Understory

by Lisa J. Lickel

  Cam saw what he was looking for a couple of miles outside the city limits—a summer cabin with a shaded, unplowed driveway, probably reached all the way back to the Barter River. That would work. He checked the mirrors, backed up a few yards, revved the engine, and rammed it through the chunks of road plow into the drive, turning the wheel to skid off the main part of the driveway, which he hoped would camouflage the car.

  He hopped out, clicked the fob to lock all the doors and began kicking snow into the ruts he’d made. It wouldn’t completely hide his tracks, of course, but it might appear that someone had tried to turn around or skidded a bit before correcting the wheels. Fifteen minutes later, sweating despite the intense cold, he stomped his big boots on the road and brushed off his coat and pants before walking the rest of the way into town as the sun crested the trees.

  * * *

  Art parked downtown, half a block away from Lou’s, just before light. Why was it that having the power back on brought everybody out? He nodded and smiled at the couple of people he could recognize under the layers of thermal wear and ski pants. He automatically checked the window of the diner as he got close and slowed down. His hackles rose as one of the people at a table lowered the newspaper. Shawn Limm stared right at him. Shawn scared the bejeebers out of him, even from the other side of the glass. Limm didn’t change expression, which somehow made it worse. Art backed up and crashed into someone big. He jumped and started to shake when Shawn’s brother, Maury, set a paw on his shoulder. “My father would like a word.”

  Art was relieved he hadn’t gotten a chance to eat yet as Maury, a hulking bully with Bruce Lee bangs and a scowl, ushered him into a midnight blue SUV with bullet-proof glass. The interior was maroon leather underneath clear plastic seat covers. Shawn got in on the other side and closed the door. No one spoke as they drove in the direction of the Limm family compound.

  From the backseat, Art watched the shiny black wrought iron gate slide open. He couldn’t hear anything, though, because the car must have been soundproof. Or the rails were oiled, or the ringing in his ear where Maury accidentally clipped him with an elbow prevented recognition of any other noise. They stopped at the guard house. Good thing the plastic seat cover protected the leather from bright spots of crimson dripping from his nose when he’d accidentally smashed against Shawn’s knuckles during a slide. Shawn had only been trying to help, he said when he unlatched the safety belt and handed him a mustard-colored chamois. For the seat.

  The gate closed behind them. Art stared as he was escorted from the car. Its clank was ominous.

  Although Shawn and Maury made occasional appearances in town, like the opening of the library tech center and the new hospital lab, their old man never had. Art couldn’t even be sure the hulk with his back turned, hands clasped behind him, was Papa Limm. The man stared outside the glass wall facing the wet black tar snaking into the woods, presumably toward some mansion.

  “Mr. Townsend,” he said in a deep, apologetic tone. “There is a reason for everything I do.”

  Art shivered between the hulking Maury and the average-sized Shawn. He had yet to wipe his face and felt blood crusting on his upper lip.

  “Just as there should be a reason for everything you…agreed to do.”

  Art’s hand went numb as Maury squeezed his upper arm.

  “Tsk, tsk, Maury. Gentle. Mr. Townsend needs both arms intact. To complete his work.”

  The pressure on his arm eased.

  “There was to be no contact between us, Mr. Townsend,” Limm continued, his voice dipping lower. “I regret that the good citizens of Barter Valley had to see that little display earlier. You will, of course, let them know you accepted a new job. With Securities Unlimited. We’ll promote you immediately to our new facility in…where is our opening, Maury?” He sighed. “We have so many.”

  “Malaysia.”

  Art dry-heaved.

  Shawn grabbed the back of Art’s collar and tipped his head back.

  “Since you already began searching for your nephew, you may complete the task. I have decided I can give the child a richer life after all. Maury understands this.”

  Art gulped when Maury let go of his collar.

  “However,” Limm said, “since you failed to use your paycheck as instructed, you will allow Shawn to help you.”

  Art was outside before he could blink twice. He tripped. While on all fours and alternately gagging on the snow in his mouth and thankful for the cold easing the swelling fire that was his nose, he wondered if Limm knew what had happened to his oldest stepsister.

