“They’ll never bring that car up. Never. Saxon’s Lake is three hundred feet
deep if it’s an inch.”
The chimes sounded. I looked toward the door with the tray of milk quarts
in my arms.
A girl with sleep-swollen eyes stumbled out. She was wearing a long plaid
bathrobe and her feet were bare. Her hair was the color of cornsilk and hung
around her shoulders, and as she neared the milk truck she blinked in the
light and said, “I’m all fucked up.”
I think I must’ve almost fallen down, because never in my life had I
heard a female use a word that dirty before. Oh, I knew what the word meant
and all, but its casual use from a pretty mouth shocked the fool out of me.
“There’s a young man on the premises, Lainie,” Miss Grace said in a voice
that could curl an iron nail. “Watch your language, please.”
Lainie looked at me, and her cool stare made me recall the time I’d put a
fork in an electric socket. Lainie’s eyes were chocolate brown and her lips
seemed to wear a half smile, half sneer. Something about her face looked tough
and wary, as if she’d run out of trust. There was a small red mark in the
hollow of her throat. “Who’s the kid?” she asked.
“Mr. Mackenson’s son. Show some class, hear?”
I swallowed hard and averted my eyes from Lainie’s. Her robe was creeping
open. It hit me what kind of girl used bad words, and what kind of place this
was. I had heard from both Johnny Wilson and Ben Sears that there was a house
full of whores somewhere near Zephyr. It was common knowledge at the
elementary school. When you told somebody to “go suck a whore,” you were
standing right on the razor’s edge of violence. I’d always imagined the
whorehouse to be a mansion, though, with drooping willow trees and black
servants who fetched the customers mint juleps on the front porch; the
reality, however, was that the whorehouse wasn’t much of a step up from a
broken-down trailer. Still and all, here it was right in front of me, and the
girl with cornsilk hair and a dirty mouth earned her living by the pleasures
of the flesh. I felt goose bumps ripple up my back, and I can’t tell you the
kind of scenes that moved like a slow, dangerous storm through my head.
“Take that milk and stuff to the kitchen,” Miss Grace told her.
The sneer won out over the smile, and those brown eyes turned black. “I
ain’t got kitchen duty! It’s Donna Ann’s week!”
“It’s whose week I say it is, missy, and you know why I ought to put you
in the kitchen for a whole month, too! Now, you do what I tell you and keep
your smart mouth shut!”
Lainie’s lips drew up into a puckered, practiced pout. But her eyes did
not register the chastisement so falsely; they held cold centers of anger. She
took the tray from me, and standing with her back to my dad and Miss Grace,
she stuck out her wet pink tongue in my face and curled it up into a funnel.
Then the tongue slicked back into her mouth, she turned away from me, and
dismissed all of us with a buttstrut that was as wicked as a sword slash. She
swayed on into the house, and after Lainie was gone Miss Grace grunted and
said, “She’s as rough as a cob.”
“Aren’t they all?” Dad asked, and Miss Grace blew a smoke ring and
answered, “Yeah, but she don’t even pretend she’s got manners.” Her gaze
settled on me. “Cory, why don’t you keep the cookies. All right?”
I looked at Dad. He shrugged. “Yes, ma’am,” I said.
“Good. It was a real pleasure to meet you.” Miss Grace returned her
attention to my father and the cigarette to the corner of her mouth. “Let me
know how everything turns out.”
“I will, and thanks for lettin’ me use the phone.” He slid behind the
wheel again. “I’ll pick up the milk tray next trip.”
“Ya’ll be careful,” Miss Grace said, and she went into the white-painted
whorehouse as Dad started the engine and let off the hand brake.
We drove back to where the car had gone in. Saxon’s Lake was streaked
with blue and purple in the morning light. Dad pulled the milk truck off onto
a dirt road; the road, both of us realized, was where the car had come from.
Then we sat and waited for the sheriff as the sunlight strengthened and the
sky turned azure.
Sitting there, my mind was split: one part was thinking about the car and
the figure I thought I’d seen, and the other part was wondering how my dad
knew Miss Grace at the whorehouse so well. But Dad knew all of his customers;
he talked about them to Mom at the dinner table. I never recalled him
mentioning Miss Grace or the whorehouse, however. Well, it wasn’t a proper
subject for the dinner table, was it? And anyway, they wouldn’t talk about
such things when I was around, even though all my friends and everybody else
at school from the fourth grade up knew there was a house full of bad girls
somewhere around Zephyr.
