A Crooked Tree

by Una Mannion

  “Don’t be stupid. Call me when you get home. If I don’t hear from you, I’ll be worried and probably call the National Guard. Get the bus. You have fifteen minutes.”

  I went into the restroom. Ellen and Beatrice were both standing there by the sinks.

  “We’re going to go now and get the bus,” I said, trying to sound cheerful.

  “Libby, what’s wrong?” Beatrice asked. I ignored her question.

  We walked out into the mall. Across from us was J. C. Penney’s.

  “Hey . . . let’s go say goodbye to Sage.”

  The girls followed me. Sage was at the diner counter when we walked in. She must have seen it in my face, because she came straight over.

  “What’s up?”

  I pulled her away from Beatrice, and told her that we’d seen him. “We have to get back on the bus. Please, Sage. Walk us as far as the Wanamaker’s stop?” Ellen was watching us, and Beatrice was looking at the customers seated around the counter, which was shaped like a kidney bean.

  Sage undid her apron and leaned across the counter, putting it on a shelf on the other side. “I’ll be right back, Gretta.”

  We went out into the mall again, up the escalator to the next level, and walked down the concourse toward Wanamaker’s.

  “You need to stay away from Wilson,” I told her. “Barbie Man is looking for him.”

  “I was only on his bike because he saw me on the road on the way to the bus stop.”

  We passed Chick-fil-A, where Marie had her first job, filleting chickens and squeezing lemons for the homemade lemonade, and past a men’s suit store. Next was Space Port. Ellen had her head down, afraid to see or be seen. As we passed the arcade, I glanced in. A black hole in the middle of a sunny day. The video players looked like black silhouettes against the dark. At the back, just one person stood out. His arm in the sling was extended like a webbed bat wing, glowing purple in the ultraviolet light. I took Beatrice’s hand. Ellen was still looking at the floor.

  “Sage.” I nearly sputtered her name. “That’s him.”

  Sage looked over into Space Port and then at me.

  “Run,” she said. Not even Beatrice asked why. We just sprinted through the mall, all the way down the concourse, past fake oases, into Wanamaker’s, past perfume counters, ladies’ lingerie and bathing suits, all of us running as if for our lives, out the back entrance and into blinding light.

  16

  Lightning bugs were out. Thomas told me once that lightning bugs—what some other states called fireflies—were Pennsylvania’s official state insect, and that it had been a bunch of schoolkids near us who’d campaigned to have them picked. It made me oddly proud. A faint smudge of gold was just visible against the clouds to the west as I went up our street. I still had to walk to the Bouchers’ despite seeing Barbie Man at the mall a few hours ago and knowing that he could very possibly turn up on the mountain. Going past the Manson House, I decided to trigger its lights in case there was someone behind me. I had on my new Converse and sprinted. I couldn’t stop looking over my shoulder. If I saw headlights from a car, I would step into the woods and hide.

  When we’d sat down on the bus earlier, Beatrice at the window, me on the aisle, and Ellen on the seat across from me, Ellen had said one word.

  “Wilson?”

  “Yeah.”

  She had puzzled it out. We listened as Beatrice pointed to things out the window, but we couldn’t talk about it in front of her. We got off the bus at the bottom of the mountain and walked straight up the hill, not wasting any time on the main road.

  The house was empty. Ellen and Beatrice went upstairs to start working on the Fourth of July outfit. They spent the rest of the afternoon on the floor, tearing the new fabric into long sections. Ellen stuffed Beatrice’s white stockings with newspaper and started the tedious task of sewing on the blue and red strips. The newspaper was to prevent sewing the stockings shut. I sat with them on the floor and sewed one blue strip. My stitching was all over the place, and I kept unthreading my needle. Ellen worked quietly, but her fingers were deft and fast, her stitches neat. Both Beatrice and I gave up, but Ellen kept sewing. I knew she was trying not to think about what had happened earlier. Beatrice chatted away, suggesting ideas and looped a red strip and a blue strip through the tops of her sneakers to make large bows.

  “That looks good,” Ellen told her. Beatrice glowed.

  By the time I left to babysit, Ellen and I still hadn’t talked about seeing Barbie Man in the mall, and what Wilson had done to him.