  * * *

  “This way,” Kenny told Thomas. Through the brambles and little trees, he saw the road and a guy tromping the other way. Then Kenny looked at Thomas closer through the whirling snow. “What’re you doing?”

  Thomas unzipped his snowsuit again. “I’m hot.”

  “It’s freezing out! You’ll get sick. And where’s your hat?”

  “I don’t need one.”

  Kenny knew that wasn’t true, but he was tired of Thomas acting like a big baby. “We have to keep moving.” He turned around and took a few more steps. “There’s a house over there. See the mailbox? We don’t want anyone to wake up and find us here.”

  “Wait!” Thomas tossed his soaked gloves aside to poke at a branch. “Something big.”

  “What?”

  “Under here. I think it’s a truck, and it’s still warm. Someone musta had an accident. I bet there’s a phone in there. We can call my dad to come and get us. I wanna go home.”

  TWENTY-NINE

  She turned over the smeary square photo to study the couple again. Serious-looking, holding hands. Skinny tie on Gregor Taylor, who was holding the hand of his wife, Bonnie. Milwaukee, 1962. She was dressed in a Jackie Kennedy outfit, complete with pillbox hat. Despite the photo being black and white, the dress could only be candy pink.

  So this was the same woman in the framed photo on the dresser in Cam’s bedroom, probably fifty years later, and standing alone, smiling, her demeanor calm. She wore pink in the photo, and a corsage, like it was her anniversary or another special day.

  In this, the older photo, the couple bore peace and pride standing on the sidewalk in what looked like a nice neighborhood, in front of a little house. Maybe they’d just bought the house. Two teenaged kids sat on the steps of the porch in the background. Bet the boy was Cameron’s father.

  She set the picture back inside the notebook and continued to leaf through the pages of Cameron’s notes. He hadn’t invited her to look, but he hadn’t told her to keep out, either, after she’d taken a pen to his manuscript. Not that it needed much work, it was just something to do, something she couldn’t stop doing. Maybe she’d run across a diary.

  Cameron’s book was going to be great. Not a simple biography, he’d made notes on both sides of the struggle for civil rights, even drawing in women’s activism, the war, and notes on current day Monrovia, Cameroon, and the Ivory Coast. Wow…he could trace his ancestry back to the Ivory Coast, and his grandmother had visited there years ago. Real Roots.

  Probably not all these notes were going in the book, but still, pulling all the pieces together was a daunting task. Her respect for this soldier-professor-survivor ratcheted.

  Rosalind would have killed to get her hands on a compelling, gut-wrenching book like this last year, when she’d been working in the Cities at Benfield and Sons, the owner of Personal, the magazine she oversaw. Personal was a conglomeration of empowerment articles, stories of individual triumph, growth opportunities in midwestern education and workshops, betterment angles in health and living well. She’d loved it. Been good at it. Rode the wave of downsizing from a monthly to a quarterly journal. Terrence, head of the book division, would have gone for this. Maybe she could still talk to him.

  But after the magazine subscriptions dried up, so did her job and other opportunities like it. Not even writing copy or other editing. She freelanced for a while, did some desktop publishing stuff f
or her friends mostly, until she couldn’t buy food after paying rent. Rosalind stared at the black stovepipe in Cameron’s kitchen, lost in time. Some empowerment story she’d made of her life. Not like Bonnie Taylor. Seemed the Taylors were destined for survival.

  Maybe some of it would wear off on her and pass on down to Kenny. She needed to hope he’d still be with Berta, safe, because the blizzard would make it hard to get to him. Cameron would be back, she could get help, some backup to go pick him up and take him away to a place where a job interview was just a job interview.

  Away where, she hadn’t quite figured out. Back to the cities wasn’t a terrible idea. She could act as agent for this book. How soon would Cameron return?

  She tapped her pen, ignoring the tingle in her fingers, while she read a couple of the yellowing newspaper articles in Cameron’s file. Open Housing marches. What was that about? She’d have to find out. Protests at Freedom House in Milwaukee, segregation. She’d never been to Milwaukee. Segregation? Didn’t all that stuff happen in the Deep South, not up here?

