But they traded him his ordinary clothes for some striped blue jeans with the first bell-bottoms he’d had since the Navy, and a fancy embroidered shirt, and they put what little hair he had in back into a pony tail with a ribbon around it, and that’s what he was looking like the next time Louisa seen him.
“Where on earth have you been, and what on earth have you been doing?” she wanted to know.
“Outa sight,” he said. And he stayed just long enough to see if the square world was still going round. The only development in the law’s handling of Robin’s case was that a couple who’d been in the parking lot of the roller rink that night, maybe fucking in the back seat of their car, had seen a suspicious man and had described him so well that a new police composite sketch had been made, replacing the one that Leo had done and not looking anything like that feller. The new suspect was actually identified as a known child molester recently released from Cummins prison, and there was a APB on him, with the state police and FBI concentrating on known places he had lived. That there FBI man who’d been so chummy with Robin’s mother was spending all his free time with her, and the last thing Louisa said to Leo before he took off again was, “You might just get an FBI agent for your new son-in-law, so you’ll have to watch your step, you old reprobate.”
Leo looked over his maps and decided to see if he couldn’t reach those places that he’d had to turn back from when his truck was just a two-wheel drive. One of them was up a mountain beyond the town of Snowball in Searcy County. The old Jeep trail climbed for a good two miles beyond the place where it left a good dirt road, and when Leo came in sight of the house he had a hunch or something that made him stop the truck and proceed on foot with the revolver tucked into the waistband of his bell-bottom blue jeans, with his embroidered shirt covering up the handle.
That way, he was able to catch ’em by surprise, and sure enough there was a old boy living there with a young girl, only she wasn’t Robin, and she wasn’t seven or eight but maybe thirteen. “How’d you find us?” the feller asked, and Leo knew that they was fugitives, and they was living here with a garden patch and a flock of chickens, and a spare room loaded up with food and supplies.
“I’ve just been looking everywhere for you,” Leo said, which was practically the truth.
“Are you her father?” the man asked.
“Naw, I’m just her uncle, aint that right, sweetheart?” he said to the girl, and she nodded her head, playing along with his game.
“Trina, tell him I aint done nothing to you,” the man requested of the girl.
“You know that’s not true, Wayne,” she said.
She held Leo’s gun on Wayne while Leo tied Wayne up real good with some rope and put him in the back end of the pickup, and the girl rode up front with him. He figured he’d just take ’em both to the county seat at Marshall and hand ’em over to the sheriff. Making conversation, he asked, “How long has he been a-keeping you?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I lost track. Maybe five or six years.” She smiled real big, and said, “I’m so glad you found me. I thought nobody ever would. You’re my hero. Could I give you a blow job?”
Leo slammed on the brakes and felt his old mousy unbending just at the thought. “That’s real kind of ye,” he said to her, driving on. “But I reckon I’d better take a raincheck on it.”
As it turned out, when he’d delivered them to the sheriff at Marshall, the girl had been kidnapped five years previously, and the search for her had eventually been abandoned. Her kidnapper, Wayne Curtis, had a long rap sheet of child molesting and sex offenses.
Leo got his pitcher in the papers, with a story about how he’d actually been working on the famous Robin Kerr case when he accidentally stumbled upon the other one. But the reward offer had expired, so he didn’t get nothing out of it except that raincheck, which he never got a chance to cash in.
The good deed gave him a right smart of pride and courage, though, and when he resumed his search for Robin he was filled with pep and renewed determination. As September rolled around, he was all set to give another try to a trail in Newton County that had turned him back in July. The country sure was pretty, what with the trees commencing to turn color, and all that red and orange warmed him up since the weather was getting cold and he had to wear his winter jacket. According to his map, there was this impassable Jeep trail that wandered all around the north end of a place called Madewell Mountain. He’d been able to climb less than a mile of it in his two-wheel-drive pickup before hitting a stretch that he couldn’t negotiate. There was at least another mile or so of it to go to reach the white square that meant a uninhabited dwelling.