  At the Bouchers’, Bruce and I waltzed through the kitchen, his feet on mine, while Mrs. Boucher gathered her things for her night out. I sang “I Could Have Danced All Night,” and he could barely stand, it made him laugh so hard. “What kind of dancing partner is this, who keeps his two feet on mine the whole time?” Peter kept pulling on Bruce, saying, “My turn, my turn.” Later I sat on the sofa and watched TV. I tried calling Sage to talk to her about what had happened at the mall, but Charlotte said she had gone out.

  At a quarter to one, headlights lit the huge glass windows and then cut. I waited a few minutes and went into Mrs. Boucher’s bathroom without flicking on the light. I put my face against the window and looked out, but I couldn’t even see the outline of the car. I went back to the living room and watched TV with the sound off. I didn’t hear the car door this time, but the headlights turned on at one thirty, and the car rolled down the long driveway toward me.

  Mrs. Boucher came in the kitchen, filled a glass of water, and leaned back against the sink and drank it. She had on a red wraparound dress that plunged at the front, but tastefully. She wore a long chain made from wide interconnected circles of hammered silver. Her high heels had straps that fastened round her ankles. Her hair fell down her back, sleek and dark. She was beautiful. I thought she was probably the prettiest adult I knew.

  “How was everything tonight?” she asked.

  “Good. Fine,” I said. I had taken a message from her ex-husband to say he wouldn’t be able to collect the boys till noon the next day, and all she said was “Good—we can sleep in a bit.” The boys went to their dad’s every other Saturday.

  She opened her pocketbook and counted out ten dollars. I always felt funny putting it into my pocket, in case it seemed like I was being greedy. I waited until we were outside in the dark before I pushed my hand into my cutoffs.

  We climbed into the Volvo. There was a faint waft of alcohol mixed with cologne. Mrs. Boucher smoked in her car, so there was always a stale smoke smell. She drove, and neither of us spoke. As we came down Horseshoe toward Forge Mountain Drive, there was something ahead of us on the road. A car. Could it be the Camaro? Everything blurred for a second. The car was stationary, the door left open, and a man, made large by the headlights of his car, was standing in the middle of the road. I made myself breathe in. Our Swedish PE teacher had told us that when Americans meet something stressful they breathe out, whereas Swedes breathe in. She’d said it was a difference in attitude about what was before us. We needed to inhale, and believe in ourselves. Be ready for the battle.

  “Uh-oh,” Mrs. Boucher said, and she stopped a distance from the car. She rolled up her window. “I hate meeting things on the road at night. Lock your door.”

  I locked mine, and the one behind me. We both peered out into the darkness. The man looked huge, and I was trying to see if it was Barbie Man.

  “Has he hit something?” she asked. “I don’t know if I should keep driving toward him.”

  I was scared. I didn’t know what to do either. I imagined creepy lowlifes from Pottstown hidden in the woods around us.

  “Keep driving. Go fast,” I said. “We can go past him.” Mrs. Boucher turned to look at me. She could hear I was scared.

  The man had seen us and was sort of waving, as if to say Go around. Mrs. Boucher put the car in gear, and we went toward the man and the car with the open door, driving much slower than I would have liked.

  “Go faster. It�
��s a trap. It’s the man that picked up Ellen.” I realized I was almost shouting in the car.

  She accelerated forward. We’d only gone a few feet farther when I realized who it was.

  “Wait. Stop. I know him. It’s okay. I’m sorry.”

  “I think we should keep going,” she said. She was gripping the steering wheel with two hands. I had terrified her.

  “It’s okay. It’s Dr. Adams. My friend Sage’s dad. We should stop.”

  Still, she seemed to speed up for a moment before braking. We sat in silence. Grady Adams was coming toward us, and she hit the wiper blades by mistake and fussed trying to turn them off. He was next to her window then, and she rolled it down just a bit and looked up.

  He leaned down to speak through the tiny gap. “I’m sorry if I scared y’all, but I’ve hit a deer.” I could see he was shaky from it. He ran his hand through his hair and shook his head.

  “Damn.” He said it slow and dragged out and almost under his breath. Sage had that same southern slowness in her speech. We idled there for a moment with him at the window.

  “I’ll get out,” I said.

