still, the glowing tip of his cigar skewed his perspective, and he wavered at the top of the steps.
He closed his eyes finally, closed his eyes and trusted his feet, and took the steps as a young child would: one (and one), two (and two), three (and three), four (and four), and he was on the ground.
He was in his car.
He decided to drive back through Galatia to get to Kenosha. It wasn’t every day he got to drive with a cigar in his mouth and a bottle of his personal lord and savior Mr. Jack Daniel’s held safe and sound between his legs.
Nigger families did the things that nigger families did: rocked on porches with rinds of watermelon at their feet while pickaninnies ran without no shoes on through litter-strewn grassless yards, and Gene Zwemmer smiled at them all, the glowing tip of his cigar still a good four inches from his bent lips.
Nice park though.
He was through Galatia.
Kenosha came over the horizon so slowly that it seemed to be climbing up out of a hole. The grain elevator appeared first, a long row of uniform white columns. The land seemed to pull back from it like a lip exposing shiny white teeth.
He held the bottle between his legs.
He held the cigar in his mouth.
He held the steering wheel with both hands, because Gene Zwemmer had never hurt a soul in his life.
School’s out, children about.
He smelled the dusty air that clung to the elevator. Dry and dusty and settling on his skin, that air, even under his clothes even, that dust could get anywhere. It got in his eyes, and, what with the smoke coming off the end of his cigar, three inches now, only three inches from the tip of his nose, he figured he’d better slow it down.
He eased right up on the scales, right beneath a hundred thousand bushels of wheat, a million million kernels of the stuff, a trillion particles of wheat dust floating all around him.
There was something wrong with this picture, he thought.
What was wrong with this picture? he thought.
He thought, and to help himself think he took a deep breath.
The tip of his cigar was so close to his face that he felt its heat on his cheeks as he inhaled. It opened up like a third eye, a bright red and pulsing orb.
If this works, I will take it as a divine sign, Rosemary Krebs was writing in her diary at just that moment.
I imagine the air glowing around Gene Zwemmer’s face, sizzling, sparking like a struck flint, sparkling like the glowsticks children twirl on the Fourth of July—Independence Day in the rest of the country, but here, in Galatea, Founders’ Day.
It was a small book, Rosemary Krebs’s diary, but there were still a hundred pages after the one on which that sentence appeared. But she never filled those pages. She only wrote one more line, and then she hid her story—her confession, Justin would have called it; and somewhere in Colin’s novel, I remembered, he also referred to that book as a confession—and left it there forever. Apparently one sign from God was enough, and she didn’t tempt fate by asking for a second.
His beard went first, three decades’ worth of greasy food going up in a single viscous black cloud. The fancy glass lighter with its etched J.E.K. exploded over his heart, the bottle of Jack Daniel’s blew off his genitals, the gas tank in his truck took off both legs at the ankles—all trivial injuries, really, given the fireball that was about to reduce Gene Zwemmer to a half dozen pieces of charcoal.
The air is burning was Gene Zwemmer’s last thought. The air is burning, the sky is falling, and everything has gone up in smoke. The last sentence of Rosemary Krebs’s diary read, This is the craziest thing I ever heard tell of, and for the first time in my life I found myself in complete agreement with her.