Cold Flat Junction

I walked along Windy Run, which meant passing Rudy’s Bar and Grill on one side and the Esso station on the other, sitting in its own couple of acres of sandy ground. There were no cars in sight being fixed or filled up with gas. A wind tunneled down the road (which is where the road got its name, I guess), and blew a Milky Way wrapper against my foot.

As I looked across at the Esso station and wondered how business was, I asked myself why I hadn’t just gone there to find out where Louise Landis lived. Gas station attendants always know everything. Why had I gone to the diner and more or less created a lot of confusion? For I knew they’d all disagree about any topic, including the whereabouts of some villager. I suppose Lola Davidow would put it down to just being “troublesome” (which she’d told me I was on many occasions).

But this was my roundabout way. I think it had to do with what the answer came out of, how it came about. Yet, what difference does it make if the answer comes out of a long, out-of-the-way conversation, or just comes out as a simple answer? I don’t know; it just does.

It’s said the older you get the more philosophical you become. I’ll be thirteen in a couple of months. I have always looked forward to my teens, but now I’m not sure. I really don’t want to get more philosophical than I already am.

As I passed Rudy’s Bar, I stopped to look in the window. I couldn’t see much but my own reflected self right above a blue neon sign that said BEER—EATS. I would have liked to cup my hands around my face and peer through the window—it was really dark in there—and see if anybody was “drunk and disorderly.” (I enjoy police terms, when the Sheriff says them: “drunk and disorderly” sounds almost poetic.) But I didn’t stare in. I told myself it was because I respected people’s privacy, but it was more because I didn’t want Rudy coming out and yelling at me to get away from the window. I am not a risk taker.

Walking on, slowly, I kicked up leaves that skittered along the pebbly ground. Why were there dead leaves on the path in this early summer? The land all around looked as if it were between seasons. Or you’d think the place had only a single season that had to make do for all four. I had this sinking feeling as I always did in Cold Flat Junction when I was alone, just looking around. Often, there was no one else around, and when I did see others, they were few and far away. There was something collapsible about all of this, as if it were a plan of a village, a mock village, or a replica, a village cut from cardboard and put up as an experiment in lastingness. And everyone was surprised it had indeed lasted, the way that tall, thin people outlive dumpy, fat ones (or at least that’s what Ree-Jane keeps telling me).

I had come to Schoolhouse Road. The school always looked to me more like a church than a school, with its white clapboard and steeple bell. The playground was empty even of the girl I’d played Pick Up sticks with the first time I’d been here. That was scarcely three weeks ago, yet it seemed like months, years even. Time, here, stretched to breaking.

I knew exactly where Flyback Hollow was and where the Queens lived on Dubois Road, and the post office, too—a square, gray, cinderblock building. I went in and found no one about, as there hadn’t been before—no one at the window selling stamps or anything. I stopped at the bulletin board where I was glad to see there was no “Wanted” poster for Ben Queen. The Drinkwater brothers were still up there looking mean, and I wondered if the FBI had forgotten about them. I also wondered how effective the FBI was, as the Drinkwaters had been “at large” for nearly a year now. They might be up in Alaska.

“At large.” I supposed it meant being all over, being out there in some helter-skelter way, hardly visible, anonymous. I left the post office and walked on, wondering if this was a good description of me.

On Dubois Road, I stopped out in front of the Queen house. I wound my hands round the white and peeling fence pickets, and leaned back and wondered if they were home and could see me. Would they remember me from being here with Mr. Root? Of course they would, for hadn’t they told the Sheriff about me? It felt as if months had passed since I’d seen them, and I wondered if Time were like a glass of water or a Cold Comfort: if you poured too much into it, it would spill over onto any available surface. If Time has to contain too much—too many murders or lost people found or chicken wings thrown—does it have to expand to take care of it all?

If Cold Flat Junction was a place where Time worked in strange ways, Flyback Hollow was its midnight. Dubois Road ended here, where the name “Flyback Hollow” was painted in whitewashed letters on a large rock. Trees and foliage grew around the place where it began. It had got nearly all of the trees in Cold Flat, as if they’d got together as saplings and decided to stick together and Flyback Hollow was where they stuck.