I had been there. I had actually seen a bad girl. I had seen her curled
tongue and her butt move in the folds of her robe.
That, I figured, was going to make me one heck of a celebrity.
“Cory?” my father said quietly. “Do you know what kind of business Miss
Grace runs in that house?”
“I…” Even a third-grader could’ve figured it out. “Yes sir.”
“Any other day, I would’ve just left the order by the front door.” He was
staring at the lake, as if seeing the car still tumbling slowly down through
the depths with a handcuffed corpse at the wheel. “Miss Grace has been on my
delivery route for two years. Every Monday and Thursday, like clockwork. In
case it’s crossed your mind, your mother does know I come out here.”
I didn’t answer, but I felt a whole lot lighter.
“I don’t want you to tell anybody about Miss Grace or that house,” my
father went on. “I want you to forget you were there, and what you saw and
heard. Can you do that?”
“Why?” I had to ask.
“Because Miss Grace might be a lot different than you, me, or your
mother, and she might be tough and mean and her line of work might not be a
preacher’s dream, but she’s a good lady. I just don’t want talk gettin’
stirred up. The less said about Miss Grace and that house, the better. Do you
see?”
“I guess I do.”
“Good.” He flexed his fingers on the steering wheel. The subject was
closed.
I was true to my word. My celebrityhood took flight, and that was that.
I was about to open my mouth to tell him about the figure I’d seen in the
woods when a black and white Ford with a bubble light on top and the town seal
of Zephyr on the driver’s door rounded the corner and slowed to a stop near
the milk truck. Sheriff Amory, whose first name was J.T., standing for Junior
Talmadge, got out and Dad walked over to meet him.
Sheriff Amory was a thin, tall man whose long-jawed face made me think of
a picture I’d seen: Ichabod Crane trying to outrace the Headless Horseman. He
had big hands and feet and a pair of ears that might’ve shamed Dumbo. If his
nose had been any larger, he would’ve made a dandy weather-vane. He wore his
sheriff’s star pinned to the front of his hat, and underneath it his dome was
almost bald except for a wreath of dark brown hair. He pushed his hat back up
on his shiny forehead as he and my dad talked at the lake’s edge and I watched
my father’s hand motions as he showed Sheriff Amory where the car had come
from and where it had gone. Then they both looked out toward the lake’s still
surface, and I knew what they were thinking.
That car might’ve sunken to the center of the earth. Even the snapping
turtles that lived along the lakeshore couldn’t get far enough down to ever
see that car again. Whoever the driver had been, he was sitting in the dark
right now with mud in his teeth.
“Handcuffed,” Sheriff Amory said, in his quiet voice. He had thick dark
eyebrows over deep-set eyes the color of coal, and the pallor of his flesh
suggested he had an affinity to the night. “You’re sure about that, Tom? And
about the wire, too?”
“I’m sure. Whoever strangled that fella did a hell of a job. Near about
took his head off.”
“Handcuffed,” the sheriff said again. “That was so he wouldn’t float out,
I reckon.” He tapped his lower lip with a forefinger. “Well,” he said at last,
“I believe we’ve got a murder on our hands, don’t you?”
“If it wasn’t, I don’t know what murder is.”
As they talked, I got out of the milk truck and wandered over to where I
thought I’d seen that person watching me. There was nothing but weeds, rocks,
and dirt where he’d been standing. If it had been a man, I thought. Could it
have been a woman? I hadn’t seen long hair, but then again I hadn’t seen much
of anything but a coat swirling in the wind. I walked back and forth along the
line of trees. Beyond it, the woods deepened and swampy ground took over. I
found nothing.
“Better come on to the office and let me write it up,” the sheriff told
my father. “If you want to go home and get some dry clothes on, that’d be
fine.”
My dad nodded. “I’ve got to finish my deliveries and get Cory to school,
too.”
“Okay. Seems to me we can’t do much for that fella at the bottom,
anyhow.” He grunted, his hands in his pockets. “A murder. Last murder we had
in Zephyr was in 1961. You remember when Bo Kallagan beat his wife to death
with a bowlin’ trophy?”
