“Afternoon,” I said.
His face looked like a piece of old hardwood left too long in the sun, his eyes pools of baked tar. His suit was at least ten years old, and made for a wider man.
“Looks like you might be having a problem. Anything I can help with?”
Perhaps he found it hard to talk up to a woman in a big truck.
“Gas,” he said, eventually.
I climbed down, careful to let my legs bend a little to minimize my height. I nodded at Adeline and the two children, who peered at me from the truck. Luz, in a dark green dress that didn’t suit her, watched me steadily, but the boy’s eyes wandered after a moment. “Lonely out here. Not the best place to get stranded with your family.”
Adeline stuck her head out of the window. “He filled the tank just yesterday,” she said.
“I could run you or your wife to the nearest gas station, if that would help.” Jud looked at me with his dark, sticky eyes. “Or if you live nearby I could drive you home. If that would be easier.” If I read him right, he didn’t want his wife to be alone with a stranger, or to leave his family stranded in the middle of nowhere. But he didn’t say anything. Us standing in the middle of the road staring at each other was not part of the plan.
Adeline got out. “Luz, stay in the truck with Button.” She stepped between me and her husband. Like her husband’s, her clothes were old-fashioned, a matching dress and shoes in aquamarine: bought years ago, rarely worn, and looked after with care. Her bright red lipstick couldn’t hide the fatigue in her smile. “We live six, seven miles north and west of here, off of Route 10. We would be sorely grateful if you would give us all a ride back.”
“I’d be more than happy.”
She smiled again briefly. “Luz, bring my purse. Button, come on out. Into the nice lady’s truck. No, in the back, scoot up, leave room for me. Your daddy will sit in the front.”
Jud, moving very deliberately, dropped the hood, retrieved the ignition key, shut but didn’t lock the pickup doors, and got in next to me. I started the truck.
“Mile down the road,” he said. “Then take a right.” He laid both hands palm down on his thighs and stared steadily ahead, like the seated pharaonic statues at Luxor. His hands were tan on the back, with the flat tendons and knobbed joints of hard physical labor, and there was a trace of oil under two of his fingernails. When I glanced down again, he had put them in his lap, right hand uppermost; the knuckle on the third finger was crushed, long ago by the looks of it—the kind of thing that happens if you punch someone in the head, or hit a wall with your bare fist.
I drove. Two minutes later Jud said, “Here,” and we made the turn. I couldn’t think of a single thing to say. Nor, it seemed, could anyone else. The next ten minutes passed in silence, until I pulled up in front of their house. I turned the engine off.
“Obliged,” Jud said, and got out, and went into the house without another word.
Adeline paused, half out of her door. “It’s just his way,” she said, apologetic. “I hope you’ll still be willing to give him a ride to a gas station.”
“I’d be happy to.”
She hesitated, and I thought she was about to introduce herself, but then she said, “He might be a minute or two. Would the wait be too much trouble? You’ve been so kind.”
“It’s a nice enough day and I can’t say I’m in a hurry.” And the Good Samaritan will demand payment.
She got out and the children scrambled after her. “You go change your clothes and play in back,” she told them, and went into the house. But the boy seemed unable to tear himself away from the truck. He patted the paintwork, then squatted down to look at something. Luz hung back, not wanting to get too close to me, unwilling to leave Button alone.
I got out and stretched. The boy was unscrewing the dust caps from my tires.
“I’m Button,” he said in a shiny voice, looking up at me. “What are these for?”
“Pleased to make your acquaintance, Button.” His teeth looked huge, adult teeth in a child-sized mouth. Just like any seven-year-old. “They’re to stop dust from getting in the air valve and clogging it up. I’ll need them back.” But he wasn’t listening; his eyes were wandering again, gaze alighting on this, flitting to that. “Button—”
“That’s not his real name.” I turned to the girl with the quiet, precise voice. “His real name is Burton, only he can’t say it right, so now we call him Button. He’s eight. Nearly nine,” she said carefully, waiting to see how I’d react: a nine-year-old should be able to say Burton.
