From the Black Hills

by Judy Troy

  “She’s into having a nice house and yard,” Mike said. “Donetta said she grew up in a trailer park.”

  “Well, nice grass is one thing,” Cory said. “But a marriage is a lot more important.”

  Mrs. Rush was coming outside now, followed by Donetta’s heavyset aunt, Nancy, and Nancy’s daughter, Ellen. They lived in Spearfish, and Mike had met them before. The daughter was four years older than he was and always wore a camouflage army jacket, no matter what the weather. She’d failed junior college and was rejected by the army; now she worked as a security guard at an office building in Rapid City. “They almost gave her a gun,” Donetta had told Mike. “Then they came to their senses.”

  Donetta kissed her aunt and walked toward Mike and Cory. She had on a short yellow dress and sandals with straps that wound around the ankle. When she saw Mike watching her, she smiled the way she had the first time she’d ever seen him—as if she’d never smile that way again for anybody else. Cory got her a Coke.

  “I’m sorry about Grandma Sharp,” she told Mike. “We didn’t tell her anything. Wilbert’s hobby is reading newspapers.”

  “They’re leaving tomorrow, right?” Cory said. “Isn’t that what they promised?” He waved to Margo, who came outside carrying the bowl of potato salad. “My beautiful baby is finally here,” he told Mike. He poked at the coals, peeled back the tinfoil, and inspected the pig’s head.

  THEY ate outside at a long wooden table Cory had made out of leftover lumber from a Rapid City subdivision. Mike figured he’d gotten the lumber, unknowingly, from somebody who’d stolen it. Cory wasn’t smart, but he wasn’t a thief, either. He brought over a huge platter of pork.

  “This is delicious,” Donetta’s aunt said.

  “There’s nothing wrong with pork cooked in the kitchen,” Mrs. Rush said.

  “What you need is a cook-off,” Wilbert told her. “Invite the neighbors and see who likes what best.”

  “No, thank you,” Mrs. Rush said.

  “Do you even know the neighbors?” Grandma Sharp asked.

  “Of course I know the neighbors.”

  “The lawns here are so gigantic,” Grandma Sharp said. “You’d need a go-cart to get from one house to the next.”

  “It’s a beautiful area,” Wilbert said.

  “People go up to their ears in debt to live in these houses,” Grandma Sharp told him. “They go into debt so that they can clean rooms they never go into.”

  “That’s hardly how we live,” Mrs. Rush said. “Our house is too crowded, if anything.”

  “Is that right?” Margo said. “Well, it doesn’t have to be anymore.”

  Everyone ate in silence. Under the table Donetta had her hand on Mike’s leg. All she was eating for dinner was potato salad, bread, and olives. “I’m not going to eat any pork,” she’d told Mike earlier. “Pigs remind me of Wilbur, in Charlotte’s Web.”

  For dessert there were berry cobblers that Donetta’s aunt had brought. It was nearly dark, and Margo lit candles. Donetta’s cousin Ellen ran around the darkening yard, catching fireflies with her hands.

  “We had family picnics like this when I was growing up,” Wilbert said. “It was during the Depression. My dad would cook hot dogs. Wieners, we called them.”

  “Were the picnics happy?” Margo asked.

  “Sure,” Wilbert said.

  “Maybe things you remember just seem happy,” Margo told him.

  “I remember bad things, too, honey.”

  “Grandma?” Donetta said. “What kinds of things do you remember?”

  “I don’t like rummaging around in the past,” Grandma Sharp said. “It’s over and done with.”

  Mrs. Rush picked up a candle, crossed the pretty lawn, and looked down at the pit. She nudged a little dirt back in with her shoe.

  LATER, Mike and Donetta took a walk through the small subdivision and into the field on the other side of Flat Rock Road. The moon was up, so white and shining that they could see deer paths in the long grass.

  “I think about this field when I can’t get to sleep at night,” Donetta said. “I imagine I’m lying in it with you.”

  “You think about me too much,” Mike said.

  She let go of his hand. “Who should I think about, then?”

  “Well, nobody, really. You should think about yourself and what you want.”

  “What do you think I want?” Donetta said.

