“Shit! I need shoes!” Dotty panted. “Find me some!”
Wallace grabbed her shiny red high heels and set them at her feet.
“Take them! Just take them!” she said, and he clutched them to his chest.
“What happened? Please tell me!” begged Canny.
“Nothing! Now go!” Dotty gave her a little shove. “You want your Poppy killed? You want him dead?” Dotty screamed.
“Move! C’mon quick!” She held open the door. Canny ran past and after her came Wallace. It was then that he saw the gun braced against the sagging screen, like an extension of Dotty’s hand, the long glinting finger that was the barrel of Huller’s gun.
The dog had been running around the house, then up the front steps to the door, which it hurled itself against, with a cry of something that was dying.
Inside the car Dotty was laughing, softly and nervously. The light through the trees was jarring, so bright against the film of the windshield that he had to look away.
The car started up right away. He was surprised that Huller hadn’t disconnected the battery. He backed up and turned, then drove to the end of the driveway that was blocked by Huller’s big black pickup. He kept glancing in the rearview, expecting to see Huller charging after them.
“Go around it,” Dotty said, leaning forward. “Just go around it!” she screamed.
So he did, turning the car into the woods that bordered the main road. Leafy branches and sharp pine needles battered the windshield and slapped through the open window at his face. “Damn … damn …,” he muttered, wincing as he steered with his right hand while he tried to shield his face with his left.
“There!” Dotty called, pointing ahead. “Take a left! There’s the road!”
At that moment, as the car emerged from the woods into a shallow culvert below the road, an explosion wrenched the ground.
“Poppy!” Canny gasped at his ear.
At first he thought a rock had hit the bottom of the car. But when the car pulled onto the road with its old lumbering roar and the explosion came again, he glanced in the mirror and saw rolls of thick, black smoke churning through the treetops. Them poor little girls, he thought. He kept thinking that. Them poor, poor little girls.
“Poppy,” Canny murmured, but when he looked back at her in the mirror, she said nothing.
Dotty turned down the visor. The old brittle clipping of the moon walk hung by one pin. She tried to tuck it up, but it kept slipping down. So with a savage swipe, she tore it off and threw it out the window.
Nothing in her expression had changed. Her eyes were still filled with that bright uneven light and her mouth seemed to quiver with that strange sense of motionless energy that charged the early morning air like electric sparks. It was her voice that was different, deep and fiberless, as if it issued not from flesh or ligament, or even bone, but from stone.
“Now get on the main road,” she was telling him. The turn ahead was one he had never taken before. “And now, pull over!” she ordered, pointing to a boarded-up gas station. She had him drive behind the station and park close to the building.
“Gimme the pill,” she demanded. “Jesus Christ … Jesus Christ,” she groaned, looking around at the piles of worn tires and the rusty oil drums filled with water. He dug in his pockets for the wrapped pill Huller had given him.
She grabbed it from him and knelt on the seat, facing Canny.
“I ain’t sick,” Canny said when she saw the pill.
“You’ll be sick if you don’t,” warned Dotty, as she pushed the pill against Canny’s unyielding lips.
“No!” Canny said and fell back, so that to reach her Dotty had to hang over the back of the seat. She swore and drew back her hand and slapped Canny’s face. She hit her again. “Get up here, you little bastard,” she muttered, grabbing her hair and yanking her forward. Canny grunted and then she sobbed.
“She takes ’em mashed,” Wallace said quickly. “You gotta mash it.”
“Not this time!” Dotty cried, as she tried to force the long yellow tablet past Canny’s stubborn lips. “Open up, goddamn you … little …”
“Here,” Wallace said, taking the pill from her. Before she could get it back, he bit it in half and put it in Canny’s mouth. “Swaller,” he said, with a pleading glance.
She gulped and her eyes welled with tears.
He looked down at the remaining half in his palm. The pill was huge. “This okay for kids?”
“Don’t start,” she warned. “Give it to her. Fast!”