“I’m surprised,” I said. She turned her head slightly, to examine me out of each eye, as though each saw a different world but only one could be trusted. Her straight, shoulder-length hair was a dense, matte chocolate brown, and would have looked better without the amateur cut. Delicate bones contrasted with the stance; she stood the way a Theban might at Thermopylae. Nine years old. “I’m pleased to make your acquaintance also,” I told her, “though I don’t know your name.”
“I’m Luz. It’s Spanish. It’s not short for Lucy.”
“My name is Aud, rhymes with loud. It’s Norwegian. It’s not short for Audrey.”
“Aud,” she said, trying it out. I blinked at the perfect Norwegian pronunciation. “Aud.”
“You say it very well.”
She accepted the praise as her due, and opened her mouth to say something, but shut it when the front door opened.
Adeline had wiped away her lipstick and swapped her pumps for tennis shoes. An apron covered the dress. Judging by her hair—blond going gray, and pulled back in a short but thick tail—and the smile lines around mouth and eyes, other lines in neck and forehead, she was in her early fifties. Her eyes were not strange, but she was recognizably Button’s mother. Or grandmother. “Button, in the house.” Button wasn’t listening. “Luz, take Button in and get yourselves changed.”
“Yes, Aba.”
We both watched them go inside. “Now,” she said, turning to me. I got the impression she had spent some time thinking about what to say. “My husband is getting out of his Sunday clothes and will be back down directly. It’s his way to be a bit wary of strangers, but he would be most obliged for a ride to a gas station. I can’t tell you how thankful we are for your kindness. The name’s Carpenter. Adeline and Jud.” She held out her hand. Plain, thin wedding ring; straight-edged nails with no polish. Hardworking hands, but not overworked.
“Aud,” I said, giving it a deliberate American pronunciation: sounds like god. I took off my gloves. “Aud Thomas.” We shook hands. I put the gloves in my pocket.
“Now, Aud Thomas, although men make fun of us women and the time it takes to change, I think my husband might be a minute or two.” She patted the pocket of her apron nervously. “Is there something I can bring out for you meanwhile?”
Being parked on the doorstep was not what I had planned.
“If I’m to wait a minute or two, I’d like to borrow the use of your facilities if I may.”
Natural suspicion warred with Christian charity. She patted her pocket again. A weapon? It would have to be a small one. I shivered a little. That and the morning’s sermon turned the tide. She stood to one side and motioned me across the threshold. “Upstairs, first on your right.” Then, in a rush of overcompensation, “When you’re done I’m in the kitchen. In back.”
The bathroom was what I think of as southern feminine: clean, decorated in pastels, and with a shower curtain depicting sunrise over a perfect valley, complete with Bambi look-alike and rabbits. I used the toilet, washed my hands, and ran my fingers through my hair. What did someone like Adeline Carpenter see when she looked at me? No way to know, just as I didn’t know why I had used my real name with Luz.
I turned away, then back again, and opened the bathroom cabinet. On the top shelf lay the explanation for the lack of pets: asthma medication. Pills, and two kinds of inhaler. Adeline’s.
I used a towel to wipe down everything I’d touched.
/> “Poured you some coffee,” Adeline said as I went into the kitchen. The same red mug, steaming now, stood at one end of the Formica table. At the other end, Luz and Button, now in identical worn corduroy pants, ate from already half-empty bowls of beef and vegetable stew. Adeline patted at her apron, utterly unconscious of the gesture. Asthma medication.
I sipped. “Tastes good.” Luz looked up and studied me for a moment, then turned her attention back to her lunch.
“That’s a big truck you’ve got there,” Adeline Carpenter said.
“Only thing big enough to pull my trailer, a fifth-wheel. I’d planned to vacation up around Petit Jean, or maybe Lake Maumelle.”
“Awful late for a vacation.” Suspicion seemed to be winning again.
I touched my throat, just enough to show the healing gash, and then my waistband, which hung more loosely than it had. “I’ve … I spent some time this summer in the hospital.” Poor pitiful Aud Thomas, probably has the cancer, yet she still takes time to play Good Samaritan to those in need.
The children finished their stew. Button wiggled in his chair, but Luz, although she looked down at a chip in the Formica as though it fascinated her, was listening to our conversation.