  “Libby, wait.” Mrs. Boucher reached toward me, but I was already on the road. I walked around to the front of the Adamses’ car. Charlotte wasn’t there; it was empty. I looked at the deer on the road. Grady came and stood next to me.

  “He just came out of nowhere and came right into the car.”

  Mrs. Boucher reversed, pulled in behind his car, and put on her blinkers. She walked up to us and stood there in her high heels.

  “I hit a deer,” he said to her. He’d already told us. I wondered if he was in shock. He seemed so upset and unlike himself. “Is it dead?” asked Mrs. Boucher.

  “I’m not sure.” I wondered if I should introduce them, or if that would be inappropriate given the circumstances.

  “Can you check to see if the deer is dead?” Mrs. Boucher sounded impatient.

  Grady knelt down next to the deer in front of the headlights, creating distorted shadows up the road. The animal was a dark shape on the ground, and a darker pool of blood seeped out in a circle around its head, like a black halo. The body didn’t look right, the way it had twisted back on itself. Grady had his hand near the deer’s face.

  “I can’t feel any breath,” he said, as though he was surprised.

  I took a step closer and leaned down next to him. The deer’s eyes were open and fixed on me. For just a second, I thought I saw a flicker. I moved back and saw that it was just me, reflected in her eyes. A young white-tailed deer. Female. She had thick lashes and was thin around the neck. We used to watch deer in the woods from the rec room window, and Dad had taught me that the slender neck and high stomach indicated youth.

  “He’s definitely dead. I need to get him off the road.” Grady stood back up. “Someone else could hit him.” There were no streetlights.

  The three of us stood there looking at the dead animal. For a moment, I thought how quiet everything was, but I heard the crickets then, a sound so loud I couldn’t understand how I hadn’t heard it earlier, like all of nature was grieving.

  “I need to move him,” said Grady again. He stepped over the deer, straddled her, and grasped the two front legs at the thin part just above the hoof. He tried to drag her but stumbled back and lost his grip. “Good God, it seems sacrilegious,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

  “I’ll help you. I’ll take this one,” I said, taking the right leg. “If you take that one, we could pull together.” I knew how to lug stuff. I counted us in, already pulling slightly on each count. “One, and two, and three—” We both pulled, and the deer moved about six inches on her back. I counted again, and this time we moved her several feet. I felt terrible dragging her, dead, across the road grit, disturbing her peace. We were nearly at the grass verge between the road and the woods, and we tugged one more time, pulling the doe up onto the grass.

  Grady sank down on the ground, leaned his body forward on his bent knees, and breathed hard. His hands hung down, his wrists limp, in front of his bowed head, and I noticed the silver chain he always wore that made him different from the other dads even out here in the dark. “He just ran right out in front of me as I came around the corner,” he explained again.

  I was looking at the front of his car. There was a big dent and dark streaks near it, and I wondered if it was the deer’s blood.

  “It’s a doe—a she,” I said.

  “Is it?” he asked. Maybe they didn’t have deer in the part of Mississippi he was from, but he had lived here a long time, longer than me. It seemed like he should know.

  “Yeah, a white-tailed doe. Bucks have antlers. She’s young.” Then I wished I hadn’t said that, because I didn’t want to make him feel worse.

  Grady reached out and put his hand on the deer’s hindquarter and left it there for a moment. “I feel real bad about this. Sorry, girl.” He was talking to the deer. I loved him right then, out there in the dark, devastated about the deer. Sage said her dad was likable because he had extreme humility, that he was almost sorry for existing, and that that was why patients liked him. He made people comfortable because there was something slightly uncomfortable about him in himself. It was so strange sitting with him there, the car headlights on us and none of us acting like ourselves.

  Mrs. Boucher, who had said almost nothing the entire time, finally broke the silence that had fallen between us. “Libby, I’m sorry, I think we should go now. I’m worried about my boys alone in the house.”

  I stood up and brushed down the back of my cutoffs. “What will happen to the deer?” I worried about dogs or foxes coming, and I didn’t want to leave the doe out there for them to scavenge.

  “I’ll call the township in the morning,” said Grady. “They’ll come take it.”

