Wallace looked hurt. “No, I don’t.” He scratched his head thoughtfully. “Fack, I never even told it before now.”
Huller had been watching Dotty. His mouth plumped over the rim of the beer can in a slow, sullen smile.
“Don’t look at me like that!” she spat.
“Like what?” Huller laughed, all wide-eyed and innocent-looking.
“Like you got everything all figured out!” she said.
10
Sometimes when a Pampers ad came on TV, Alma would sniffle some, but otherwise she was in good spirits. Of course, having the house so clean helped and having Jiggy around so much more now was nice, she was telling Wallace as he washed the breakfast dishes. He had made pancakes, Canny’s favorite. Tonight he was planning on mushfries, which were the leftover pancakes cut up and deep-fried.
“Probably it was too soon,” Alma said from the table. She was lighting another cigarette. Even with the window open, the kitchen was dim with smoke. Alma could smoke all she wanted now. It didn’t make her sick to her stomach anymore. “It was just like when we were married. He’d want to go out and I’d be too tired and then my feet got so swellen I couldn’t stand up even. And, acourse, relations was out of the picture, me being so big and so sick and all.” She laughed. “The littlest movement’d make me want to throw up. He’d just sit down on the bed and I’d start to gag.…”
The water gurgled down the drain. Wallace wrung out the dish rag and bent low over the sink and wiped water spots from the faucet. His face was red.
“Which is rough when you think about it,” Alma went on, “’cause relations is all newlyweds really got going for them. It’s how they get to know each other. ’Course, it takes a lotta years.…” Her voice trailed off and she stared at her empty coffee cup a moment. “Dotty says you were married a long time.… I mean to your wife—the one before Dotty. Was the first one like Dotty? I mean, you know, as pretty like her?”
Wallace had not moved from the sink. He started wringing out the dishrag again.
“Probably not, huh?” Alma sighed. “Probably she was like me, all wrung out and fat and so miserable, you couldn’t take no more. And along came Dotty and that was that and you just couldn’t say no, so off you went.…”
Wallace muttered something.
“What?” Alma asked, leaning forward.
“She warn’t fat,” he repeated softly.
“Was she all wrung out and nagging all the time at you to stay home?” Alma doused her cigarette in the saucer’s coffee puddle. From the box in her lap, she scooped a fistful of Chees-its.
“Nope,” Wallace said uneasily. “I was always ’t home.”
“Didn’t you ever go out with the guys?” Alma asked through a mouthful of crackers.
He turned and shook his head.
“Bowling? Or even just hanging out?”
He was shaking his head.
“Really? Jeez!” She regarded him with a curious, puzzled expression. She shrugged. “Well, what’d you do?”
“Nothing,” he said.
Alma’s eyes narrowed. “She run around?”
“Nope. She warn’t like that.”
“What was her name?” she asked, and when he told her, she repeated it. “Hyacinth. That’s pretty. I never heard that before.”
“All her sisters had flower names,” he said, blinking. He had forgotten that. “There was Rose and Daisy and Marigold … and one that died, Daffodil.”
From outside, now, came Kelly’s piercing scream. When he did not move, Alma rose slowly from the chair and waddled onto the porch. She was still passing clots. Dotty said some were as big as grapefruits. After Answan was born, Hyacinth couldn’t walk for two weeks. Her mother moved in. Mrs. Kluggs had a harelip and a fine blue tint to her skin that marked her as a Mooney. Way back, all the Mooneys had been blue, blue as ink and proud of it, Mrs. Kluggs boasted. His mother-in-law hated his guts. She put his boots out on the porch to fill up with snow all night long. She used to go into the bathroom after him and open the window. If that didn’t work, she’d tie a handkerchief over her nose. She even got Arnold to do it. Sometimes his whole family would all be sitting around with masks on.
He felt weak. He was remembering too many things. He looked around the kitchen, at the headless doll next to the sagging trash bag and the mud-caked sneaker by the dog’s water dish, in which a black fly floated. For a moment, he could not remember whose house this was or why he was here. His eyes focused on the fly—on its hard, hairy head and its dark wings, inert and iridescent. “I got lost,” he whispered. “That’s what happened.”