“Luz, take Button out back.”
“Yes, Aba.”
Aba. Some weird fundamentalist title? “Great kids,” I said.
“Jud and I had Button late in life. He’s … he’s not quite right, but he’s a blessing from the Lord.”
“His sister, too.”
Adeline Carpenter smiled. “She’s as good as gold with that boy.” She sounded proud, as if she really cared. If I hadn’t known how she was being paid to train this girl, I might have believed her. Her smile disappeared suddenly as she remembered she was talking to a stranger. She drummed her fingers on the table, blushed when she caught me watching. Maybe that was something good Christian ladies weren’t supposed to do. “Well, Miz Thomas, I don’t know what’s keeping my husband, but if you want to take your coffee outside and sit in the sun, I’ll go see if I can find him.”
I left by the front door, but walked around to the back. It must have been nearly sixty degrees outside, and the sunshine was a little bolder. The cabin in the clearing would be lit by sun, too, but probably fifteen or twenty degrees cooler. Be present. Pay attention. I breathed deeply, exhaled, breathed in: Arkansas soil; the thin, crumbly smell of mold formed on hay stalks that have been sodden but are now dry; and, faint in the still air, the pine scent of the woods. Luz and Button were nowhere in sight.
The barn was big and old and the right-hand side was cluttered with farm machinery: half modern, half the broken, rusting remains of seventy years of automated progress. Sunlight streamed in through the open door and through chinks in the eaves. A child’s steady voice, and another, interrupting, came from behind a truck of forties vintage. I moved closer. The truck had no wheels, and was filthy with rust and dirt and rodent droppings, but its headlights were intact, round and clean and shining. Luz spoke in Spanish.
“—y por eso la Virgen María fue una reina que vivía en una catedral. Ella fue la reina de cielo, y ella fue linda, con una vestimenta azul junto con diamantes en el dobladillo—”
And so the Virgin Mary was a queen who lived in a cathedral. She was the queen of heaven, and she was pretty, with a blue dress that had diamonds on the hem.
I moved quietly until I could see Button sitting with legs splayed before him, playing with something on the floor. The words meant nothing to him; perhaps he found the rhythm soothing. Luz’s eyes seemed far away, but every now and again she glanced at the boy to make sure he was close by.
“It’s a horse!” Button said, holding up what looked like an ancient threaded bolt.
“Yes,” Luz said in English, and patted him on the head. He went back to playing. She resumed her tale. “Y la virgen reina escucha en caso que rezas. Y cuando mueras vas a su palacio en cielo, que tiene tantos colores lindas y lo huele a … a flores. Y cirios se quemarsen en grutes, y huelen bien también.”
And the virgin queen listens if you pray. And when you die you go to her palace in heaven, which is such pretty colors, and smells like flowers. And there are candles in grottoes, and they smell good too.
It was a six- or seven-year-old’s vocabulary, apart from grotto. Her native tongue. I couldn’t understand how she had retained so much. Adeline Carpenter would not approve of the Virgin Mary being called the queen of heaven, nor of any talk of cathedrals and incense and diamonds.
“El palacio es—Button, put that down.” She sounded so much older speaking English. Button had found something on the floor he liked. He stood up and carried it into the closest column of sunlight. It glittered. “That’s very pretty. Let me see.” She held out her hand. He handed it over reluctantly. A piece of old bottle glass. She sighed, just like Adeline. “Glass, Button. Glass. What did Aba tell you about glass? It might hurt you. If you see it on the floor, don’t pick it up.”
“Glass,” he muttered, unconvinced, but then something else caught his eye, and Luz sighed again.
“Fue un relato agradable,” I said—it was a nice story—and her head whipped round. “You don’t need to be afraid.”
“I don’t understand you,” she said in English.
“Yes you do,” I said, still in Spanish. “I won’t tell anyone. I promise. Not even Aba.”
She opened her mouth, then thought better of it and shut it again. Her eyes narrowed. I’d seen that look on a hundred suspects’ faces: I would get nothing from her.
She was still studying me. “You talk different when no one else is around.”
Careless again. The child was smart; pointless trying to lie to her now. “So do you.”
