The Enchantment of Lily Dahl

by Hustvedt, Siri

  Behind her she heard Vince yelling, “Watch the pot!” She turned around to look at him and set the coffee near the cash register. “You okay?” he said. Lily didn’t answer him. She was thinking. I can’t just let this go. Somebody has got to do something. I can’t stay here and pretend nothing’s happening. Lily wiped her shoe with a napkin and faced Division Street again. The bright sunshine was hard to look at. Lily reached for the screen door and opened it. I’m going now, she thought. It can’t wait. She walked out into the street, turned right and then right again up the alley to her bicycle.

  Lily rode past the Ideal Cafe and saw Vince standing in the doorway in his white apron. He waved a spatula at her and roared, “Where do you think you’re going! Get back here! If you don’t get your ass back here in two seconds, you’re fired!”

  She didn’t pay any attention to him. Vince was standing in another dimension, like a person in a movie she could watch without him affecting her directly. He had fired her twice before, but both times he had rehired her within twenty minutes, and both times it had been his fault for being such a hothead. Now she was the one who had walked out on him, and it seemed only fair that he should fire her. There was something oddly pleasant about the uproar she had created: the fat man screaming in the doorway, the startled faces in the cafe. It had been so easy, had taken only a couple of seconds to turn the Ideal Cafe upside down. Lily knew where she was going. She was looking for someone—a nameless girl hidden at Martin’s or at the Bodlers’, in the woods or in the caves. Whoever she was, she must look something like both Lily and Dolores. Whoever she was, Lily felt she had to find her. Just beyond the Webster city limits, Lily imagined the suitcase lying abandoned in the woods, and she imagined her fingers on the lid pulling it open a couple of inches, and then in the fantasy she slammed down the lid to shut out the horrible contents.

  * * *

  Standing outside Martin’s house, Lily felt excited. Her excitement outweighed her dread, maybe because Martin’s truck was gone and the house looked unoccupied. She walked onto the porch, opened the door and peered into the room. The rocking chair had been moved back to the corner, and she could see the black cloth, the collage of crimes and advertisements with its blank center. She walked inside. This, too, was easy. You put one foot in front of the other, she said to herself, and you’re in. She touched the black cloth for an instant, but dropped it quickly. The chemical smell remained strong in the house, and again she wondered what it was. When she looked for the knives, she saw that they had disappeared. Lily remembered Dolores yelling about being cut, remembered Martin’s hand, and, as she walked through the open door into Martin’s bedroom, she thought that cuts like the ones she had seen on Martin’s hand couldn’t have come from fixing a fence. Stacks of books lay on the floor, and on a table she saw the copy of Gray’s Anatomy that had been in the other room before, a book of photographs called The Nude, and a fat white book entitled Prosthetics. A fly buzzed past her cheek, and Lily listened for cars on the road, but there were none, only highway traffic in the distance. Lily moved to Martin’s desk, pushed away the chair and opened the desk drawer: bank receipts, several index cards, paper clips, a copy of Playboy. Then, looking down, she noticed a dark heap on the floor, bent over and reached for it. Clothes, she thought, just clothes, but when she pulled out a blue T-shirt and looked at it, she noticed it had a tiny bow at the neck and a tag inside that said “Lady Susan, size 7.” Lily stared at the tag, took a deep breath and threw the shirt back under the desk. From somewhere outside she heard a dog barking, and she ran out of the house. Pedaling up the gravel road toward the highway, she suddenly remembered she had forgotten to shut the desk drawer.

  Two cars were parked in the Bodlers’ driveway: the twins’ truck and a Pontiac that Lily thought looked familiar. Lily jumped off her bicycle and ran to the door. She rattled the screen and called inside, “Hello! It’s me, Lily. I have to talk to you!” Yelling into that house, Lily felt that she had temporarily given herself permission to act wildly, but could withdraw that permission at any second if she had to.

  She yelled again. “Let me in! It’s important!” Heavy footsteps came from the next room. Frank appeared in the kitchen.

  “Hold yer horses,” he muttered. As he trudged across the kitchen floor, he pulled at his trousers, and stopped behind the screen. He raised his bloodshot eyes to her and grunted.

