American Elsewhere

by Robert Jackson Bennett

  “I guess I can see that,” says Mona, who suddenly wants nothing more than to get away from this strange place filled with cabinets and dead things and the perfume of wood alcohol and pitch.

  “Well, I won’t hold you up,” she says. “I am sure you want to see the house. Run along, and I’ll look forward to hearing all about it later.”

  “All right,” says Mona. She begins backing away, papers clutched tightly in her hands.

  “Good day,” says Mrs. Benjamin, and she laughs quietly, as if enjoying some private joke, and she returns to her work, muttering and humming to herself in several clashing octaves.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  The careful striae of small towns. Invisible boundaries, reflecting pay grade, church attendance, model of home. Blue-collar neighborhoods with open garages packed to bursting; houses deeply set in wooded copses, accessible only by winding driveways—the upper crust, surely; then packed, denuded, Puritanical homes, white and harsh and cauterized. The value of the cars (all American) fluctuates wildly from street to street. Crowds of children at play burst out of hedges, then disappear like flocks of pigeons wheeling over cityscapes. In all yards and at all corners, people wave constantly, at everything and everyone, hello hello and how d’ye do, and how d’ye do again.

  And there, just on the corner ahead, below a big, leaning spruce, is a low adobe home she’s seen before, though last time it was rendered in the yellow hues and dusky shadows of instant film taken decades ago.

  Mona pulls up in front of her mother’s house. The sense of déjà vu is overpowering. She sits in the car for a while, just staring at it. She knows she has never been here, but she can’t help but feel as if she has, as if Earl and Laura once swung by this house on a summer vacation when Mona was still terribly young, and she now has only echoes of the memory.

  Once, she knows, a woman in a tight blue dress greeted her friends on that front walk, and then they had a pleasant afternoon in the backyard, with cocktails and gossip and, maybe later in the evening, a little too much candor. Perhaps she or a friend commented, “Mountains are pink—time to drink!” and laughed and thoughtlessly scrawled it on the back of a photo and forgot about it, leaving it to be tossed in with some meaningless papers from work and travel hundreds of miles to the bleak oil flats of West Texas.

  It all feels so impossible. It was one thing to learn via papers and photos that her mother had once been happy and whole, but it is quite another to actually see the real, definite place where she lived her life.

  Mona feels like the victim of a crime. It is wrong for her mother to have been someone else once. It is not just that Mona was stuck with the frail, decaying husk she became.

  But finally she climbs out, legs wobbling and eyes watering, and she sits down on the front step like a latchkey kid and waits for the locksmith to come.

  She gets enough control over herself to take stock of the house while she waits. Parson was right—the house is in very good shape. There isn’t a weed in the yard, the grass is watered, and unless she’s wrong the house even has a new layer of adobe.

  When the locksmith comes she asks him about it. “It was probably your neighbors,” he says. “I’m sure they didn’t go in, they just kept the place tidy.”

  “Well, that’s kind of them. Do you know which neighbor? I’d like to thank them. I’m willing to bet this adobe stuff isn’t cheap.” She looks at the neighboring houses. There are no visible cars, and all the garages are shut. There’s only one old man, who sits in his front yard in a lawn chair and watches her with open curiosity.

  Mona memorizes his address and makes note of his shoes and his watch. Stop it, she thinks. He’s just an old man. And you, Miss Bright, are not a fucking cop anymore.

  “Oh, no,” says the locksmith. “We just take care of things here. Or someone does.” He looks at the red Charger, and she can see he recognizes it from the funeral. He begins to look a little worried. “You’re new here, right?”

  She nods.

  He hesitates, as though he is about to say something against his better judgment. “You know not to go out at night, right?”

  “I think I was told the mountains can be dangerous… is that it?”

  “Sort of,” he says, discomfited.

  “Is there a curfew?”

  “No, nothing official like that. It’s kind of a rule. It’s probably okay here, where it’s so close to downtown. But I wouldn’t go too far. People get lost real easy. It’s hard to see where you’re going in the night.” He looks across the street and at the tall pines behind the houses, as if he’s already making sure everything around him is safe, even though it is hardly mid-afternoon. He’s so eager to leave he gets all the locks changed within a half hour and even undercharges her. He practically sprints to his truck. Mona watches him go, and then opens the front door to her house.

  The interior has been done in what Mona thinks of as a ranch style, or maybe a lodge or cabin style, with lots of knotty natural-wood surfaces. The rooms are low and wide with cedar or ponderosa crossbeams, Mona can’t tell which. There isn’t a stick of furniture in here, except in one corner, where there’s a single wooden chair and, interestingly enough, an aquamarine rotary phone that’s plugged into the wall. She walks to it and sees it is covered in ages’ worth of dust. She grimaces and picks up the receiver, her hand immediately smearing with gray, and holds it close to her ear. To her surprise, there’s a dial tone.

  She hangs it up and walks throughout the house, wiping her hand on her shorts. There is a wide foyer that ends in a set of rustic wooden stairs leading to a second-floor balcony. She can see light spots on the wooden floor where furniture stood for years on end. The same faint patches appear in spots on the wall where pictures once hung. It’s like she’s in a room of reverse shadows.

