A LATE-SUMMER AFTERNOON. Tall stalks of ironweed and goldenrod bordering the dirt road nearly ready to bloom. Stubblefield drove one-handed, sipping a beer, trying to keep the Hawk from dragging its sensitive underparts against the rocks. Raking its shiny flanks against the various jungle shrubs encroaching on the passway. He had worked most of the way through a green eight-pack of Rolling Rock pony bottles, a gift from the Conway Twitty–looking dude leasing the Roadhouse and very much wanting to keep his jolly position, it being so central to a certain half-legal local social whirl.
Jollier still to be the owner of the Roadhouse. During Stubblefield’s tour, the potential for entertainment seemed clear, even hours before opening time, no music from either jukebox or live band, neon off, back-room pinball tables dark and silent. Daylight blared gritty through the opened door and cast a vampire-killing trapezoid onto the nineteenth-century wood floor, the splintery puncheons hip-wide and wrist-thick, cut from trees nearly two hundred years ago and made to last. Still bearing adze marks from bearded pioneer ancestors. The festive stale odors of spilled drinks and tobacco smoke soaked so deep into the thick boards that some archaeologist with sharp instruments could scrape down the layers of wood and identify McCallum’s Scotch spilled by some horseback trader in the days of the Cherokee Nation. Might as well put up a sign: SERVING HIGH TIMES FOR TWO CENTURIES. Stubblefield imagined cashing a check every month, and yet no other responsibilities on his part than to be el patrón.
The Hawk rounded a turn, raked its oil pan alarmingly on the high center of the two-track, and drew to a stop. Projected on its windshield, a brown log fortress set against a green mountainside. Down a weedy slant of lawn, the lake lay glassy, about halfway between the color of sky and the color of mountains.
Some memory of country etiquette learned in childhood from his grandfather kicked in, and Stubblefield tapped the chrome horn ring, the briefest of friendly toots, before getting out of the car. Even then, he couldn’t bring himself to walk right up the footpath and climb the steps and knock on the front door. He waited below the porch and called out, Hello?
Across the lake, mounds of pale grey and silver clouds rose in convincing mountain shapes so high into the sky that Stubblefield became confused about what was heaven and what was landscape. Have to be in Tibet to validate some of those upper peaks.
—Hey? he said.
Off to the far side, past the row of rockers, two small heads popped up over the rim of porch boards. Hair like dried shucks, and dark eyes glaring at him. Then they ducked back down. Stubblefield walked around to the end of the porch, but the children were gone. Whose children, by the way? Grandchildren of the hermit spinster’s?
In the backyard, no children. Just a clutch of chickens pecking at the ground and a slim girl. Or, rather, since she appeared to be about Stubblefield’s age, a woman. Wearing black pedal pushers and a white blouse and scuffed black penny loafers. Standing at a chopping block splitting kindling with a double-bitted axe, the shape of its flared blades echoing deep into Iron Age history, some Viking or Celt thing. Whack, and two yellow-faced pieces of pine fell away from each other and landed in a pile of their fellows.
—Hey, Stubblefield said.
The woman swept back dark hair with her wrist and glared, about as welcoming as the children. She said nothing for an uncomfortable stretch of time.
—So, again, greetings, Stubblefield said.
Just then, he realized that an empty pony bottle still dangled from his right fist. He shook it, pretending to throw it away but it wouldn’t go. A Red Skelton bit surfacing into his life all of a sudden.
The woman raised the axe to whacking level and propped its helve on her shoulder.
—Help you? she said.
—No, Stubblefield said. Or, possibly, yes.
—Which?
—My name’s Stubblefield.
—He died.
—Grandson.
—Ah.
—So, I guess Grandpa, what? Mentioned me?
—A time or two.
—And he hired you to, what?
Nothing from the woman but a neutral straight-on look. Put a level to her eyebrows and the bubble would stay inside the lines.