  Another article called Milwaukee the “Selma of the North.” Okay, then. There was the tie.

  Whoop! Underneath the old paper, three little paper-covered books tumbled in a pile. She pushed the articles aside to read later and gingerly opened Bonnie’s oldest diary, curiosity warring with invasion of privacy.

  Jan 1, 1940, Amarillo, TX

  Mama 4 babee bornd.

  Curiosity won.

  She flipped the page, but that was all the writing on that day. Faded brown flaky ink on rubbed silky, graying lined paper, the letters were disjointed but round or straight, almost like stick-figure hieroglyphics. Texas? What was Bonnie doing there?

  Two months later, another entry said “Rash” and “Rats” and “Rain,” almost like a poem. Most pages were scrawled with at least one word, usually about the weather, “Dry,” “Hot,” after that. Perhaps Bonnie had been encouraged to write more by someone. How old was she at that time? A young girl? Maybe she was out of school. The letters became less childish as the months passed. She wrote of her father working in the oil field and later, of having their own house.

  So that was it. Cameron’s great-grandfather had been an oil man. Interesting. In December of 1941, Bonnie wrote three sentences about the bombing at “Purl Harber.”

  What they doing out there?

  Thanks LORD, no war here.

  What Nippon?

  Feb 21, 1943. Went north to Wiskansen.

  Bonnie’s brother Walter, who’d moved to Milwaukee years earlier, had invited his sister north. Strange. The next two years were talk of rashuns, which morphed to rations, and factory work and prisoner of war camps, cleaning work in the northern suburbs, meeting Gregor Taylor, a boy her brother Walter brought home from work twenty-five miles north in West Bend at the aluminum plant, making shell casings for anti-aircraft guns on ships.

  May 22, 1945.

  Married that uppity north man, Gregor Taylor. He better be the gentleman he always been in front of Walter and Mrs. Hamilton. Gonna make some cute children, yes, Lord.

  Bonnie’s spelling dramatically improved as the years passed. Mrs. Hamilton was the landlady who’d encouraged her young tenant to keep up with her learning. The war ended, and Gregor and Bonnie stayed in Milwaukee raising their children, Jules, born in nineteen forty-six, and Barbara, born in forty-seven.

  Setting one diary aside, she paged through the others. Nineteen sixty-two, they’d finally been able to buy a home of their own. A little thing but all theirs. Just as she’d thought from the photograph.

  Nineteen sixty-six. Jules brought home a white girl from the university, much to the dismay of everyone in the family. And the neighborhood. He joined the Air Force shortly afterward. Hmm… She had never thought of prejudice going both ways.

  Iago raised his head from her knee and snarled. Lear began to bark.

  “What’s the matter?” She blinked and looked around. Where was she? Back in a cabin in the midst of snowy woods, not Milwaukee in the nineteen sixties. Lear ran to the front door at the same time someone outside began to knock.

  THIRTY

  Cam ducked into a ditch when the early commuter or delivery trucks passed. He wasn’t afraid of being recognized so much as getting in the way of a sliding vehicle or the nasty spray from wheels. It took longer than he was happy about to walk the two miles plus into downtown.

  Garage first. He tramped into Logan’s, glad he knew that was the name of the dark, ratty-looking business on Main and Third, for snow completely covered the signs around town. Feeble light in the office and the crooked sign turned to “Open” confirmed his hunch they’d be open early.

  A bell jingled when Cam stepped inside the cramped area. Stale cigarette smoke clung to the place. He’d been in here once last summer to get his muffler replaced. The same magazines, Outdoor Life and dog-eared copies of something about hunting, scrabbled together on the dusty coffee table between torn-up chairs that anyone would have to be desperate to sit on.

  Cam banged on the countertop littered with paperwork, a parts catalog, and a rotary-dial telephone next to a huge cash register. “Hello!” At least the bank calendar on the wall behind the counter was turned to the right month and year. A dark-haired young man with a vacant expression came from the workspace, letting in a rush of gas and solvent fumes.