  She walks through the hallway to the living room and kitchen in the back. Everything is done in Mid-Century Modern, with butcher-block countertops and huge, bulky sinks. The oven has only one dial, and she’s pretty sure that if she uses the microwave, which is the size of a couch, she’ll be sterile for the rest of her life.

  So this was Momma’s kitchen, she thinks. Mona herself hasn’t had a real one in years. But she chose that, of course, preferring wandering purgatory over a real life, so burned was she by her last attempt. She is not sure she wants to try again here. Thinking about it makes her stomach hurt.

  She walks through a set of French doors to the backyard. Unlike the front, it hasn’t been maintained at all. There’s no grass on the ground, but dull orange gravel, and ivy has taken over, strangling what might have once been a small tree and bowing down the back of the fence. Beyond the fence are pink crags striped with crimson. Mona tilts her head, thinking. They’re the same crags she saw in the background of the photo of afternoon cocktails, unchanged after decades.

  There is a lump of ivy in the center of the yard. She walks to it and takes one huge vine and pulls. Whatever it’s attached to is heavy as hell, but there’s a squawk of iron on stone. She plants a foot on the lump, wraps the twist of ivy around her wrist, and tugs.

  A significant strip tears away. Below it is a rust-covered wrought-iron table. The very iron table her mother and her friends sat around for cocktail hour, she thinks.

  The sense of déjà vu increases. She turns around and looks at the back of the house, which is just as picturesque as the front, despite the messy backyard. Some of the clay hanging pots have even been left behind, though now of course they are empty. Once, though, they were probably bursting with geranium blooms or drapes of ice plants. She feels an intense happiness when she imagines this.

  This house, though it is empty, feels perfect in some way. It’s all anyone could ever want. This is a place to raise children, to live a life. This is the kind of house you dream of living in as a kid.

  But she glances to the side and sees the neighboring homes, and she thinks that the same could be said of them, and the ones across the street. There is something strangely perfect abou
t this part of town. It is like she’s walking through old photographs or home movies, images layered with longing and nostalgia. Even if they are hollow or overgrown with ivy on the inside.

  She walks back inside and resumes her tour. She has no idea what her mother did with all this room, nor can she imagine how she afforded such a big place. She must have been a pretty big wheel at Coburn, whatever it was they did there. Upstairs are smaller rooms, ones probably used as kids’ rooms by the family that rented this house in the interim. Which means that somewhere around here would be…

  She opens one small door at the end of a hallway and is greeted by a tiny bathroom with one wooden wall of a much lighter color than the other four. It’s newer, she guesses, and unvarnished. Up against the wall is a white bathtub, and running down the center of it in a thin, long V is a stain of deep black with faint, spidery edges, and she notices the linoleum around the tub is bubbled and curling, like it’s been cooked.

  This is where the lightning struck. It must’ve split the wall like an ax and come shrieking down on anyone who was in the tub. Much of the bathroom is still smoky and charred. The faucet is even fused shut, and its knobs droop a little, like a Dali painting.

  Mona steps out of the room and shuts the door. She is relieved to have the sight hidden from her, for the ruined bathroom feels very out of place with the rest of the house. It’s as if it belonged to another house entirely, one dark and broken and empty, not at all part of this happy, rustic place.

  Suddenly there is the peal of a high-pitched bell, and Mona gasps and jumps. She leans up against the wall to catch her breath as the bell rings again. She wonders if it could be the doorbell, but it is not.

  She walks downstairs to the aquamarine phone sitting in the corner beside the wooden chair, the one that looks like it’s been sitting there for years, and stares as it rings again and again. Finally she answers it.

  “Hello?”

  There is the hiss of static, as if the call is coming from a very long way away. But there is no voice in it, no greeting back.

  “Hello?” she says again.

  Still nothing. But somewhere in the static she hears something: someone is breathing, lowly and slowly.

  “Hello?” she says. “I can hear you. Did you get the wrong number?”

  She expects the caller to hang up, but he or she does not. There is just the breathing, the whine of the static rising and falling like a theremin.

  “I think there’s something wrong with the phones, whoever this is,” she says. “You can’t hear a damn thing I say, can you?”

  No answer.

  “I’m hanging up now,” she says. “Goodbye.”

  She drops the receiver onto the cradle and stares at it. She almost expects the phone to start ringing again, but it does not.

  Mona will be damned if she’s come all this way and done so much work just to sleep on a wooden floor, so she cruises around for a department store to put together something resembling livable conditions. She finds Macey’s, a sort of general store, though like so many shops here at first it seems totally abandoned. She isn’t worried, however: she knows many stores in small towns keep wildly irregular hours, often opening whenever the owners feel.

  It is not abandoned. She is walking by the lines of mannequins in dresses when she hears the sound of someone weeping. Curious, she turns around and sees the door to a back room is open, and seated within are two women with their faces in their hands. She can see a pair of feet wearing men’s shoes just before them, like someone is standing or leaning against the front of a desk. She can hear a man’s voice talking quietly, as if giving comfort or condolences. Then the feet shift, and a small, bald head wearing Coke-bottle glasses pokes past the side of the door frame. The man looks at her and says, “With you in a minute.”

