by Tony Earley
“You’re not going to run off, are you?”
“Not right now. Just tell me when you can’t see me.”
Jim watched Chrissie walk off into the fog and listened to her counting slowly. By the time she counted to five, her outline began to grow indistinct, and by the time she reached twenty, she vanished entirely. The last thing Jim saw fade out of sight was the long, black stripe of her hair.
“There,” he said.
“You can’t see me anymore?”
“No. Can you see me?”
“There’s sort of a dark place where your car’s parked, but I can’t tell what it is.”
Jim squinted at the spot where he had last seen Chrissie and rubbed the gooseflesh on his arms. He felt suddenly heartbroken, and wished she would come back.
“Are you still there?” he asked.
“I’m still here.”
“You looked like a ghost,” he said. “You just disappeared.”
“I feel like a ghost. Are you sure you can’t see me?”
“I’m sure.”
“Then you can ask me three questions.”
“What?”
“You get to ask three questions when you climb the beanstalk. But only if you can’t see the person you’re asking.”
“I’ve never heard that part of the story,” he said.
“You just didn’t have the right person telling it,” she answered.
“Three questions aren’t enough.”
“But that’s the way this story goes.”
“Okay. Let me think.”
“Number one.”
“All right,” he said. “Here goes. Number one. Are you an Indian?”
“Half,” she said. “I can’t believe you wasted a question on that. Number two.”
“Number two. Do you get sick like that every month?”
Chrissie didn’t say anything at first. “Yes,” she said finally. “But only since we moved back to North Carolina, and only for a few hours at a time, and only on the first day.”
“That’s awful.”
“I’ll live. These aren’t very good questions, Jim.”
“I’ll try to do better.”
“Okay. Number three.”
“Number three. Are you Bucky Bucklaw’s girlfriend?”
“That’s complicated.”
“What do you mean ‘complicated’?”
“That’s four questions, Jim.”
“Then answer number three.”
“I don’t know how to answer number three.”
“It seems easy enough to me,” Jim said.
“Well, it’s not.”
“Either you’re going with Bucky Bucklaw or you’re not going with Bucky Bucklaw. Which one is it?”
Somewhere up the road he heard Chrissie stomp her foot.
“Look here, Jim, I can’t be your girlfriend,” she said. “All right?”
“Nobody asked you to be my girlfriend,” Jim said. “But why not?”
“That’s five.”
“Damn it, Chrissie,” Jim said. “Will you please, please, please stop counting?”
“No more questions, Jim.”
“But you didn’t tell me what I need to know.”
“Take me home,” she said.
“I’m not taking you home until you answer number three.”
“When you take me home, you’ll know the answer to number three.”
The road wound through the half dozen buildings clustered in the small village of Lynn’s Mountain, though all Jim saw of it was the store and a handful of tombstones in the graveyard at the church. Chrissie pointed at the tombstones and smiled as they passed but did so without comment. Jim was pleased that they had apparently just shared something, even though he didn’t know what it was.
“You can ask me questions if you want to,” he said. “You climbed the beanstalk, too.”
“How many questions?”
“As many as you want. I’m not stingy like some people I know.”
“Why did you break up with Norma Harris?” Chrissie asked.
Jim winced and twisted in his seat. “I don’t know,” he said. “It just wasn’t any fun, I guess. That’s the main reason. Is that a bad reason?”
“I don’t know if it is or not. Y’all seem like you belong together. You’re both fair-skinned and your hair’s the same color. You’re both real smart and you seem a little stuck-up at first.”
“Well, we don’t belong together, and I’m not stuck up. Ask me another question.”
“Why do you want to be my boyfriend?”
“What makes you think I want to be your boyfriend?”
“I’m not stupid, Jim,” she said. “You play with my hair during history class. You stare at me all the time. And you came to give me a ride when you heard I was sick. That was a very nice thing to do, by the way.”