I returned to the milk truck and waited for my dad. The sun was up good
and proper now, lighting the world. Or, at least, the world I knew. But things
weighed heavy on my mind. It seemed to me that there were two worlds: one
before the sun, and one after. And if that were true, then maybe there were
people who were citizens of those different worlds as well. Some moved easily
through the landscape of night, and others clung to the bright hours. Maybe I
had seen one of those darktime citizens, in the world before the sun. And—a
chilling thought—maybe he had seen me seeing him, too.
I realized I had brought mud back into the milk truck. It was smeared all
over my Keds.
I looked at the soles, and the earth I had collected.
On the bottom of my left Ked was a small green feather.
2
Down in the Dark
THE GREEN FEATHER WENT INTO MY POCKET. FROM THERE IT found its way into a
White Owl cigar box in my room, along with my collection of old keys and
dried-up insects. I closed the box lid, placed the box in one of the seven
mystic drawers, and slid the drawer shut.
And that was how I forgot about it.
The more I thought about seeing that figure at the edge of the woods, the
more I thought I’d been wrong, that my eyes had been scared from seeing Dad
sink underwater as the car went down. Several times I started to tell Dad
about it, but something else got in the way. Mom threw a gut-busting fit when
she found out he’d jumped into the lake. She was so mad at him she sobbed as
she yelled, and Dad had to sit her down at the kitchen table and explain to
her calmly why he had done it. “There was a man at the wheel,” Dad said. “I
didn’t know he was already dead, I thought he was knocked cold. If I’d stood
there without doing anything, what would I have thought of myself after it was
over?”
“You could’ve drowned!” she fired at him, tears on her cheeks. “You
could’ve hit your head on a rock and drowned!”
“I didn’t drown. I didn’t hit my head on a rock. I did what I had to do.”
He gave her a paper napkin, and she used it to blot her eyes. A last salvo
came out of her: “That lake’s full of cottonmouths! You could’ve swum right
into a nest of ’em!”
“I didn’t,” he said, and she sighed and shook her head as if she lived
with the craziest fool ever born.
“You’d better get out of those damp clothes,” she told him at last, and
her voice was under control again. “I just thank God it’s not your body down
at the bottom of the lake, too.” She stood up and helped him unbutton his
soggy shirt. “Do you know who it was?”
“Never saw him before.”
“Who would do such a thing to another human being?”
“That’s for J.T. to find out.” He peeled his shirt off, and Mom took it
from him with two fingers as if the lake’s water carried leprosy. “I’ve got to
go over to his office to help him write it up. I’ll tell you, Rebecca, when I
looked into that dead man’s face my heart almost stopped. I’ve never seen
anything like that before, and I hope to God I never see such a thing again,
either.”
“Lord,” Mom said. “What if you’d had a heart attack? Who would’ve saved
you?”
Worrying was my mother’s way. She fretted about the weather, the cost of
groceries, the washing machine breaking down, the Tecumseh River being dirtied
by the paper mill in Adams Valley, the price of new clothes, and everything
under the sun. To my mother, the world was a vast quilt whose stitches were
always coming undone. Her worrying somehow worked like a needle, tightening
those dangerous seams. If she could imagine events through to their worst
tragedy, then she seemed to have some kind of control over them. As I said, it
was her way. My father could throw up a fistful of dice to make a decision,
but my mother had an agony for every hour. I guess they balanced, as two
people who love each other should.
My mother’s parents, Grand Austin and Nana Alice, lived about twelve
miles south in a town called Waxahatchee, on the edge of Robbins Air Force
Base. Nana Alice was even worse a worrier than Mom; something in her soul
craved tragic manna, whereas Grand Austin—who had been a logger and had a
wooden leg to show for the slip of a band saw—warned her he would unscrew his
leg and whop her upside the head with it if she didn’t pipe down and give him
peace. He called his wooden leg his “peace pipe,” but as far as I know he
never used it for any purpose except that for which it was carved. My mother
had an older brother and sister, but my father was an only child.
Anyway, I went to school that day and at the first opportunity told Davy
Ray Callan, Johnny Wilson, and Ben Sears what had happened. By the time the
school bell rang and I walked home, the news was moving across Zephyr like a
crackling wildfire. Murder was the word of the hour. My parents were fighting