  He wraps up the discussion with the two crying women pretty quick. It is a little bizarre to see them having such an emotional moment in what appears to be no more than a closet. The two women shuffle out, still dabbing at their eyes, and the storekeeper follows.

  He is an elderly gnome of a man, dressed in a button-up white shirt, red bow tie, and suspenders. He smiles wearily at Mona as he approaches, and says, “Sorry about that. They were a bit distraught.”

  “What was wrong? If it’s not too rude to ask.”

  “Oh, nothing. Well. Not nothing. We had someone pass away just recently, you see.”

  “Oh, right,” says Mona. “The funeral. I’m sorry, I should have known.”

  “Yes,” he says. He looks Mona over and smiles. “I suppose you’d be the new arrival in town.”

  Mona coughs. “That’s right. I’m Mona.”

  “And I’m Mr. Macey,” he says, and shakes her hand. “I must say, no one ever told me you were so pretty. Were I but a younger man… I’m sure I’d make a pest of myself. I might still, you know.” He smiles crookedly. Mona is not offended: she can tell he is the sort to innocently flirt with every woman, regardless of age or beauty. He might have been waiting to get old just so he could have such a freedom. “What can I do for you, Miss…?”

  “You can just call me Mona,” she says. “I’m looking for a mattress and a set of sheets.”

  “Ah. Moving in, are we?” He gestures and leads her through the aisles. It is a rather schizophrenic store: shelves of cheap novelty gags segue into imitation jewelry, which stands beside a case of knockoff watches and sunglasses.

  “Maybe. I inherited a house around here. I guess I’ll be bedding down there for a while. I just went to see the lady at the courthouse about it, in fact.”

  “Mrs. Benjamin,” he says, and groans a little. “I can’t imagine what sort of impression she made. Don’t worry, we’re not all as batty as that around here. Did she offer you any tea?”

  “Uh…”

  “Do not drink any,” he tells her, and laughs. “You’ll be drunker than a boiled owl for hours, and hacking up pine gum for days. There’s always been a nutty herbalist-holistic tendency in New Mexico. People trying to cure your cold with sprigs of rosemary, that kind of thing. Mrs. Benjamin is the worst offender, mostly because all her cures have more in common with backwoods cocktails than they do with medicine.”

  He sells her a mattress and a set of sheets at 15 percent off—a “greeting discount” on which he refuses to budge—as well as some toiletries. She gets the impression he’s a canny negotiator, and the way he carries himself has a certain casual power to it. As she’s checking out, a young man comes rushing into the store, presumably to speak to Mr. Macey. But Macey simply looks at the young man, all the cheer and goodwill blinking out of his eyes, and shakes his head—Not now. Embarrassed, the young man bows himself out and waits outside, hands behind his back.

  “Any way else I can help you?” he asks her when they finish.

  “Maybe. I’m looking for information on someone who might have lived here—Laura Alvarez, my mother.”

  Mr. Macey screws up his face to think about it. “Alvarez… hm. I don’t know. I don’t think I’ve ever heard of anyone by that name.”

  “Were you here thirty years ago, or so?”

  “Of course,” he says.

  “Well, she would have lived here about that time. Or moved away from here. She worked on the lab on the mountain.”

  “Ah,” says Macey. “That might explain it. The dealings of the lab were—how shall I put this—not for the minds of mortals like me. I never knew what they did, and their personnel changed quite frequently.”

  “Kind of a black hat operation?”

  He chuckles a little. “I suppose.”

  “There’re no offices in town that would have kept track of that information?”

  “If there ever were, I never knew of them.”

  “Well… if you could ask around, I sure would appreciate it. Sorry to grill you, but… she was my mother. I just want to know a little more about her.”

  “I understand. Don’t you worry about it, then. I’ll try and find something out. Is there anyt
hing else I can get you?”

  “Not unless you got a steak behind your counter.”

  “Hungry, eh? Tell you what. Head on down to Chloe’s—you know where Chloe’s is, right? Okay, good. Head on down there and tell them I sent you.” He winks. “Another greeting discount, let’s say.”

  “You don’t have to do that.”

  “I absolutely do. We don’t get many newcomers here, as I’m sure you’ve heard a million times over by now. We need to do them right.” His smile fades a little bit. “I hope you like it here for however long you stay. Most do. Though we have our fair share of trouble.”

  “Would it have something to do with the funeral yesterday?”

  Mr. Macey’s smile thins a bit, and his eyes grow a little sad. “Oh, well,” he says. “I certainly hope not. It was an old friend of mine who died, you see.”

  “Who was it, if you don’t mind my asking? I keep hearing about the funeral, but never about the deceased.”

  “His name was Norman Weringer. He was probably the most-liked man in Wink. He and I would spend hours walking the countryside around here, talking and—sometimes—arguing. He made arguments a treat, Norman. I suppose that might be why I liked him so much.”

  “I’m sorry to hear he died.”

  “I am, too. Even now. I always felt he’d outlive us. Yet here we are.” He purses his lips and stares out the window. “I almost feel like doing something about it myself.”