“Thank you,” he said. “You can feel it when I touch your hair?”
“It’s attached to my head,” she said. “Of course I can feel it. But you didn’t answer me. Why do you want to be my boyfriend?”
Jim gripped the steering wheel tighter. Chrissie had finally asked the question; he was going to step up and answer it truthfully, Bucky Bucklaw be damned.
“Because I love you,” he said.
“Oh,” she said, looking down into her lap. “I see.”
“I’ve loved you since you got off the bus the first day of school.”
“Now, wait a minute. That just sounds like something that boys say to girls.”
“Well, maybe it was the second day.”
“That’s better.”
“And I know I don’t know you very well,” Jim said. “So, you don’t have to tell me that. I don’t understand it, either.”
“I wasn’t going to say that. I think we at least ought to be able to love whoever we want to, even if it’s not a good idea.”
“Well, at least that’s one thing we agree on, I guess.”
That seemed to be the end of it. Jim had always imagined that telling Chrissie he loved her would lead to more discussion, but then again, he couldn’t remember talking about love much with Norma, either. Maybe love was just one of those things it didn’t take long to talk about.
Close by the roadside, a mountain of logs marked the yard of Carson’s Mill, and from out of the fog they heard the banshee keening of the big saw blade. Jim noticed that Chrissie shivered at the sound. A little farther up the road he tried to see his friend Penn’s house but couldn’t find even the mailbox.
“Where does that Carson boy go to boarding school again?” Chrissie asked.
“Outside Philadelphia somewhere.”
“I saw him around a time or two over the summer. He’s handsome.”
“He’s got that bad limp, though,” Jim said.
“That’s not a very nice thing to say about somebody who’s had polio. Especially when they’re supposed to be your friend.”
“You’re right. I don’t know why I said it.”
“Yes, you do.”
“Is there anything else you want to ask me?” Jim said.
“Did you know that my mama and your uncle Zeno almost got married?”
“What?” he said. “What?”
“They broke it off at the last minute.”
“I never heard anything about Uncle Zeno even having a girlfriend, much less one he almost married. Why did they break up?”
“I don’t know,” Chrissie said. “Mama won’t talk about it. She says it’s ancient history.”
“So Uncle Zeno had a girlfriend,” Jim said. “My, my, my. Is your mama pretty?”
Chrissie briefly looked upward, studying some picture Jim couldn’t see. “I don’t know anymore,” she said. “I guess she was at one time. Does it matter?”
“No. I guess not.”
He drove through the ford on Painter Creek and crept the Major past the spot where his grandfather’s house had stood. Jim had visited the old man only once before he died. In the fog there
was nothing to see — the house had fallen in several years before — and nothing to hear, but Jim still felt uneasy passing by it. He pointed out the window.
“That’s where my grandfather’s house used to be,” he said.
“You can still see the chimney from the road,” Chrissie said. “It always gives me a bad feeling.”
“You get bad feelings about a lot of things.”
“There’s a lot in the world to feel bad about.”
“I guess I never thought that way,” Jim said. “I think there’s a lot in the world to feel good about.”
“I heard your grandfather bought your grandmother from her daddy and treated her real bad. Isn’t that enough to give somebody a bad feeling when they see his old chimney sticking up?”
Jim accelerated the Major slightly. “I didn’t have anything to do with it,” he said.
A mile or so past Amos Glass’s place, the road switchbacked twice in rapid succession, then straightened out and continued upward toward the far western reach of the mountain. Soon they drove out into the apple orchards owned by Bucky Bucklaw’s father, Arthur Bucklaw Sr. Save for the few apple trees crouched close to the road, Jim could not have said how he knew that they had driven out into open country; he knew only that they had.
“You turn to the right up here,” Chrissie said.
“You live on the Bucklaw place?” Jim said.
“Yep.”
“I didn’t know that. I thought you lived just past it somewhere.”
“Nope. We live on it.”
“Huh.”