He turned on the seat. “Here,” he said, and when Canny opened her mouth, he winked and pretended to give her the other half.
Dotty glanced over her shoulder.
“Swaller,” he said, and Canny forced a loud gulp.
“Now lay down,” Dotty told Canny. “And close your eyes and pretty soon all this shit’ll be just a bad dream.”
He started the engine and pulled onto the road. Dotty told him to stop at the first pay phone he saw.
Her eyes were closed. “I don’t need him,” she muttered with her head back on the seat. “I don’t need anybody.” Tears leaked from her eyes and down her cheeks, which were so bruised the flesh was beginning to blacken. She opened her eyes and looked at him. “What’s wrong with me, Aubie?” she whispered. “What the fuck’s wrong with me? All I do’s hurt people.”
He thought a minute. “You’re bad,” he said, nodding his head as if to pump out the thoughts. “But you’re good too. It’s jest your bad part’s too … it’s too strong for your good.”
“There’s one!” she said, pointing to a telephone booth in the parking lot of an Italian restaurant.
He watched her from the car. She bent over the telephone shelf and then suddenly she straightened, her hands scrambling the air as she spoke.
In the back, Canny sagged in the corner of the seat. Her chin lay on her chest and her head bobbed ever so slightly as if she weren’t yet deeply asleep. He looked back at Dotty. Right now she was talking to the Birds. They were probably deciding how much they were going to pay. Last night he’d gotten too scared. He hadn’t been strong enough. Today he’d do it right.
Suddenly, he thought of Krystal and Kelly and a wave of nausea washed over him. For a moment their plain round faces were all that he could see. He blinked and blinked until he saw past them, saw Dotty through the sunstruck, grimy glass of the phone booth—not Dotty, but a blur of gray, a shadow.
She ain’t right, he thought, raising his hands slowly, one to the wheel, the other to the key. What he had said was wrong. She wasn’t part good and part bad—not and do that; not and shoot two little girls, both younger than Canny—if that’s what she did.… Maybe she didn’t. Maybe those were jet booms and that’s what the smoke was from too. He took a deep breath. Them poor little girls, he thought again. And poor fat Alma. His fingers closed over the key. Now! his brain commanded. Now! Just go! Leave her and go!
But she’ll be all alone, he thought, watching her leave the telephone booth. Barefoot, over the pebbles, she walked quickly with her arms folded and the gun dangling at the side of her breast.
“They’re waiting for my next call,” she said when she got into the car. “The money’s all set.” She looked at him. “It’s at a graveyard, Aubie, so I don’t want you coming apart on me, understand?”
He nodded.
“You gotta do this,” she said. “You can’t fuck up, Aubie.” She hugged herself and almost seemed to shiver. Beside her, Wallace was wet with sweat. It ran down his temples and over the bridge of his nose to channels underneath both eyes.
“First we go to the town forest.” She was trembling. The map in her hand fluttered. “Then after we leave her off, we go get the money and we call them and tell them where to find her.” She bent forward and rested her brow on the dashboard. “I feel like I’m gonna puke,” she groaned.
He kept blinking as he drove. It was hard to see through all the sweat. As he drove it seemed that the car had never ridden sm
oother. The engine was almost silent. If there were bumps in the road, the tires must have been floating over them.
She said turn and he turned … left … right … right … left. Once she said pull over, stop, quick, I’m gonna be sick. And he did. She opened her door and with both feet braced, she leaned over the road and he could hear it splatter onto the roadside. He could smell it and he could see her shoulders writhe and he could hear her bitter gasps at the end.
Then she sank back against the seat, thin and spent. She said she felt better now. “Get on the highway. Up ahead’s the road,” she said.
He was on the highway. He passed farmhouses and an apple orchard and, in the distance, like black spikes of a battered fence, rose in uneven heights factory smokestacks and chimneys. The highway here narrowed suddenly from three lanes to two. It was his lane that had vanished, so that there was nowhere to go until she jerked the wheel. All around him, horns blared and brakes squealed. Canny slept so soundly that not even the horns awakened her.