  “What can I do for you?” he asked while wiping off his hands. His expression turned sullen when he recognized Cam.

  “Need some new tires. Just checking to see if you have them in stock.”

  Curiosity lit the man’s features for a couple of seconds. He might have still been a teenager, maybe early twenties, like Cam’s former students. Working in a garage. Not a bad way to make a living. Certainly a needed service. Better than spouting poetry or trying to cram Shakespeare into recalcitrant kids’ heads, or writing books no one wanted to read. He had jotted down the specs on his truck tires and slid the torn piece of notebook paper across the counter. The boy waited until Cam withdrew his hand before picking it up.

  Was this what you went through, Uncle Wally? Cam bit the inside of his lip and looked around some more. Clanging sounds echoed from the shop. Two generations since Civil Rights and still racial prejudice tethered itself to the trees of the Great North Woods.

  “I’ll be right back.” The young man vanished.

  Yeah, running a business meant working with customers you couldn’t afford to lose. Of course Barter Valley had little competition, being twenty-one miles from the next comparable-sized city.

  He should start the biography with what he knew of the slave ship, of the stories Bonnie brought back when she’d visited Ivory Coast a few years ago. He hadn’t wanted to be sentimental, but if that’s what it took to inveigle readers’ sympathies, he’d do it.

  Cam was studying the posters of upcoming events—most from the past summer—on the wall opposite the counter when the young man returned.

  “Sorry for the wait,” he said in a voice that meant fifteen minutes to check inventory shouldn’t have been a problem.

  Cam just raised a brow.

  “Yeah, we have four in stock. Need an appointment?”

  “Soon as I can get a tow,” Cam said. “Later today?”

  Kid shook his head and pretended to consult the schedule book he tilted out of Cam’s view. “Wednesday. Afternoon.”

  Cam bit back the automatic retort before taking his time running through his options. Black smoke from the coughing engine and a tough time keeping the Jeep straight warned of serious problems, and Cam already decided he wasn’t going to drive Art’s vehicle around Barter Valley. However, resupplied and with a ride back home, and he—they—would be okay for a few days. He had nothing else on his agenda. Rosalind appeared out of danger. The nephew, though. Maybe it wouldn’t take too much work to find the kid and take a report back home. Monday…no school yet due to the resurrected snow and iffy power…his mother…a phone would be handy. Matt at the newspaper office would
let him recharge the phone. He might know something about this sister and the kid. Maybe even the Limms and whether they’d be any help.

  “Don’t suppose you have a loaner car for me to use while you’re working on mine?”

  Headshake.

  What was this? Some whole new language in Barter Valley where locals only spoke body language? Or was this kid related to Rosalind? He sure hoped not. “Know of any rentals in town?”

  “Sorry.”

  “Okay. I’ll take the appointment.” Cam turned to leave and started tugging on his gloves.

  “Need a down payment to hold the tires.”

  “What? You mean you give me an appointment but you might use the tires in the meantime?”

  Shrug.

  “Where’s Logan?”

  “Busy.”

  “I’d like to talk to him. Now.”

  Kid disappeared through a different door this time, to the side of the big counter in the shadows. Cam heard muffled voices for less than a minute.

  “He says it’s okay.”

  Cam leveled a muted glare on the young man, dropped to the name on the grimy striped work shirt then back up. “Thanks, Carl. I’d like to watch you write in my appointment.”

  Satisfied at the scribble, Cam turned away again. “Be back on Wednesday.”

  * * *

  She shuffled toward Cameron’s front door, Iago following, whining. Wow, that hurt. Maybe she could ask him for some kind of walking stick or if he had a spare pair of crutches laying around. At the door, she hesitated. Should she even be answering? She should have thought this through before getting up. Had the person on the other side heard her moving? Too late. The dogs had made enough noise, with Lear’s barks and Iago’s whine. She’d definitely make the worst fugitive in the world. What would Doc Kimball have done?

  Peek through the window. She ducked her head around to see a wavy image of a stick-thin person. Yeah, like she could identify anyone through winter clothes. Next best thing. “Who’s there?”