Out in the yard, a woman laughed. Alma was laughing, but it was Hyacinth’s laugh that slashed like a razor down his back; her and all her Kluggs relatives, all laughing, slapping their knees and holding their sides from splitting over such a crazy story. Whoever heard of such a thing? Went off to work one morning; comes dragging back five years later, saying he got lost. Come on Wallace, Tell us another one.…
A week had passed and, as far as Wallace could tell, Alma knew none of the truth about Canny. She seemed content to smoke and watch her soaps and complain to Dotty about what a lazy little slut her fifteen-year-old sister was. Ellie had moved in three days ago, after a slapping match with her mother.
Jiggy and Dotty and Wallace were in the cabin now, working on the “plan.” Alma was in the house, taking a nap. Right after breakfast this morning, Ellie had taken the three little girls into the woods to wade in the stream. Ellie was a big, bony girl whose breasts lifted against her thin cotton shirts like hard little knobs. Though she was prettier than Alma, Ellie’s eyes were of the same dull stone.
Dotty sat on one bed in the cabin’s heat, rubbing baby oil on her legs. She had been lying in the sun all morning, and her thighs were a fiery pink. Jiggy sat on the edge of the other bed. Between them, on the wooden chair, rigid in his silence, was Wallace. His hands capped his knees. As they talked, he nodded mutely, barely listening, his eyes blurred and still. Their voices hummed with words of a strange, bright fluidity, bobbing up and down and back and forth, glinting easily past him.
Jiggy was saying that Wallace should make all the telephone calls. “Then they’ll think it’s just one guy they’re dealing with. It can’t be me. I’m known.”
“He gets all screwed up on the phone,” Dotty said, tilting the bottle of oil against her fingers. She stroked the oil along the inside of her thigh. She glanced up at Wallace’s remote expression. “He gets scared talking when he can’t see who he’s talking to.”
“I’ll tell him what to say,” Jiggy said.
She shook her head. “He’ll forget. Guaranteed,” she sighed.
“I’ll write it all down,” Huller said.
“He can’t read,” she said, in the same flat tone.
Huller looked up at Wallace. The little man’s jaw twitched. His eyes had a hazy cast. Huller’s voice dropped. “What the hell am I getting into? Jesus Christ!”
Dotty shrugged. “He can read easy stuff that’s printed.” She laughed lightly. “Canny can read as good as him now.”
Huller got up and went to the door. He stood looking out across the dusty driveway. “You should see the house they have, Canny’s family,” he said.
“I already seen it,” Dotty said. “I was in it. Remember?”
Huller turned and seemed to be studying her, as if he were trying to make up his mind about something. “Weren’t you scared, just walking into a strange house and taking off with their kid?”
“Not then. Not inside.” She laughed. “I was gonna tell whoever came to the door I was collecting for cancer or something and then when nobody came, I just opened the door and went inside, straight on into the kitchen. There was a glass jar on the counter with dimes in it and then all of a sudden I remembered how hungry I was and I opened the fridge and stood there looking in at all the food, and then I heard this baby voice saying, ‘Hi, hi,’ and over the door of the fridge, I could see this tiny little girl. She
was in the other room, in her playpen, you know, with her face pressed to the side, all cute and pudgy through the holes. The phone started to ring and she kept saying, ‘Hi, hi,’ louder and louder like she wanted me to say it back. Like if I didn’t, she’d cry or something. So I went in and I said, ‘Hi.’ And then when I started to go, she started hollering it, ‘Hi! Hi!’”
Dotty drew her knees to her chin and smiled. Wallace was looking at her now, and listening carefully.
“She wouldn’t shut up and then the phone stopped ringing, so I grabbed her and then I thought I heard footsteps upstairs so I ran outside and when I got to the truck, Aubie started peppering me with questions. That’s when I got scared! All I could think of was getting the hell outta there. I didn’t think of nothing else, I swear. I mean, if I’d’ve planned it, wouldn’t’ve gone so smooth.” She sighed and rubbed her chin over her greasy shoulder. “Course, try to tell the cops that. How it was just one of those crazy things that just happened. And then I couldn’t just ditch her in the middle of nowhere and then, after a while, Aubie was getting such a crush on her that when I’d tell him to stop the truck so I could leave her off someplace, he’d just keep on going. He wouldn’t listen to me.”