The branches above me lapped across the narrow road and created a tunnel of coolness and partial dark. It was like a little park in here, almost, the road dividing and arcing around a couple of acres where Jude Stemple’s house sat. There were other houses, little ones, square and uninteresting and dropped about as if Aurora Paradise had tossed playing cards on the floor, which she sometimes did.

I slowed down and picked a black-eyed Susan, humming and pulling its petals. It was so nice not having to be anywhere, not having anyone to serve at dinner except for Miss Bertha and Mrs. Fulbright. I turned around and around in quick circles like a skater, my arms thrown out and my head back. I did this until I was too dizzy to stand and had to go and lean against an oak. Then I did it again, this time moving the circles forward down the road. I suddenly stopped, wondering why I was dawdling this way and making myself dizzy when I had important things to do, like talking to Louise Landis. I hadn’t even given thought to what I was going to say.

Jude Stemple had been building the wooden fence around his house, sawing wood, when I first came across him. The fence was finished and I opened the gate. I didn’t see him outside, or hear any sawing noises coming from the shed behind the house, nor did I hear noises coming from inside, either. His hound dog was lying on the porch as usual. I walked the path up to the porch and the dog beat its tail, though it did not rise. There was a screen door and behind it the front door was open. I knocked on the doorjamb and called out, “Mr. Stemple!” I knew the open door didn’t necessarily mean anyone was home; people didn’t bother locking their doors around here.

Wearily, I sat myself down on the step beside the dog. He was really old and tired. I scratched his ears, knowing how he felt, though moments ago I’d been dancing crazy circles down the road. Again, I had that strange feeling of Time lying heavy and gathering itself together, as at a formal dance a woman might stop to scoop up the train of her gown. Time wasn’t passing, it was bunching. Bunching before me and this old hound.

What I really wanted to do was lie down on the porch and go to sleep, too. I can’t recall ever feeling so tired. Maybe once I did before in the Rainbow with the Sheriff sitting across from me, waiting for me to tell him what I knew. I saw again Ben Queen walking away that night from Crystal Spring and heard him say, If it goes too hard on you, turn me in. It wasn’t dog-tiredness I felt now, it was a tiredness all my own. I leaned over and put my chin on my knees and studied the gray porch step.

I did not understand the reluctance I felt as I left Jude Stemple’s place and got farther back into Flyback Hollow. The road had come together again and continued on its way. Masses of trees divided this part of the Hollow from the part I’d just left. I thought of Brokedown House and that white light in my eyes, and I stopped dead amid the unfamiliar, glad it wasn’t night. Even so, the trees seemed to have drunk in last night’s darkness and were throwing it off in blue shadows along my path.

You got to go on a ways, the lady in the diner had said, and I wondered just how far. I looked back, anxious that the road might be closing up behind me. It was ridiculous. Still, I surely did wish Dwayne were here, even if it meant I’d have to carry a sack of rabbits.

Then I saw the house, up on the right; it had to be the Landis place, as there was no other, and it did—as they had said—melt in. Its dull olive-green paint and dark green roof separated themselves from their surroundings like the figures finally seen in one of those cloud puzzles. You have to look hard. If I hadn’t been looking for it, I would have passed the house right by.

Now there was another road, narrower than the one I was leaving, a driveway, I guessed, for I was sure an educated person like Louise Landis would drive a car. I did not take to this road very quickly. I stopped to pick some more black-eyed Susans and tiger lilies and thought as I did it (though this had not been my clear intention) that Louise Landis might appreciate a bouquet. Then I realized they were her flowers in the first place and dropped them by a tree.

I told myself to stop acting like I was the Gretel part of Hansel and Gretel and that Louise Landis was a perfectly normal person, not someone to stuff little kids in an oven, and that she wouldn’t have changed over the years, despite yearning after and maybe even waiting for the man she had always loved (except it hadn’t done the Phantom of the Opera any good, all that waiting around). With a firmer step I walked on, recalling I’d seen her three weeks ago, the woman in black who’d stepped out of the school to look off into the dense beige distance of Cold Flat Junction.