  “I have to talk to you again, to you and Dick, about what he saw.” Lily hesitated. She looked intently at him to show the urgency of what she was saying and then added, “It could be a matter of life and death.”

  She wasn’t at all sure, but Lily thought she saw a hint of amusement in Frank’s eyes. “Easy does it,” he said and stared at her without blinking. He did not open the screen door.

  “Mr. Bodler,” Lily said, “let me in.”

  Frank scratched his neck. “Dick’s restin’.”

  “This won’t take long.”

  Frank rubbed his nose with the back of his hand. Then he lifted a finger slowly toward the ceiling like a person testing the wind and said, “Hold on.”

  Frank disappeared. Lily heard voices from inside the house while she waited. Listening, she thought she heard a woman’s voice, but Dick’s voice had the timbre of a woman’s, and it could have been him.

  Frank returned, motioned for her to follow him, but said nothing. He led Lily through the second room and then kicked open the door to the third. The kick gave her a start, and she braced herself as she followed him into the bedroom. The room was incredibly dark. She saw nothing but a bar of hazy light straight ahead of her. Two or three seconds later, she realized that the light came from a window, its opening obscured by a tall stack of boxes, and that the visible glass was coated with a thick, yellow film. A hulking dresser with a cloudy blackened mirror above it stood against the left wall, and when Lily turned to look at it, she saw the blurred reflection of two people lying on a bed. The mirror’s distortion confused her for a moment, but she turned to her right and saw Dick Bodler and Dolores Wachobski together on a small bed that sagged under their weight. Dolores was sitting, wedged close to Dick, who was lying down, his head propped on an uncovered pillow. Bolt upright near the end of the bed were Dick’s boots. Their long, creased tongues hung out from between knotted laces, giving them a vaguely doglike appearance. Dolores was wearing a thin pink dress that buttoned up the front, and because that dress was the only clear color in that dark room of muddy browns and grays, her body looked separate from everything else around her. The puking, bloated, whiskey-logged woman of three days ago had been replaced by a steady, sober person in pink. The transformation was so complete, Lily found it almost supernatural. This wasn’t the Dolores she had shaken and slapped the other night. Holding a neat fan of playing cards in two hands, Dolores turned her head to Lily and said, “You look a little mussed up, honey. Anything wrong?” Then she lowered her eyes to her cards. Dick hadn’t shown Lily any sign of greeting or recognition. He lifted a hand that had been hidden behind his thigh and brought several badly smudged cards up to his nose. Then he narrowed his eyes. Lily shifted on the floor, felt her foot knock something, heard a sloshing sound and looked down at the floor. Her toe had knocked into a coffee can that was serving as a spittoon. She smelled rancid tobacco juice and felt thankful she hadn’t spilled it.

  Lily tried to focus her eyes. The vague light, the dust that floated in the room made it hard to see, and she felt that the momentum of the afternoon had suddenly been lost. The world had slowed down and then collapsed into this funny, filthy room. But she spoke anyway. “I want to ask you about Martin Petersen.” She took a step toward the bed. Nobody moved. Frank stood in front of the tower of boxes and surveyed the three of them with blank eyes. Dolores and Dick looked at their cards. “Martin Petersen,” she said again.

  After several seconds, Dolores patted the bed. “Join us for a game of gin?” Her voice was bright and clear.

  I’m tired, Lily thought, really tired. “No,” sh
e said. “I just want to talk.”

  “Sit down then,” Dolores cooed. She smiled and motioned with her head to a spot on the bed near the boots.

  “I’ll stand,” Lily said.

  Dolores threw back her head and hooted.

  Dick continued to look at his cards. Then he raised his eyebrows as though he were surprised by what he saw.

  Dolores laughed again.

  The laugh seemed to remain in Lily’s ear even after it was over. She looked straight at Dolores. “On second thought,” she said, “move over.” Lily crawled over Dick’s legs and nudged Dolores forcefully with her elbow. “Make room, honey,” she said, emphasizing the word “honey.” The bed sank further under her weight, and for an instant Lily thought it might go crashing to the floor. She crossed her legs Indian style and beamed at Dolores. “This is comfy,” she said.