  “Okay, then. Well, good night, Dr. Adams,” Mrs. Boucher said. We climbed into her Volvo, which was still running. Grady was standing again, but he wasn’t moving to get into his car. He just stood there on the road in the headlights, looking at the mess at his feet.

  Mrs. Boucher put her car in gear, and we drove past him. She glanced at me but didn’t say anything. She rummaged in her bag with one hand, pulled out a cigarette, and lit it. I nearly asked her for one. I was jittery and began babbling. I asked her if she knew the man on Yellow Springs who had hit a deer the year before and gotten killed. The deer had come straight through the window and split his skull. She had heard about it, she said. She dropped me at the top of my street.

  “Libby, wait,” she said before I could close the door. “Why did you say the car on the road could be the man that picked up Ellen?” She was looking at me.

  I could see the lit lamppost at the end of my driveway, which Ellen had remembered to put on for me. I could tell Mrs. Boucher now, and the fear wouldn’t be just ours anymore. It would be other people’s problem. But it seemed like every time I told people things, it just brought more mess.

  “I was just scared. I don’t know why that came out.”

  “You’re sure everything’s okay?”

  “Yeah. I’m sorry.”

  I closed the door and sprinted toward the light on my driveway, still frightened of what might be in the woods.

  I washed my hands at the laundry room sink and went upstairs to my bedroom. I could hear Beatrice’s soft snore from Ellen’s trundle and see the shape of Ellen in Marie’s bed. Beatrice still liked to spend nights in our room. I left the light off and tried to change in the dark, sitting next to Beatrice on the trundle, taking my sneakers off first. My hand touched something warm and sticky on the top of the right sneaker, and without thinking I put my hand toward my face. It smelled of earth and metal. I carried the sneakers into the bathroom, turning on the light. The right foot of my new white Converse was smeared in blood that had already started to brown. I looked at my reflection and saw I had a streak on my cheek from where I had lifted my hand. I turned on the hot tap and wiped my face and hand repeatedly. I put the shoe into the sink an
d started to rinse it with hot water that steamed, and then remembered that it’s best to use cold water to get blood out. I had a strange feeling in the bathroom, like this was happening to someone else at nearly three in the morning, standing there at the sink with a strong scent of iron or metal from the deer but also something else, a smell like pine needles.

  I climbed across Beatrice into my own bed and lay down in the dark, Beatrice snoring just a few inches below me.

  “Libby?” It was Ellen. “What did Wilson do?”

  17

  I had slept in. The girls’ voices and my mother’s drifted up from the kitchen. I opened my eyes and it took me a minute to focus on the shape across the room from me. I leaned up on my elbow. Ellen had nearly finished Beatrice’s parade costume. She’d created a headless life-size mannequin by stuffing newspaper into legs and pillows into the torso. It was propped up on Marie’s bed, facing mine. The legs were striped in circles of red, white, and blue. Its blue denim cutoffs and a white T-shirt were Ellen’s. She’d stitched a vest to wear over it from the red and blue strips of fabric. Ellen must have been sewing half the night. On top of her dresser sat a giant blue top hat made from the poster board; she’d rolled it into a cylinder and stuck it into a cutout circle of cardboard. Against the wall was a huge sign on white poster board, the text done exactly like in the Dr. Seuss books: I Am Sam, Sam I Am. Beatrice was going to be a Dr. Seuss Uncle Sam on her bike.

  I went down to the three of them seated around the table, Ellen and Beatrice eating Wheaties and my mother sipping a cup of tea.

  “Ellen’s going to art camp!” Beatrice shouted when I came in.

  “Really?” I asked, looking at Ellen and then at my mother.

  Ellen never got overly excited about anything, but she was brimming with happiness. “Mom signed me up. I have to stay with the Gambinos for the two weeks so I can walk back and forth each day.” She eye-rolled on “Gambinos” but couldn’t disguise her pleasure. I crossed myself as a joke. The Gambinos were the most Catholic family we knew. Their son Gabriel, who was my age, wanted to become a priest. After the Gambinos visited us, Marie and Thomas would go around the house lifting their hands and talking like Vito Corleone from The Godfather. Lorenzo and Sofia Gambino had come from Italy on the boat. They were older than my parents, but Dad had worked with Lorenzo in construction when he first came to America. Sofia worked in a soup factory.