“But it’s only until my daddy gets here.”
“When’s that going to be?”
“I’m not sure.”
Arthur Bucklaw Sr. had moved with his wife from the Casar side of the mountain to the Aliceville side thirty years earlier, where, much to the amusement of his neighbors, he purchased five adjoining farmsteads of almost unworkable steepness and immediately went to work setting out fruit trees. The sunny, southern slope of the mountain had proved ideal for growing apples, however, and Bucklaw Sr. had made what everyone agreed must have been a great deal of money, and this despite the Depression. Many of the people who had laughed at him now picked apples for him in the fall. The responsibility for rubbing people’s noses in just how much money Bucklaw had made seemed to have fallen to his only son, Bucky. Jim thought that the uncles were probably worth more than the Bucklaws, but he had no way of knowing for sure. At least with Bucky graduated out of high school and off the baseball team and gone away to the navy, he didn’t have to think about it so often.
After Jim turned off the main road onto the Bucklaw place, he drove down a narrow boulevard of huge packing sheds and barns that grew one at a time out of the fog like the palaces and temples of a ghostly city. He assumed they had been built, in typical Bucklaw fashion, within spitting distance of the road simply so they wouldn’t be missed by visitors. Despite the hearty contempt Jim held for Bucky, the closer they drew to the Bucklaw house, the more nervous he became. Chrissie, likewise, slumped down in her seat, hiding from any Bucklaw who might magically be able to see her slinking past. The house, which occupied the top of a small knoll set back from the drive, was at least mercifully obscured by the fog.
“Slow down,” Chrissie said. “You don’t want to run over those dogs.”
Jim had opened his mouth to say “What dogs?” when he suddenly found himself face-to-face with a nightmare constructed of sharp claws, large teeth, and hateful, pale eyes — two wolflike dogs who threw themselves at his window, apparently trying to chew through the glass. After a few horrifying seconds, the dogs vanished just as quickly as they had appeared, leaving behind an impressive layer of dog slobber and muddy paw prints on his window.
“Good Lord,” he said. “What in the world was that?”
“Bucky’s dogs,” Chrissie said. “They’re German shepherds.”
“I’m glad I had the window rolled up.”
“I would’ve warned you if you hadn’t. They might’ve gotten in here and chewed you all to pieces.”
“What about you?”
“Oh, they know me.”
At Chrissie’s direction, Jim pulled into a muddy clearing walled off by a thicket of scruffy-looking pines. He parked beside a decrepit Model T truck whose flatbed was constructed of mismatched lumber.
“We’re here,” she said.
When Jim cut the engine, he heard what sounded like an immense pack of hounds baying urgently somewhere close by. In the fog the noise seemed to come from all directions at once. He expected to see more vicious dogs, hundreds of them this time, loping out of the trees. He hesitated before getting out.
“What about those dogs?” he asked. “Are they going to chew me all to pieces?”
“They’re penned up,” Chrissie said, shutting her door.
“What are they?”
“Plotts mostly. Some blueticks. Mr. Bucklaw uses them to hunt bears.”
“Bear dogs,” Jim said. The uncles used their hounds to hunt raccoons. “How many does he have?”
“I don’t know. Twenty or twenty-five, I guess. You’re not allowed to pet them because they’re bear dogs, so I don’t pay them any mind. They smell bad, too. My paw-paw takes care of them for Mr. Bucklaw.”
She led him up a narrow path into the pines. The dogs’ voices ran in and out of the fog; they surged forward and retreated from every direction he turned. The baying grew louder and more urgent the farther he and Chrissie walked. He squinted up the path.
“Are you sure they’re penned up?” he asked.
Chrissie smiled and took his hand. “Don’t worry, Jim. I won’t let them get you.”
Up ahead he heard a door creak open. A man’s voice yelled, “Hey! You there!” and the dogs fell silent on a single note. The door creaked closed.