That was his destination now, and the hunch he’d played in finding that Trina girl was now hunching him over the steering wheel with shivers running up his hunched back. Something told him this was the big day.
But the damn trail just played out completely, far short of the goal. After getting stuck in one hole so rough and deep he had to get out and jack up the rear end and put rocks under the tires to go on a little ways more, he got into a gully that was really terrible and he couldn’t go backward or forward, and spent two hours trying to jack the pickup up and get it out of there, without any luck. Since he couldn’t go back the way he came, he figured he might as well just walk on, until he reached that house.
The trouble was, there just wasn’t no trace whatsoever left of the trail. And the bluffs was steep and risky and the woods was deep and spooky, and it was beginning to get dark. He had a flashlight, and his revolver, and that was all he had to find his way to wherever he was trying to go.
Chapter twenty-two
She was so heartsick she couldn’t eat. So she simply stopped eating. She didn’t even bother to build a fire in the kitchen stove each morning, because Sugrue wasn’t eating anything anyway. She built a fire in the living room stove just to keep warm. She made sure that Robert was fed, giving him his bottle with Pet Milk three times a day, and then tried gradually to wean him from his bottle by getting him interested in some of the canned goods: there were potted meats like deviled ham that he would eat. But there was nothing that she would eat. Not as long as Hreapha was gone.
She wondered if perhaps Hreapha had been eaten by a bear. Although the Ouija Board had once declared that Hreapha would live to be nineteen, which was really old, old age for a dog, there was a possibility that the Ouija Board was mistaken, just as a lot of things that require belief and faith are false: for instance, Robin had a hunch that there was no such thing as the Tooth Fairy, or, if there was, the Tooth Fairy had ignored the last two teeth she had left under her pillow. She had a third tooth almost ready to leave there, but had decided not to, out of fear it would prove beyond doubt that there is no such thing as a Tooth Fairy. And if the Ouija Board was wrong about Hreapha living to be nineteen, then it was also wrong that Sugrue was going to die. Some mornings he was able to get up and go out, hobbling on his homemade crutches, and although he couldn’t do any work, and wasn’t any good at talking, he was at least sobered up enough to listen to her.
When she told him she feared that a bear had eaten Hreapha, he simply said something that sounded like “Pigeon eat.” More than once he said those words whenever she brought up the subject of Hreapha’s disappearance. Was he trying to say that a pigeon had eaten Hreapha? Or perhaps that Hreapha had eaten a diseased pigeon which had caused her to get sick and die?
Although she accepted the possibility that the Ouija Board was wrong and that the Tooth Fairy did not exist, she refused to cease believing in spirits or whatever was unseen but clearly felt or known. She knew that there was some kind of invisible spirit who lived in the cooper’s shed or spent most of its time there, and she had heard its voice clearly, that time she’d cured the pork. She was going to hear it again while doing the only work she would do during her time of sorrow over Hreapha: the smoking of the pork. One of the garbled things that Sugrue had said, whenever he said “Pigeon eat,” was “Mokawg,” and w
hen several repetitions of mokawg failed to make any sense to her, he got his crutches and summoned her to follow him to the cooper’s shed, where, on the dirt floor of the shed, he piled up an assortment of wood chips from the chopping stump and some of the accumulation of corncobs that they’d saved from their own corn on the cob and the chicken’s winter supply of shelled corn. He built a fire and soon the interior of the shed was filled with smoke. He poked holes through the chunks of the razorback she had cured, and ran white oak splits through the holes and hung the meat from the joists of the cooper’s shed.
He held up two fingers and then three fingers, “Toodaze. Freedaze,” he said, and hobbled on back to the house, leaving her to figure out that she was expected to keep the fire going by adding more of the wood chips and more of the corncobs. But was she supposed to stay awake and watch it for two or three days?