  There was silence. Then they could hear, in the distance, firecrackers Cory was setting off in the Rushes’ backyard.

  “I don’t know,” Mike said finally. “Me, I guess.”

  “But I shouldn’t say it, right? Because it makes you feel trapped, and you worry about what’s going to happen to me when you go away to college.”

  “Yes,” Mike said.

  Donetta stood apart from him in the darkness. Mike knew she was crying, though she wasn’t moving or making a sound. When her father had died, she’d cried silently like that, as if she’d not expected to be comforted.

  “I’m not trying to be an asshole,” he said.

  “Then don’t be one.”

  He put his hands on her shoulders, looking down at her wet face.

  “Are you breaking up with me?” she asked him.

  “No. I don’t know what I’m doing.”

  “You always know what you’re doing.”

  “I used to,” Mike said. “I used to think I did.” He touched her face and hair, and when she didn’t respond, he dropped his hands and lay down in the grass, just as he’d lain down in Lee-Ann’s bathroom that afternoon.

  “You’re going to get chigger bites,” Donetta told him.

  “I know. I don’t care.”

  He closed his eyes, and after a moment heard her lie down next to him. The firecrackers had stopped, and from across the street they heard voices, then a car leaving. “Aunt Nancy and Ellen,” Donetta said sadly.

  Mike leaned over and kissed her. It was a test for him, at first—given what had happened earlier with Lee-Ann—until Donetta began to kiss him back. She slid her hands up under his shirt and caressed his shoulders and chest; she stroked his erection. As he unzipped his jeans he watched her lift up her dress and take it off. He positioned her on top of him, so that he could see her body in the moonlight. For the first time Mike was thinking only of her, even from the beginning, and though he didn’t say that he loved her, he could have said it without lying.

  Afterward he reached up and touched her long hair, and the necklace she always wore—a small gold heart on a gold chain, a present from her father. His hands were trembling, and he felt the edge of something hiding inside him: the fear of what it might be like if Donetta didn’t love him.

  “Let’s get up,” he whispered. He stood, tucking in his shirt, and led Donetta through the field. He felt better then, but he wanted to get back to where he could see lights and houses, and the shadowy, familiar outline of the Black Hills in the distance. He and Donetta stopped at the edge of the road, from where they could see Mrs. Rush and her mother in the big, lighted kitchen window. Donetta’s grandmother was drying a butcher knife.

  “Your family’s screwed up,” Mike said.

  “I know. My father was the only nice one.”

  “No,” Mike told her. “The nice one is standing next to me.”

  IT was after ten when he rode up Edge Street. He’d expected his house to be dark and his mother asleep, but from a block away he could see lit-up windows and a car out front—Tom DeWitt’s, he recognized as he got closer. Something had happened with his father.

  He left the motorcycle in the driveway and went into the house wearing his helmet. In the kitchen, standing at the table, his mother and Tom were looking down at a map of Kansas.

  “There’s been a close call,” Carolyn said. “But they don’t know where he is.”

  Mike’s father had been seen in a Jeep, with a woman, stopped on the side of Interstate 70 between Denver and Kansas City—a Jeep Cherokee with a Colorado license plate
. They had a small dog with them, Tom said. Mary Hise’s dog, almost certainly. Ten miles west of Oakley, Kansas, heading toward Kansas City, they’d had car trouble and were looking under the hood—a spark plug had come loose. A Kansas state patrolman had pulled up behind them and asked if they needed help. That was three hours ago now. Routinely, he’d called in the license plate; the car was registered to the woman.

  “That’s why he didn’t check Glenn’s identification,” Tom said to Mike. “There was no reason to. But afterward, the patrolman had a feeling about it. He said that the man had seemed nervous, and that he’d let the woman do all the talking. By this time half an hour had gone by. He checked with the dispatcher, found out about the ATL—Attempt to Locate—and gave her the license plate and description of the Jeep. But it hasn’t been seen since. They must have gotten off the highway. Western Kansas is an empty place, but Glenn was in a vehicle that could go anywhere. We had a chance and messed it up.”