Wallace leaned toward her. “You never said stop, Dotty. I woulda if you did.”
“Oh yah!” she laughed uneasily. “You really remember too!” She rolled her eyes at Huller. “He can’t remember what day it is, half the time.”
“I ’member that day,” Wallace said, gazing into the shadows in the corner of the cabin.
Huller was leaning against the door frame with his arms folded, watching the two of them.
“I ’member what you had on and what Canny had on. I ’member ever’thing that day.”
From the woods came the little girls’ whoops as Ellie chased them home. Like Ellie, whose tee shirt and shorts were slapped to her body, they were all dripping wet.
Dotty got up and stood next to Huller, who was staring at his sister-in-law. “She’s gonna be a bag if she don’t watch it,” Dotty scoffed. Huller didn’t answer.
“Don’t be mad, Jig,” Ellie called up to the cabin. “I’ll get them all in dry things, I promise!”
Huller opened the door. “I’ll give you a hand,” he said, stepping outside.
“Bastard,” Dotty muttered, watching them go into the house.
“Dotty?” Wallace said, and waited a minute. “Dotty?”
“What?” she asked, wheeling around, her arms folded tight across her bosom. “What the hell do you want?”
He hung his head and took a deep breath. “I’m scared.”
“So what else is new?” she said, grabbing her cigarettes off the bed. She started for the door.
“Something bad’s gonna happen,” he said. He looked up at her, his face twisted with dread. “I know it is.”
“Shit!” she groaned and flew toward the door, but then stopped suddenly and came back to him. The hard little line of her mouth wavered. “In my whole life, Aubie, you’re the only guy I ever seen cry.” She shook her head. “You’re like a little kid. The first day I saw you, I thought that. It was like no matter what I said or did, you were gonna stick with me. But I was just a kid then, Aubie. I ain’t a kid anymore. And in a few years, Canny ain’t gonna be a kid anymore.…” She laid her hand on his cheek. “We’re all getting growed up, Aubie.” Her voice softened. “All but you.… You know what I mean?”
He shook his head. Truly, he did not.
“No.” She looked at him. “Course you don’t. I could spell it out black and white and you still wouldn’t get it.”
After she left, he continued to sit in the straight-backed chair, watching the tide of shadows that rose from the floorboards to his ankles, to his knees, then waist high. Of all the voices from across the way, he could make out only Canny’s. He listened carefully. He knew he had to remember this, the way she laughed, and now, the way she was giggling, and then he thought, Just like them two boys of mine, I ain’t never gonna see her again.
The next morning, Jiggy and Dotty left early. They were headed to Stonefield to go over the route Jiggy had in mind. Wallace was still in bed when Canny came into the cabin. Laughing to see him all curled up under the covers, she ran and threw herself on top of him. “You’re getting lazy as Momma!” she scolded, trying to tickle him through the blanket. “Sleeping till noon! Not even getting up to eat or pee.…”
“Lemme be,” he growled, pulling the pillow over his face.
Canny sat up and lifted the corner of the pillow. “You drunk?” she asked, peeking in at his gaunt, whiskery face.
“Course not!”
“You sick?”
“Nope.”
She stared down at the lump in the pillow and scratched her head. “You mad at me?”
“Nope.”
“Yes you are. You’re mad ’cause I been sleeping over the house, huh?”
“I said I ain’t mad.”
“You sound mad.”
“I ain’t.”
“Then get up … c’mon,” she said, tugging at the covers.
“Don’t.… I ain’t dressed.” He pulled back on the sheet. “Leave me alone, dammit, Canny!”
“I know why you’re mad,” she persisted.
“I ain’t mad!”
“You think Momma’s doing it with Jiggy now, huh?”
“Watch your mouth,” he said, raising up on one elbow. He clutched the sheet to his chest. “Or I’ll wash it out for ya!”
“Well, that’s what you been thinking and I know it. But Poppy!” she squealed, breaking into a grin. “It ain’t true. Least, not anymore. After Momma came over last night, Jiggy and Ellie were kissing on the couch.”