Dadblast it, this aint a smokehouse, you idjits, said that voice she’d heard when she was curing the pork. And then the voice began coughing. She thought that was funny, that an invisible spirit which had no body and no lungs and no throat to cough with, would be coughing at the smoke. It made her cough too, but she had lungs and throat.
“Are you really coughing?” she asked. “Or just faking it?”
I’m jist a-making out like it, he said. Paw would skin ye like a hog if he knew you was smoking up his workshop thisaway.
“He started the fire, not me,” she said and pointed toward the house where Sugrue had gone. She wondered if the spirit could see her point.
He is a miserable cuss, aint he? Bad enough when he could talk plain, much worser since he caint.
“How old are you?” she suddenly wanted to know.
Me? I reckon I must be about three, four years older’n you, gal.
“Is your name Adam?” she bravely asked.
How’d ye know?
“Sugrue told me how this place had belonged to the Madewells, and they had a boy named Adam. Do you just live out here in this shed all the time?”
Why, no, I wouldn’t rightly call it such as that. But you’uns has stuffed my room with all them boxes and bags and such that a body couldn’t turn around in there.
“The storeroom was your bedroom?” she asked.
Not was but is.
“I can’t see you, you know,” she pointed out. “And I think maybe I’m just imagining you. Maybe I’m just going crazy because Hreapha is lost.”
Aw shoot, that dog aint lost. She’s just gone down to Stay More for a visit with her friends.
“Really? Whenever I talk about Hreapha, Sugrue always says ‘Pigeon eat.’”
Her invisible friend Adam laughed. It was a boyish laugh that was more than just the kind of giggle that Jimmy Chaney made when he laughed. Don’t he have a lot of trouble talking, though? I reckon what he was trying to say was ‘Bitch in heat.’ He was just trying to tell you that she’s having her time of estrus.
“What does that mean?”
There was silence, and then he said, Darn, you’re a-makin me blush. It aint fitten to talk about, but you know what she-dogs and he-dogs do when they get together?
She thought about that for a while, and then she smiled and said, “Oh. So maybe she’s just gone to Stay More to see her favorite he-dog, Yowrfrowr.”
That’s the one, he said. I had to tell her how to get there, because it’s a long ways over the roughest country you ever seen, and I aint even so sure she could’ve made it.
“I feel a lot better, knowing she hasn’t been eaten by a bear.”
Aint nothing ever going to eat that dog.
“I’m sorry we’re smoking up your father’s workshop, but I don’t know what else to do.”
Our smokehouse aint standing no more. It was right over yonder. She could not see the way he was pointing, if he was pointing. So I don’t reckon it will do no harm to Paw’s shop if you just go on and smoke your hog in here. But you caint stay awake all night tending the fire, so I’ll help ye with it.
“Thanks so much,” she said. And that night she put more chips and corncobs on the fire and watched to be sure it would keep burning, and then she bundled up in her thickest jacket and with a blanket and pillow made herself comfortable outside the cooper’s shed but close enough to keep an eye on it. And she eventually drifted off to sleep, with Robert joining her under the blanket. Sometime late in the night or early morning she was awakened—maybe Robert did it—she was awakened by something and saw that the fire was dying out, and got up to add more chips and cobs to it.
She smoked the meat for nearly three days, until it was good and dark reddish-brown. Every time the fire was getting too low while she slept, she would be awakened again, but her new friend never spoke, although she occasionally called to him, saying “Hello?” This bothered her, and she wondered if he was tired of talking to her. Or if she had said anything to bother him. Eventually she decided that he wasn’t really there, that she had just imagined him, that she had been talking aloud to herself.
When the smoking of the meat was all finished, and she had hung it up to keep in the storeroom, she returned to her neglected paper dolls. It was hard to play with her paper dolls when Robert was in the house, because he’d mess up her paper town of Stay More, which she had laid out so carefully and populated with dozens of paper dolls named Ingledew and Swain and Whitter and Duckworth and Coe and Dinsmore and Chism and so on. Now she wanted to put into the Stay More schoolhouse a paper doll named Adam Madewell, and she tried to imagine what he looked like. If he was three or four years older than she, he’d be twelve years old and in the fifth or sixth grade.
