by Unknown
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loops and scallops of smaller stones, and when hung from Liza's ear it almost brushes her shoulders.
She is wearing only her bathing suit, so she has to carry the earring curled up in her palm, a blazing knot. Her head feels swollen with the heat, with leaning over her secret bag, with her resolution. She thinks with longing of the shade under Ladner's trees, as if that were a black pond.
There is not one tree anywhere near this house, and the only bush is a lilac with curly, brown-edged leaves, by the back steps. Around the house nothing but corn, and at a distance the leaning old barn that Liza and Kenny are for-bidden to go into, because it might collapse at any time. No divisions over here, no secret places—everything is bare and simple.
But when you cross the road—as Liza is doing now, trotting on the gravel—when you cross into Ladner's territory, it's like coming into a world of different and distinct countries.
There is the marsh country, which is deep and jungly, full of botflies and jewelweed and skunk cabbage. A sense there of tropical threats and complications. Then the pine plantation, solemn as a church, with its high boughs and needled carpet, inducing whispering. And the dark rooms under the down-swept branches of the cedars—entirely shaded and secret rooms with a bare earth floor. In different places the sun falls differently and in some places not at all. In some places the air is thick and private, and in other places you feel an energetic breeze. Smells are harsh or enticing. Certain walks impose de-corum and certain stones are set a jump apart so that they call out for craziness. Here are the scenes of serious instruction where Ladner taught them how to tell a hickory tree from a butternut and a star from a planet, and places also where they have run and hollered and hung from branches and performed all sorts of rash stunts. And places where Liza thinks there is a bruise on the ground, a tickling and shame in the grass.
Vandals
P.D.P.
Squeegey-boy.
Rub-a-dub-dub.
When Ladner grabbed Liza and squashed himself against her, she had a sense of danger deep inside him, a mechanical sputtering, as if he would exhaust himself in one jab of light, and nothing would be left of him but black smoke and burnt smells and frazzled wires. Instead, he collapsed heavily, like the pelt of an animal flung loose from its flesh and bones. He lay so heavy and useless that Liza and even Kenny felt for a moment that it was a transgression to look at him. He had to pull his voice out of his groaning innards, to tell them they were bad.
He clucked his tongue faintly and his eyes shone out of ambush, hard and round as the animals' glass eyes.
Bad-bad-bad.
"The loveliest thing," Bea said. "Liza, tell me—was this your mother's?"
Liza said yes. She could see now that this gift of a single earring might be seen as childish and pathetic—perhaps intentionally pathetic. Even keeping it as a treasure could seem stupid. But if it was her mother's, that would be understandable, and it would be a gift of some importance. "You could put it on a chain," she said. "If you put it on a chain you could wear it around your neck."
"But I was just thinking that!" Bea said. "I was just thinking it would look lovely on a chain. A silver chain—don't you think? Oh, Liza, I am just so proud you gave it to me!"
"You could wear it in your nose," said Ladner. But he said this without any sharpness. He was peaceable now—played
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out, peaceable. He spoke of Bea's nose as if it might be a pleasant thing to contemplate.
Ladner and Bea were sitting under the plum trees right behind the house. They sat in the wicker chairs that Bea had brought out from town. She had not brought much—just enough to make islands here and there among Ladner's skins and instruments. These chairs, some cups, a cushion. The wineglasses they were drinking out of now.
Bea had changed into a dark-blue dress of very thin and soft material. It hung long and loose from her shoulders. She trickled the rhinestones through her fingers, she let them fall and twinkle in the folds of her blue dress. She had forgiven Ladner, after all, or made a bargain not to remember.
Bea could spread safety, if she wanted to. Surely she could.
All that is needed is for her to turn herself into a different sort of woman, a hard-and-fast, draw-the-line sort, clean-sweeping, energetic, and intolerant. None of that. Not allowed.
Be good. The woman who could rescue them—who could make them all, keep them all, good.
What Bea has been sent to do, she doesn't see.
Only Liza sees.
i v
Liza locked the door as you had to, from the outside. She put the key in the plastic bag and the bag in the hole in the tree.
She moved towards the snowmobile, and when Warren didn't do the same she said, "What's the matter with you?"
Warren said, "What about the window by the back door?"
Liza breathed out noisily. "Ooh, I'm an idiot!" she said.
"I'm an idiot ten times over!"
Warren went back to the window and kicked at the bottom Vandals
pane. Then he got a stick of firewood from the pile by the tin shed and was able to smash the glass out. "Big enough so a kid could get in," he said.
"How could I be so stupid?" Liza said. "You saved my life."
"Our life," Warren said.
The tin shed wasn't locked. Inside it he found some cardboard boxes, bits of lumber, simple tools. He tore off a piece of cardboard of a suitable size. He took great satisfaction in nailing it over the pane that he had just smashed out. "Otherwise animals could get in," he said to Liza.
When he was all finished with this job, he found that Liza had walked down into the snow between the trees. He went after her.
"I was wondering if the bear was still in there," she said.
He was going to say that he didn't think bears came this far south, but she didn't give him the time. "Can you tell what the trees are by their bark?" she said.
Warren said he couldn't even tell from their leaves. "Well, maples," he said. "Maples and pines."
"Cedar," said Liza. "You've got to know cedar. There's a cedar. There's a wild cherry. Down there's birch. The white ones. And that one with the bark like gray skin? That's a beech. See, it had letters carved on it, but they've spread out, they just look like any old blotches now."
Warren wasn't interested. He only wanted to get home. It wasn't much after three o'clock, but you could feel the darkness collecting, rising among the trees, like cold smoke coming off the snow.
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