Soon they were off the highway on a wide road, deeply shaded by the thick pines that towered along both sides. There were no houses here. For miles there seemed to be only this pine forest.
“Up there.” She was pointing to the right to a sign that said STONEFIELD TOWN FOREST in black letters. He turned onto the narrow dirt road and drove slowly past a parking lot littered with beer cans and broken bottles.
“Keep going,” she said, “till you come to a fork.” She looked at the map again, then glanced over the seat at Canny. “She better not wake up,” she said. “There! Keep right now—off the road. And just keep going.”
Here, the road became two rutted tracks. Weeds grew up from the high center mound. If he went over twelve miles an hour, the axle scraped against the jutting stones.
Dotty kept insisting that somewhere in here there was a shack that Jiggy had brought her to see. “Just keep going. It’s way far in,” she said. “He said nobody ever comes out this way.”
After a couple of miles, the road narrowed even more. At some points, thorny vines dragged over the roof and against the closed windows. Dotty kept peering at the map in her lap, at a spot she kept marked with her finger. Under the map, the gun made a soft mound.
“Where we goin’ after?” he asked.
“After? After what?”
“After the money. When they got her back,” he said thickly.
“I don’t know yet,” she said.
“You still wanna go to Hollywood?” he asked.
She didn’t answer.
“You still wanna go to Hollywood?” he called over the motor. She looked at him and suddenly she laughed, and he saw for the first time that her front tooth had been knocked out. The black gap sickened him. He looked back to the road, to the sagging, weathered shack coming up ahead.
He pulled into the newly cut clearing beside the shack. The front door was made of three z-braced boards, its shiny hasp obviously new. He opened the door and looked inside. It was a small, dark, airless box. A cobweb glistened from corner to corner. The smell of cold, wet dirt made him shiver. She’ll be so scared, he thought. He could picture Canny sitting up suddenly in the pitch black and starting to scream, thinking it was a nightmare, thinking that any minute he’d come. What if something went wrong, he wondered. What if they never came for her? No one would ever hear her. Dotty was calling to him from the car.
“She’s moving,” Dotty called. “Quick! Get her in before she wakes up.”
In the back seat, Canny’s eyes fluttered. She tried to lift her head, but her eyes rolled and she fell limply back.
“Canny?” he said, ducking his head into the back seat.
“Where’s my …?” The rest of her words were too thickly slurred to be understood. He lifted her head and brought her face close to his. She looked at him for a moment and smiled a lax, drooly smile and then her eyes rolled to whites, seeming to sink back in her head.
“Canny!” he said, shaking her.
“Pull her out!” Dotty said. “Just pull her!”
“She’s waking up, but she ain’t!” he said, in a panicky voice.
“Then get her in there before she does! Pull her! Pull her out!”
He picked her up, easily lifting the small limp frame that seemed made of air, of twigs and air. He stepped back, then stood for a moment by Dotty, who handed him a padlock through the car window. “Hurry up!” she called after him. “Just put her in, goddamn it, then lock it!”
So he did; he stepped into the shack’s black dampness, then squatted and eased her onto the dirt floor, feeling blindly with his hand for rocks or sticks that might hurt her. His fingers caught in the sticky thickness of a spider web as he leaned to kiss her.
“Poppy …,” she murmured, and he felt the air stir as she reached for him.
He stood up quickly and closed the door behind him.
“Lock it!” Dotty was calling. “Put the lock on!”
He slipped the padlock through the hasp.
“Lock it!” she called.
“Poppy?” came Canny’s voice, small and muffled. “My head hurts.…”
“She’s awake,” he called to Dotty.
“I got a bad taste,” Canny said.
“She don’t feel good,” he called. He stood with both hands still on the unfastened padlock.
“I’m gonna be sick,” Canny groaned. “Poppy? Poppy, please help me.…”
“Lock it, goddamn you!”
His shoulders sagged as he stared down at the soft green moss that hemmed the bottom of the door.