  “Well, how do you do!” Dolores said. It was not a question. “For a minute there, I thought you was just a teeny-weeny bit scared of me, or maybe Dickie here?” Dolores patted the man’s trousers, and a small cloud of black dust rose from the cloth.

  “No way,” Lily said and wiggled her shoulders in an exaggerated gesture of getting comfortable. Dolores’s sarcasm relieved Lily’s guilt. She really is a bitch, Lily thought. “I want to know exactly what you saw that day in the field—when you said you saw Martin Petersen,” she shouted at Dick. He didn’t look at her. A bird whistled outside, three distinct notes, each one higher than the one before.

  “Why?” Dolores said.

  Lily’s leg brushed Dolores’s hip. The contact made her uncomfortable, and she felt her face getting hot. “Dick,” Lily began and corrected herself, “Mr. Bodler says he saw Martin Petersen carrying”—Lily rubbed her face—“me”—she paused—“across the field out here last Thursday night, but I wasn’t there.”

  “You?” Dolores squinted at Lily.

  “Remind you of anything?” Lily said. “Like Jesse James?”

  “No,” Dolores said, but her lips were parted in an expression of confusion.

  Dick sat up.

  “Well, let’s face it,” Lily said, “it wasn’t Jesse James.”

  Frank had turned to Lily, and he stepped forward.

  Dolores looked at Lily and spoke between her teeth. “I saw Jesse, and I saw me. I know what I saw, and it scared the bejesus outa me. It wasn’t Martin Petersen, and it sure as hell wasn’t you.”

  Lily shouted at Dick. “How did you know it was Martin? Wasn’t it getting dark? I’m not saying you didn’t see anything, but how could you be so sure? In the police log last week there was a report about a man carrying an injured woman just outside of town. It’s the same thing, don’t you see? I’ve got it right here.” Lily dug into her back pocket for the clipping and waved it in front of Dolores. “You didn’t call the police, did you?”

  “I never call them clowns,” Dolores said. She took the clipping from Lily, stared at it and sucked the inside of her cheek.

  Frank walked over to Dolores and held out his hand for the clipping. She gave it to him, and he read it for at least a minute. Kindergarten speed, Lily said to herself. “Wonder whose pig it was,” he said finally.

  “You’re sayin’ Marty Petersen’s walkin’ round town with a dead woman and that’s what I’ve been seeing?” Dolores said, “Wearin’ cowboy duds? That it ain’t visions? Is that what you’re sayin’?”

  “Maybe,” Lily said. “I’m not sure.”

  “What about the music?” she said. “I heard music.”

  Lily ignored her.

  Still holding the bit of wrinkled newspaper, Frank sat down on a crate piled with magazines and spat into the coffee can. “That boy was born with thin blood,” he said. “Runs in our family.” He spoke slowly.

  “Who’s he talking about?” Lily asked Dolores.

  “Must be Marty.”

  “You and Martin are related?” Lily said in a loud voice.

  Frank nodded. “As I was sayin’, he inherited it, thin blood, female-like, if you know my meaning, a little like Dick here.” He lowered his voice when he mentioned his brother. “Only Dick ain’t clever, and Marty’s wicked clever—not just with his hands neither. He reads a lot a books, comes here and pages through every one we get in to see if he wants it, and takes whatever he likes. He’s got big ideas ’bout things, an’ when he ain’t cursed by stutterin’, he goes on and on till I can’t take it no more, a regular chatterbox he is, once he gets goin’.”

  Lily interrupted him. “How are you related?”

  Frank looked at her. “Our mother and Martin’s grandmother was sisters.”

  “I had no idea.”

  Frank nodded. “Norwegians,” he said. “Those girls was born here, but their parents come from a little place in Sogn Valley, name of Underdahl. Took the name from there: Underdahl.” Lily watched the back of Frank’s head in the mirror and saw his bald spot wave in the reflection.

  Dolores looked at Lily. “Like you.”

  “There are lots of Dahl names,” Lily said, as if an explanation was called for. “It means ‘valley’ in Norwegian—Overdahl, Grondahl, Folkedahl—lots of them.” She heard her voice drop. She knew it was silly, but the coincidental overlapping of her own name with Helen Bodler’s maiden name unsettled her.