Late one cold afternoon Robin was standing on the porch of the house, admiring the pretty colors in the distant trees and in the yard, where a giant maple had turned bright red, when suddenly she heard, far out across the way, the name of her dog announcing her return home. Robin’s heart nearly exploded with joy. And then she saw the dog, limping slowly across the field. Robin ran out to meet her.
“Hreapha!” Robin shouted gleefully.
“Hreapha,” said the dog, and while there was happiness in the way she said it, there was also a kind of pain too, as if something was wrong with her.
Robin reached Hreapha long before Hreapha could reach her. And Robin knelt to hug the dog, but did so gently, astonished to see how hurt the poor dog was. “Oh, Hreapha,” she cried, “what has happened to you?” And found herself astonished that she expected an answer, as if her friend could tell her the story of her adventure.
Hreapha could not even say her name. She could only whimper.
“Let’s get you some food and water,” Robin said, and tried to pick her up to carry her to the house, but Hreapha struggled and whined and had to be put down. So Robin walked slowly as Hreapha limped onward to the house, where Robert was so thrilled to see her that he forgot he hated dogs and jumped on her back and began licking her. Robin drew a bucket of water from the well and rinsed Hreapha’s big plastic water dish, which Robert had been using as a wading pool, and then held Robert back while she filled it so Hreapha could have a drink.
For several days Hreapha did not feel like doing anything. Robin made a pallet for her with an old blanket on the floor beside the living room stove, which she kept running day and night. She had a practiced swing with the axe, and was very good now at splitting firewood. Day by day the weather grew colder; there were even dustings of snow. On one of her trips to the woodpile, Robin stopped in at the workshop/smokehouse and said, “Hello? Adam? Would you like to come in the house and keep warm?” She waited a long time for an answer, but it never came, and made her realize that Adam was just a figment of her imagination, whose voice had come to her only when she was in desperate need of help.
She didn’t need any help now. She kept everything going. She had always been strong-willed but now she had to be stronger than ever. Her appetite had returned with Hreapha’s return and she did a good job in the kitchen, although Sugrue didn’t much care for anything she tried to fix for him.
She wondered if there was something in whiskey that was nourishing and a good substitute for food. She learned all on her own how to make a good ham omelet, with onions that had been dried from the garden, and it was so tasty she had it several times a week. She always ate too fast, much too fast, but simply assumed that was because her appetite was good. She appreciated that there was no one to remind her to wash her hands before supper, although she wished her mother was still around to nag her about it, and she thought of her mother when she usually washed her hands anyway. She wished her mother could be there to praise her for being clean and to sample her cooking. After enjoying a scrumptious ham omelet, she followed it up with one of her desserts: using the box of mix according to instructions, she made perfect fudge brownies. A month earlier Sugrue had shown her the location of a grove of pawpaw trees and they had brought home a couple of sacks full of them to ripen, and there were still a few that were ripening, and she had learned almost to like them as a kind of inferior banana. No, she didn’t need any help. She looked at herself in the mirror one morning and decided, “I don’t look like myself.” What she meant was that whatever self she had been thinking of herself as having was no longer there. Maybe her mother wouldn’t recognize her. Whatever remained of her human self she now projected into her paper dolls, so that she became each of the citizens of her little town of Stay More and fabricated their lives for them, and did a passably good job of having them speak to each other. Hreapha and Robert always seemed to enjoy listening when she was talking in the voices of the citizens of Stay More as they lived through their lives. She wished her mother could listen to her talk about Stay More. Almost as much as missing her mother, she missed comic books, even more than she missed movies and television, and she took it for granted that she might never again see a comic book, so she would have to make up replacements for them.
The Nearly Complete Works, Volume 2 Page 162