Stubblefield glanced off toward a set of fading ridges or clouds or whatever. Some big bird passed overhead. A shadow of wings brushed him but he didn’t even look up to see hawk or raven or buzzard. Instead, he watched the shadow waver away across the grass and become broken up by the ragged garden.
As if making an apology, he said, I guess I own this place now. And I need to … He paused and started to say, Make some decisions. But before he could get all confessional about what hard choices they were likely be and what a mess his grandfather had dumped in his lap by dying with everything in such disarray, he factored the lack of upwelling sympathy in the woman’s demeanor. The axe, but not just the axe. Something about her eyes. So Stubblefield revised his sentence on the fly, like lighting a fresh cigarette off the butt of an old one, and said, Have a look at my inheritance.
—Look all you want, she said. It’s yours. And by the way, there’s a fair chance the children burned down the house.
She set another section of pine onto the chopping block and whacked it, scenting the air with piney odors, sharp and clean. And then before Stubblefield could go, What? in relation to the house, some instant memory flashback washed over him. Something about the sway of her hair, or a glint of light off angles of cheekbones and jawbone. Seventeen memories came rolling in from some useless brain attic that usually opened up only to inform Stubblefield exactly where he was and what he was doing and what the weather was when he heard a particular song for the first time, even back to early childhood. Hearing his mother singing, When the red red robbin goes bob bob bobbing along along while she ran meat through a hand-crank sausage grinder, October sunlight beaming aslant onto the green tiled kitchen floor, segmented by the crossed black shadows of the muntins.
But no music kicked off his Luce memories. They rose to him like watching an eight-millimeter movie thrown onto a white wall by a Bell & Howell, the only sounds a soft clatter of sprockets engaging holes in the film and the hiss of the film feeding off one spool and snaking its way onto another.
IT IS SUMMER’S END. But not reckoned by some vague astronomical moment when the autumn equinox passes and nobody even looks up or feels an onset of chill. Reckoned, rather, by Labor Day, after which the pool closes for the year and school resumes. Which feels much more like something irreplaceable just died.
As for locale, it’s the town swimming pool beside the mile-long grass airstrip. Two dozen pretty teenage girls walking around the concrete apron, the water dark green. A Labor Day beauty contest back when girls wanted to look like Marilyn Monroe or Ava Gardner. All the bathing suits identical except for color, body sheaths cut low across the chest, modesty panels stretched quivering tight. Deep reds and blues and greens, and then the less interesting pastels. The most popular girls are curvy armloads levered up onto stiletto heels. Scarlet pouty lips. Breasts scooped like double cones of vanilla almost to their chins and glowing with Sea & Ski. Hair domed and flipped and sprayed into crunchy helmets. Pinched waists and asses like upside-down valentines.
Aluminum megaphones on creosote poles at each corner of the pool’s chicken-wire fence blare some fake Latin samba cha-cha saxophone shit played by heroin-addict New Yorker jazzmen daydreaming they’re living in Rio or Batista Cuba. Anyway, whatever the music, even if it were a Sousa march, only pretty girls drive Stubblefield’s picture show. They walk around the rim of the pool, each one a Helen of Troy, launching a carload of high school boys to spray-paint her name on the water tower.
A red-and-white antique biplane lifts off the green grass airstrip into the pale blue sky above the dark blue mountains. Four shirtless teenage boys ready for football season set off running down the length of the landing strip, constantly angling their Timexes, worn on the undersides of their wrists, to see how close a pace to Bannister’s four minutes they are achieving. Townfolk gather around the pool fence and hang over the rails atop the sunbathing platform, applauding all the loveliness their lives encompass.
Luce is one of only two beauties wearing sunglasses. Green lenses set in black cat eye frames. And, by a long stretch, she is the only one eating a frozen Mars bar from the concession stand while she parades. Her lips candy-apple red, and all twenty nails painted to match. Black swimsuit. A swoop to her do so that one eyepiece of her glasses is nearly obscured by a dark wave of hair.