But wait: I stopped again, feeling I’d walked miles and the house was receding before me. How did I know that woman was Louise Landis? It could have been just another teacher. But I didn’t think so. The woman I saw standing on the top step and shading her eyes against the sun had an air of certainty about her that went along with being a school principal.

I still hadn’t decided what to say and thought I’d better hurry up about it. My brain paraded several choices before my eyes: one, I was lost, or two, I used to live here (which she’d know was a lie, since she’d lived here all her life). Three, I just moved here and was walking around—only, that would lead to being lost again; four, I was visiting—

The door opened before I’d settled on something and it was the lady in black I’d seen, just as I knew it must be, only now she was wearing blue. Her skin was like mine: no matter what color we put on, it looked good.

She looked down at me with one of the pleasantest smiles I’d ever seen and said, “Hello.” It might even have been her second hello, offered in a warm and friendly tone, but my mind was still busy: seven, I was collecting for the First Tabernacle Church; eight, I was helping the Humane Society and did she have a pet? She was a person you just knew you could put your trust in, and so I did: “Hello. Jude Stemple sent me.”

My mouth was open to deliver whatever the next part of this lie was, but when she said that, I was completely stumped. I mean that she seemed to be so accepting in advance of the queer people who turned up on her porch. After I entered, she closed the door and I watched her back as she led me from the hallway, scented by furniture polish and roses, into the living room. Her hair was coiled into an elaborate scroll at her neck. It was shiny, pale brown, almost blond, maybe that color called ash-blond. I thought it was very nearly the color of mine, but hers certainly wasn’t mouse-brown or dishwater-blond, as Ree-Jay said mine was. Just before I sat down in the armchair she indicated, I pulled a lock of hair around and looked at it out of the corner of my eye and thought, yes, we did have similar hair. Skin and hair, two ways we were alike. I wondered if she ever had a hankering to go to Florida.

We were in her “parlor”—a word I preferred to “living room” but one which my mother thought to be “common.” “Parlor” suited this room better, as it was so comfortably old-fashioned, like the hotel music-parlor. (I would have to ask my mother why “music-parlor” was okay.) Hers contained a piano, upright against the far wall, and velvet upholstery on a settee and several side chairs in a red so deeply touched with blue it was almost purple. A fireplace with orange flames that seemed on the verge of going out, licking around and turning to ashes a few blue coals. There were pictures and portraits on one wall, and more books than I’d ever seen outside of a library on the other. They covered an entire wall and looked, as books always do to me, warm and colorful and inviting.

The whole room was that, really. The walls were papered with village scenes—little people walking in little streets past tiny houses on tiny squares. Wide mahogany moldings shone with that same polish that scented the hallway.

We were sitting in armchairs covered with a brown, flowered chintz that didn’t match but didn’t clash with the velvet and the wallpaper. There was a little ball of yarn between the cushion and the arm of my chair and I pulled it out. Maybe she had a cat. My eyes traveled back to the books. We sat in silence and listened to coals sifting and sputtering; somewhere, a clock chimed, and for once I didn’t have to count the chimes.

The silence surprised me. Here was an adult person who just sat, her elbow on the arm of her chair, chin supported by her hand, waiting for ... well, whatever I had to offer, I guess. All of this, you would think, would edge me closer to telling the truth of why I was here, but, strangely, it didn’t. Maybe the room seemed so overwrought with imagination—all of those writers hidden in all of those books, all of those villagers in the wallpaper—that I moved instead toward greater foolhardiness. That was the danger of imagination; you could so easily fall right on your face. But it was like, well, writing a play, the way Will and Mill were always doing. Writing it and performing it, so for once I had the lead.

“The Stemples?” Now I was looking up at the ceiling, thinking that I might not want to be related to Mr. Stemple, as he was definitely what my mother would call “common.” I didn’t want to be unkind to Mr. Stemple, but I didn’t want to be related to him, either. “No, not directly. He’s more by way of being a cousin of a cousin.” She had not asked me my name or where I’d trucked on in from, or where I went to school, or how old I was.