  He folded up the map and helped himself to a glass of water. It was hot and still outside, and there’d been heat lightning as Mike had ridden home. Mike watched Tom set the glass on the table, then rethink that and place it in the sink. There was nothing he did, Mike thought, that he didn’t do deliberately.

  “Why are you telling us this?” Mike asked him.

  “Don’t you want to know?”

  “Of course we do,” Carolyn said.

  “You should keep it to yourselves, though,” Tom said. “It’s not something you’ll see in the newspaper.”

  “Then you shouldn’t have told us,” Mike said.

  “Don’t be so difficult,” his mother told him. “Would you rather not know?”

  Tom rested his hands, casually, on the back of a chair. “I’ll tell you why I told you. I thought you might have the same concern we have. That your father might harm this woman.”

  “He won’t,” Mike said.

  His mother said, “There’s no reason to worry about her. Glenn hates himself for what he’s done.”

  “How do you know that?” Tom said.

  “Because he hated himself before he did it.”

  Mike turned away from them. That was bullshit, he thought. It was the kind of thing people said on talk shows. And it was too personal a thing to say. For the last eighteen years his mother had felt fine being private about private things. But now that his father was hiding, his mother was doing the opposite, revealing things about both herself and Mike’s father. Mike wondered what kinds of things she’d been telling Tom DeWitt about him—Mike.

  “I’m putting my motorcycle away,” he told them, and went outside. He wheeled his bike into the carport, and as he hung up his helmet he thought about the fact that his father wasn’t hiding alone anymore. Mike had been able to imagine what it might feel like to be alone and in trouble. He couldn’t picture his father that same way now.

  He stood in the dark driveway, watching his mother and Tom DeWitt through the window. They were sitting down, talking, both of them leaning forward in their chairs. Mike’s mother’s hair was a little longer and less neat than it used to be—a more ordinary length—and her red sleeveless blouse was open at the neck. Sitting there under the kitchen light, they both seemed more substantial to Mike than Mike seemed to himself. They were sharp-edged and vivid, whereas he felt like a shadow. Why couldn’t he seem that definite to himself? Why didn’t he feel that solid? Why couldn’t he see himself as clearly as he could see them?

  He stayed outside and walked—down Edge Street to Pine and up Arapahoe, where Josh used to live and where Josh’s mother lived now with her boyfriend. If Josh were around, Mike thought, the two of them could take off for a few days, go to a rodeo in Wyoming, or go camping in the Hills. Josh was always up to something adventurous, and often illegal. In the fall he was going to the University of South Dakota in Sioux Falls, on a football scholarship, and he’d said once to Mike, “I’m trying not to get arrested before that.”

  And that made Mike think of the university he would be attending, and of the visit he’d made there last fall, with his parents. There had been an away football game that weekend, and everybody in Brookings had seemed to be crowded into bars and restaurants, watching the game on television.

  “You’ll get caught up in that, too,” Mike’s father had told him. “Don’t think you won’t. You’ll be shouting along with the rest of the idiots.” He’d gotten into a bad mood then, and Mike and his mother had ended up walking around the deserted campus by themselves.

  Mike was back on Edge Street, all the houses dark except his own. He waited at a distance, away from the streetlight, until Tom DeWitt drove off.

  TEN

  WYLENE Moseley was the name of the woman his father had been with, and might be with still. She was a waitress from Central City, Colorado, a town in the mountains west of Denver. She was forty-two years old.

  “I can tell you what she looks like,” Tom DeWitt told Mike on the phone, Monday morning, during a thunderstorm that had begun at dawn and kept Mike home. “My mother’s teaching,” Mike had said at first, when Tom had called, and Tom had said, “I know. I thought just you and I could talk.”

  “Blue eyes and black hair,” he said now. “Five seven, a hundred forty pounds. Attractive features. Is that how you pictured her?”

  “I didn’t picture her.”

  “But you must have wondered.”

  Mike knew better than to say he had. All day Sunday, as he and his mother had waited for a phone call telling them that his father had been arrested, or worse, they’d never once mentioned the woman. She’d become unmentionable—like an untouchable in India, Mike thought, which was a bad joke, because he knew that his father would be touching her.