“I can’t get up … Poppy … oh.…”
When he opened the door she was on her knees, her hands groping blindly in front of her. Finger stripes of dirt streaked the side of her face.
“I don’t feel so good,” she said weakly, squinting up at him. “How come I’m here? What’d I do bad?”
“Jest rest,” he whispered in her ear as he carried her to the car. “Jest rest.…”
“Put her back!” Dotty cried, opening her own door. “I said put her back, you stupid …”
It wasn’t until he had laid Canny on the seat and backed out that he saw the gun Dotty pointed at him. “She’s sick,” he said. “She got scared.”
“Get her out, you stupid bastard, and put her back.” She gripped the gun with both hands.
He looked at the gun and he looked at her. “We’ll take her with us. And then we’ll call after,” he said.
“We can’t! If they see her, they’ll grab us!”
“We can hide her,” he said. “Like we done before—under a blanket or something.”
“No! Now you listen …”
But he was already inside the car, starting it up.
“Aubie! Listen to me. It ain’t like before. It’s gonna be all over pretty soon.”
She sat back crying a moment and then she drew back her hand and slapped the side of his head. Cursing, she pummeled him with her fists as he drove down the narrow road. Then with a gagging sound, she fell against him with her head on his shoulder. “We’ll be dead … all of us … they’ll shoot us …,” she sobbed.
He looked at her. “You shoot them little girls, Dot?”
Her head jerked and for a second she looked as if she were trying not to smile.
“He did,” she said, rubbing her arm. “He went from one bed to the other. They were all sleeping. And then he started for Canny.” Her voice had softened. “And that’s when I got the gun. We were wrestling for it and he kept pushing me back—like this …,” she said, with the heel of her hand extended. “And all of a sudden, I heard it go off and he just whooshed down like something the air went out of. Pssssss,” she made a whistling sound and her hand fell slowly. “Just like a dead balloon.” Tears ran down her face, but she was smiling.
He kept driving. His hands were sweaty on the wheel. She was lying. She had killed that whole family. There was no doubt in his mind that she had killed them, one by one, and then she had set the house on fire. The
horror of it rose in him, like a sickness in his chest, so that his pulse beat seemed to slacken and the air was thinner now and every breath drained him.
She sobbed and her voice caught and she shook her head and gasped a little, and he was afraid to look and find her laughing now. Her voice had that same cold, giddy tremble as that day when they had first met, when she pushed him into the river. Suddenly it occurred to him that she had tried to kill him that day. Maybe she did, he thought.
Maybe she did. Maybe he’d been dead all this time, ever since then. And this was a dead man’s dream, where no one ever really got hurt or really got killed because he was still there, could see it now, could see it and hear it—it—himself, floating in that glistening pool, his head bent, his arms arched and weightless as wings, and, on his feet, the tar-encrusted metal plates that anchored him in place, safe from all that might happen.
By the time they found him, his skin was probably water-wrinkled and pure, pure white. They fished him out and buried him in clean new clothes, which was the mending Hyacinth had done that last morning, shortening the sleeves of the black suit and taking in the pants, her mouth braced with straight pins while she spoke of death to the two little boys. What daddy? Which daddy? Yours acourse. So that’s why they never answered him. That’s why they looked and saw straight through him—he was already gone; already in the dusty grave hole looking up at her with the boys on either side of her, dry-eyed and serious. There wasn’t any sound, just the quiet, quiet stillness through which he could see their faces and his own, as blank and secretly exultant as theirs to be finally rid of the terrible burden that was Aubrey Wallace.
20
They drove along Main Street. It was still too early for the stores to be open. The only traffic was a gray van coming in the opposite direction. The light turned red and they both stopped.
“She sleeping?” Wallace asked, glancing over his shoulder.
“She better be,” Dotty snapped. “’Cause after we get the money, we’re putting her back in the shed.” She knelt and, from the floor in back, pulled up a dirty sheet, which she tossed over Canny.
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