So, what high and mixed emotions for young Stubblefield that day after the beauty show. Driving his grandfather’s Packard back around the lake to the farmhouse, the hopeless and glowing vision of Luce burrowing deeper into his head by the minute. And then the gloom of his mother’s arrival the next day to take him back to Jacksonville for the start of his final year of high school.
KEEPING COOL AND LETTING the memories unreel, Stubblefield wandered off to check out the Lodge. Floor to floor, opening a door now and then, barely attending. All the way up to the sad, airless servants’ quarters under the eaves. Back downstairs, he studied the lobby, the daybeds near the fireplace and the elderly radio. Kerosene lamps mixed in with a few mica-shaded electrics. Woodstove in the outsized kitchen, iron frying pans big as car wheels, and a flashlight by the back door. By the time he finished scouting around, he was dizzy from trying to hold the current image of Luce and the one from the past in his head at the same time.
When he returned to her, Stubblefield started trying to say some vague things about the Lodge’s potential and its liability, talking like he was all business, using the bald lawyer’s vocabulary. Assets and profit and shit. Imaginary money. He broke off and said, I guess when the power goes out, you don’t hardly notice.
—I miss the radio.
Then Stubblefield decided to tell Luce about his memories. Except it wasn’t exactly a decision. He blurted something stupid before he could catch himself. Like, Great God, do you remember that beauty contest back when we were in high school?
ON THE WAY HOME he kept striking the steering wheel with the heel of his hand and trying to remember exactly what he’d said. His face felt flushed red as a lipstick kiss. Was it possible that he’d concluded his memories with, You were so beautiful back then? Had he really committed that unforgivable past tense?
But he remembered her response pretty clearly, at least in précis. How embarrassing that she ever did something that silly. But, good God, she was seventeen. At that age, we’re mostly high-pitched and crazy. All the urgent chemicals raging around the blood course. And that’s why we do dangerous and embarrassing things, as if simultaneously we’re immortal and going to die tomorrow. And that’s why we look back on that time so fondly from the dimmer years to come. Remembering the days when we were like Greek gods. Mighty and idiotic.
Something like that. It was a fairly awkward conversation.
But Stubblefield was quite sure Luce had concluded by saying, I’m not the same person as that girl. Sure, too, that he had collected himself enough to state a firmly held belief. We are who we are. Ten or eighty. What we see in the mirror is all that changes. Same fears and hopes running around inside like hamsters on a wheel.
—Well, that’s depressing, Luce had said. But whatever. I didn’t win that day.
—They chose wrong.
—The sunglasses?
—Could have been the Mars bar.
After Stubblefield had turned and started to walk away, Luce said, either to his back or to herself, So, a flame still burns?
Even in that dizzy moment, Stubblefield at least retained enough clarity to know sarcasm when he heard it. Or would that be irony? Fine line, sometimes.
He had kept walking, but raised a hand as far as he could reach above his head, made a leveling motion, and said, Yea high.
As he rounded the corner, he saw the children sitting in rockers at either end of the porch, glaring and intemperate like pickets guarding the flanks. Stubblefield thinking, If they had muskets they’d shoot me down.
Later that night, back at the cottage, Stubblefield remembered that he had seen Luce one other time. The summer after the beauty show. His final summer at the lake. A teenage burger joint in town. Luce leaning over the jukebox, studying the songs. Her long hair falling forward, hiding her face until she hooked it behind her ears and he recognized her profile. She had on boy clothes. A white button-down shirt, the tails untucked over faded jeans. Black penny loafers with dimes in the slits. And the memory, when it came, kept spooling all the way to her dropping the nickel in the slot and the fans of shiny 45s rotating until one fell onto the turntable and Johnny Ace began singing “Never Let Me Go,” scratchy and hollow, since the record had been in the Wurlitzer for some time. Luce slow-danced solo, doing the Stroll, back to her booth to rejoin her friends, some dismal triple-date arrangement of cheerleaders and football players. As for weather, it was raining that long-ago night when Stubblefield walked out to his grandfather’s car. The neon of the cafe set the water drops on his windshield alight with pink and lavender.