“That’s Paw-paw,” Chrissie said.
They walked into another clearing and a house began to form itself out of the fog. It seemed to be misshapen at first — the house in a children’s story where a troll might live — but eventually it sharpened into a dogtrot cabin whose sagging ridgepole dipped toward a covered passageway separating two log rooms. Chimneys of rough fieldstones plastered with mud rose unsteadily on either side of the house, just high enough to clear the roof. The roof was covered by ancient wooden shingles, patched here and there with flattened tin cans. Jim could see tiny slivers of light leaking from in between the logs of the walls. In the places where the chinking had fallen away entirely, someone had stuffed wads of old newsprint into the cracks.
A single hound Jim couldn’t locate barked a sharp warning, and a door on the left front of the cabin swung open. A feeble column of orange kerosene light tipped across the yard, and the silhouetted shape of a stooped old man appeared in the doorway. The old man had only one arm; his right sleeve dangled emptily by his side.
“Who’s out there?” he demanded.
Chrissie dropped Jim’s hand as they stepped into the light. “It’s me, Paw-paw,” she said.
Jim had never known that Chrissie’s family was as poor as this house revealed them to be; he felt immensely sad that she had to live in such a place, and he took an immediate, irrational dislike to the old man who stood before them. He needed to blame Chrissie’s predicament on someone, and the old man was the only possibility to present itself so far.
“Where you been, girl?”
“I got sick at school. I missed the bus and had to get a ride home.”
“Who’s that with you?”
“This is Jim Glass,” she said. “He’s the one who gave me the ride.”
“Jim Glass,” the old man said. “I knew your granddaddy.”
“Yes, sir.”
“He was a bastard.”
“Paw-paw,” Chrissie said.
“Well, he was. No reason not to call a spade a spade.”
Jim almost smiled. Amos Glass had been a bastard, but to Jim’s knowledge nobody ever called him one until after he died.
“Nub,” Mr. McAbee said.
“Excuse me?” Jim said.
“Everybody calls me Nub.”
“Oh. Nice to meet you, sir.”
“I can see you’re wondering what happened to my arm.”
“Oh, no, sir,” Jim said.
“Paw-paw, you always do this,” Chrissie complained.
“I wore it off playing the fiddle, is what happened,” Mr. McAbee said. He opened the door wider and stepped to one side. “Y’all get on in here. You’re letting all the fog in.”
“This is the only time I’ll ever be able to bring you up here,” Chrissie whispered. “Look at everything close and you’ll know the answer to number three.”
Once inside, Jim studied the room intently. In the center of the floor the old man drew a chair from underneath a homemade table covered with an oilcloth and sat down. The wide pine planks of the floor had been worn thin and splintery, but they were swept clean. The walls were sealed with newspapers and pieces of cardboard tacked up by nails driven through old bottle caps. A large, rusting cookstove dominated the wall facing the door, and a black pot of greens bubbled on the stove. To the right, a small bed, made neatly with a worn but clean feed-sack quilt, lay along the wall beside a misshapen door Jim assumed opened into the dogtrot. A teddy bear slumped against the wall and stared into the room as if he could not believe his misfortune. On the left, two women sat on either side of the fireplace, although no fire had been lit inside it. One woman was old and shriveled and as dry-looking as an old harness. She had no teeth and her white hair was pulled back into a painful-looking bun. The other looked like an older, tired version of Chrissie, although her hair was brown, going to gray, and not black.
“Who’s that with you?” the younger woman asked.
“Mama, this is Jim Glass,” Chrissie said. “I got sick again at school and he gave me a ride home. Jim, that’s my mama, Nancy Steppe.”
“Hello, Mrs. Steppe,” Jim said. “Pleased to meet you.”
Mrs. Steppe nodded to him, expressionless, but didn’t take her eyes off his face.
The older woman leaned over, picked up a tin can from the hearth, and spat into it. “Did anybody see you drive up in here?”