“They was?” Wallace asked eagerly.
“Yup. I saw ’em through the hole in the floor.” Canny smiled. “But then he turned out the light.” She hopped back on the bed and sat cross-legged, facing him. “So, there’s nothing to worry about, Poppy,” she said solemnly. “It’s gonna be just like always. Momma’ll get sicka him or he’ll dump her and then we can leave.”
The early sun pierced the window in a fine, thin tube of light. Wallace gazed after it, his eyes distant again. Canny picked at a thick scab on her knee as she whispered stories about Alma and how she’d hate being her kid or Jiggy’s, they were both so mean to Kelly and Krystal. “So, I guess I’ll keep you, Poppy,” she giggled, scrambling next to him. With her head at his chin, she curled close. She smelled like a milky little kitten. “That is, unless something better comes along,” she said, in her gravelly voiced imitation of Dotty.
Jiggy had gotten a street map from the Stonefield town hall. He had the map spread out now on the cabin floor. He knelt over it, and with a red crayon drew a line down different streets. Dotty squatted next to him.
“What’s that?” she asked, pointing to the X he had just made.
“The graveyard I showed you,” he said, pausing to sit back on one knee. “Down behind these train tracks. From here, the graveyard,” he said, running his finger along the map, “to here—the Birds’ house … only takes five, maybe seven, minutes.… So, soon as the money’s dropped, Pops brings the kid.…”
Wallace’s eyes shot to Dotty’s.
“I told you,” she said. “He’s scared of graveyards! Scared shitless!”
Huller looked up at Wallace’s gray face. “That true? Pops?”
Wallace nodded.
“What the hell’s to be scared of?” Huller snapped. “Everybody in there’s dead. Dead people can’t hurt you, right?” At the sight of Wallace’s constricted eyes, Huller’s tone eased. “Right?”
Wallace only shrugged miserably. He fiddled with the rim of his baseball cap.
Dotty drew her finger along the map. “Why not here?” She looked at Huller. “The dump. Aubie’s used to dumps.”
“Too far away,” Huller said. “The graveyard’s only a couple minutes from the kid’s house.”
“What the hell’s the difference?
” she asked. “Five minutes, ten minutes.…” she said, wiping polish remover onto each scarlet nail.
Huller snatched up his map. “You’re starting to sound stupid as …,” he snarled, then, with a glance at Wallace, caught himself. “Time’s all we got here. Once he makes that call, I gotta fly.”
“Whatd’ya mean I? Where the hell am I gonna be?” Dotty broke in.
“In the truck, of course.” Huller smiled sweetly. “With me.” He winked.
She glanced uneasily at Wallace. “And then after he gets the money, he leaves off Canny and drives over the tracks to meet us,” she said, in a loud, exaggerated tone.
“Something like that,” Huller said, spreading the map again. “The fine points come later.”
“Hey Jiggy!” Ellie called from the driveway. “Let’s go!” Huller made a move to rise, then rocked back into place. Dotty was still talking. “How much later?” she wanted to know.
“A day or two.”
Wallace’s head jerked up. “You mean mebbe tomorrow?” His chest rose and fell in a little pant. “You mean we’re gonna be bringing her back so fast?”
“No, no,” Huller said, patting Wallace’s shoulder. He folded up his map. “I just want to get it all figured out by then. That’s why I keep going over the different routes.”
“Hurry it up, Jig!” Ellie hollered from the driveway.
Huller went to the door with Dotty right after him. He turned and jabbed the map in her chest. “Where the hell do you think you’re going? It’s Ellie’s old lady’s birthday.”
“Want some hot dogs?” Wallace asked, clearing the beer cans and cigarettes into a paper bag. “There’s some left from last night.” He knelt down and picked up the cap to the polish remover. “I could cut ’em up in sauce like you like.” He had to press both hands onto the bed in order to rise. His knees were swollen and stiff with the cabin’s dampness. “And after,” he coaxed, “we could go for cones.”
She stood in the doorway, hugging her arms, watching Canny come toward the cabin.
“Mebbe if you want, we could go for a ride after,” he said. She shook her head.
“Mebbe we could find a drive-in movie.…”
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