  “Sure,” Dolores said. “I went to school with a girl called Hallingdahl.”

  They were all silent. Helen Underdahl, Lily said to herself, and burped. It was a silent burp, but she tasted vomit in her mouth and swallowed to get rid of it. She looked at Frank and in a loud measured voice said, “Do you think Martin is capable of—” She stopped. “Would Martin hurt anybody?”

  Frank leaned forward on the crate. “The truth is, Miss Dahl, you can’t know nothin’ about nobody now, can you? Seems to me you yourself could hurt somebody if the time and place was right. That’s so, ain’t it? Even them that’s closest to you, you can’t really know ’bout them. One day you wake up and find out. Folks say, ‘It ain’t possible, can’t happen.’ You live a little longer, and it happens.” Frank nodded his head. “People are full of surprises. I seen a lot a things that weren’t supposed to happen, Miss Dahl, and it ain’t so easy to say who’s to blame. That’s the nature of things. The day comes when you wake up in the mornin’ and look out the window and you can’t see nothin’ but grasshoppers so thick they black out the sky. And then before you know it, a drought sets in, and your fields burn as sure as if you’d taken a torch to your own crops. That’s just the way of nature, but then the price of eggs goes so low, it ain’t worth sellin’ em. Costs more to raise the chickens. An’ whose fault is that, Miss Dahl? Was it them politicians in Washington, don’t know a heifer from a steer?” Frank shook his head and stuck a pinch of tobacco into his cheek. He narrowed his eyes. “And the day comes when a goddamned inspector from the goddamned Twin Cities drives up in his fat car and tells you you gotta slaughter your animals, every last one of ’em. Hoof-and-mouth, he says. But it turns out, Miss Dahl, they wasn’t sick. Them cows wasn’t sick.” He raised a fist at Lily. “And the day comes when you don’t know your own people, don’t know what they are or what they’re thinkin’, and that’s gotta be the worst. They turn their backs on you and leave you high and dry. It don’t matter that it ain’t you done nothin’. You’re mixed up in it somehow, and that’s all that matters. Pity’s cheap, Miss Dahl, and those that pity don’t like to come too close. They stand at a good distance cluckin’ their tongues and shakin’ their heads, but they won’t get their hands dirty, and that ain’t much when all you’ve got left is a patch of land with the devil’s mark on it.” He nodded. “Folks surprise you. That’s all there is to it. You’re askin’ me if that boy could do somethin’ bad. I’m tellin’ you, you bet he could, but that don’t make him much different from nobody else.”

  Lily looked at Frank. The length of his speech had astonished her. In a low voice she said, “Martin’s got pictures and articles of dead people on his wall—murdered people—did you know that?”r />
  “You think that’s different from havin’ the pictures in here?” Frank tapped his temple with a finger.

  Lily’s mouth was dry. “I, I don’t know,” she said.

  Dick was stirring on the bed, and when Lily turned to look at him, she saw that he was sitting up. He let go of the cards and watched them scatter onto his lap and the bed. Until then, she had felt the man had been absent, absorbed only in the numbers and the faces on the cards in his hand. Lily didn’t know what he had heard or not heard, but his face took on a sudden expression of joy. He threw back his head, opened his mouth and laughed without making any sound, his chin bobbing. He hugged himself and began to rock back and forth on the bed, bumping both women with his shoulders. Lily moved out of his way and knocked Dolores in the shin with her knee.

  “He don’t mean nothin’ by it,” Dolores said to Lily. “It’s one of his peculiars.” She smiled. “Peculiarities. Every once in a while it comes over him—just like that.” She snapped her fingers. “I think we oughta leave him alone. Frank’s the only one who can get him out of it, if it don’t stop by itself.”

  Lily looked at Dick and shouted at him, “I have to go now, Mr. Bodler.”

  The man stopped his motion instantly, looked her straight in the face and said, “You’re leavin’?” He looked at his brother. “Miss Underdahl is leavin’?”

  “Dahl,” Frank said. “Just Dahl.” He didn’t speak loudly enough for Dick to hear. Lily knew he had made the correction not for his brother, but for her.