  “Have you heard her name before?” Tom asked.

  “No.”

  “Do you think she’s somebody your father knew?”

  “I don’t know,” Mike said.

  “My guess is that he met her on the road, somehow, and that she knows he’s in trouble.”

  Mike was on the phone in the upstairs hallway, from where he could see his mother’s neatly made bed and the window beyond it. “Why would she go with him, then?” he said coolly, as if he didn’t care, really.

  “Do you know who gets the most letters in prison?” Tom said. “Men who’ve murdered women.” When Mike said nothing, Tom said, “I don’t understand it either. But I can tell you what I think she thinks—that your father’s been treated unfairly. Also, she likes danger. Adrenaline makes her feel more alive—that kind of thing.”

  “It makes everybody feel that way.”

  “Some people feel good and alive the second they wake up in the morning.”

  “Like you?” Mike said.

  “Never. Do you?”

  “No.”

  “We have something in common, then,” Tom said. “We have something else in common, too. We don’t want to see this woman get hurt.”

  “So?” Mike said.

  “It’s just something we share, like the way we wish Mary Hise hadn’t died.”

  “Everybody wishes that.”

  “You must wish it especially,” Tom said. “You knew her.”

  That was true, which was the meanest thing about it. Mike stood in the dim hallway for a long time after they hung up, looking through his mother’s window at the dark sky and falling rain. Finally he got out the vacuum cleaner, as his mother had asked him to, and started downstairs, pushing it hard into the corners, angry at himself for answering the phone to begin with or for not saying: You think you’re being clever, making me feel bad about Mary Hise? How could I not feel bad about her?

  Upstairs, he did his mother’s room, his own room, and the small, oblong guest room, which had a window overlooking the backyard. Then he turned off the vacuum cleaner and sat on the old four-poster bed that had belonged to his great-grandmother. The guest room was where he and Donetta had had sex whenever his parents had been out of town. Often, Mike would walk past the room, look at the bed, an
d remember exactly how Donetta had looked, naked on the white sheets. An unused room was sexual the way a motel room was, Mike thought. Never occupied long enough by any one person, it was emptier than empty, like a pool without water, or sleep without dreams.

  Mike’s father was probably staying in motels with Wylene Moseley—if that was even her name, Mike thought, if Tom DeWitt hadn’t made up the name, or even the whole story. But if she was real, Mike knew, his father was sleeping with her, because if he’d slept with Mary Hise, then he’d sleep with other women as well. That was how Mike was himself, in a way, and he felt too depressed right then to imagine that he could be different. He wondered if Wylene Moseley knew about Mike and his mother, or about Mary Hise; he wondered how his father had gotten her to help him. His father acted differently around attractive women. The first few times Donetta had come over for dinner, for example, he’d cleared the table, carried in dessert, and stood when Donetta got up from her chair. He’d been overly friendly and polite around some of Mike’s mother’s friends, as well. Women had always seemed to like him more than men had, at least at first. Donetta had liked him a lot, until she got to know him better. Then she’d said to Mike, “I get tired of paying attention to him.”

  Outside, in back, rain was pooling in the low spots under the crab-apple tree. Mike had filled in those hollows with dirt, then peat moss, but they formed themselves again each time it rained. There were things you couldn’t change, including things about yourself, Mike thought; he was bad at being faithful, and women—girls—liked him, too. He knew how to make them like him.

  He stood at the window, imagining what Wylene Moseley must be like, taking off with his father like that. She was probably an outdoors kind of person—the kind of person Mike was more than his father was, although his father never would have admitted that. Mike had seen pictures of him hiking in national parks, but his father had never backpacked anywhere, or climbed a real mountain, or even stayed in a tent for more than one night.

  Mike remembered that when he was five or six, his father had set up a small yellow tent for him and Josh in the backyard. “You boys will have a lot of fun out here,” Glenn had told them. “You’ll be like cowboys.” He’d gotten them sleeping bags and settled them out there after dark. Then later, after a dog barked and an animal got into the trash, he came outside and knelt at the tent’s opening. “Are you scared?” he’d asked kindly. “Do you want to come in?”