“Why?”
“Why do you?”
I watched her work out that we both had things to hide. She decided she wanted to keep it that way. “Button!” she called. “How about we go indoors for some milk?”
“Milk?”
“Milk,” she said firmly, with a look at me. I was briefly tempted to wring her neck.
“But I want to stay out here!” His face began to crumple. “Want to stay here!”
The next step would be a full-blown tantrum. I knew when I was beaten; there were other ways to get the information.
Jud and Adeline found me sitting on the front step. I stood, drained the last of the coffee, and handed the mug to Adeline. It would be washed and free of fingerprints in minutes. “Perfect timing,” I said. I put my gloves back on.
“Thank you again,” she said. “The gas station’s just two miles north on 10, then it’ll be a four-, five-mile drive back to the truck.”
Jud said nothing at all.
“Shall we?” I gestured at the truck. He nodded.
He sat as before, though this time his hands rested on dark blue denim, and his shoes were sturdy work boots. Perhaps it was my imagination but he seemed a little less stiff.
At the gas station, the attendant seemed to know who Jud was and filled a cheap plastic gas can without comment. I went in and bought myself coffee in a go cup. Jud settled his bill in cash. He counted his change so carefully that I felt guilty about the ten dollars’ worth of gas I’d siphoned off earlier. I shook my head as we walked separately back to the truck. These people were profiting from the abuse of a young child. I wasn’t here to feel sorry for them.
We drove to the stranded pickup without exchanging a word. He climbed out, then leaned forward to speak through the open window. “Wife tells me you’ve been sick.”
“Yes.”
“You’ll be in our prayers.” And he nodded once again, and walked away.
I parked in what was by now the familiar off-road spot behind the rise and took my mat, field glasses, receiver, and go cup to the top of the hill. No movement outside. I extended the receiver’s aerial, plugged in the headphones, and put them on. I had to take my gloves off for fine-tuning the receiver, but then I had it: running water, dishes banging, a drawer opening
and shutting. From only three or four hundred yards, there was little distortion. I made a slow sweep with the field glasses. Inside the house a door opened, then closed. Then nothing.
I sipped at the coffee. All I had achieved with my visit so far was the discovery that the situation was complicated. I wondered what Tammy was doing, whether she had called Dornan yet, and what would happen then: to her, to Dornan. To me.
Adeline started to hum. It wasn’t a hymn but an old show tune. Fringed buckskin, white teeth, blond hair … and then I had it: Doris Day in Calamity Jane, singing about the windy city. When her husband wasn’t around, did Adeline dream of being transformed by a big-city suitor?
After a while I heard Jud’s pickup. I wondered what had taken him so long. Maybe he’d been giving thanks for the gas. He drove round the back of the house. Two minutes later, the back door slammed.
“Sit,” came Adeline’s voice, loud and tinny from the receiver. “We’ll eat.”
Scraping of a chair, chink of cutlery on crockery. Scrape of another chair. Moment’s silence. Then, “Dear Lord, we’re thankful for this food. Amen.” Jud’s voice. “Amen,” Adeline’s voice. Food sounds: lighter tink of spoons on bowls.
Adeline’s voice: “Truck all right?”
Pause, while I imagined Jud nodding. “Drove her to the gas station, had John put her up on the blocks. No leak as I could see.” Eating noises. Pause. “Gas come to near nineteen dollars.” Audible sigh: Adeline. “Children fine?” Jud asked.
“Out back. Right as rain.” Which was more than Adeline sounded. “Jud?” Eating noises. “Jud, why haven’t we heard?”
“Couldn’t say.”
“We should have heard by now. How can we manage without that money?”
“We’ll hear soon enough.” Definite tones in his voice of I-don’t-want-to-think-about-it-right-now.
“Maybe I shouldn’t have written to Miz Goulay, maybe it’ll make him mad. But that check should’ve come a week ago, more. He’s never missed before. We need that money.”
Chair scraping. “Tractor needs work,” Jud said. The door closed behind him. Adeline sighed and started collecting the dishes, then stopped, and it took me a moment to identify the strange sounds: she was crying.
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