by Lila Shaara
“Hello,” he said. “I was just admiring your handiwork. You must be Miss Tokay.”
“Hello,” she said in a voice that sounded as though the wind could carry it away in wisps. “I’m glad you like it. No more services, I’m afraid.”
“Oh?” said Harry. “I didn’t know you had services.”
“The temple’s closed now. Closed for repairs.”
“Oh,” said Harry. “What kind of services?”
“To get dictations from the Ascended Masters. Didn’t you come for the services? People used to.” She looked away from him now, out across the road to rows of pine trees. “It’s a beautiful day.”
“Yes,” said Harry. “Where’s the temple?”
“Which one?”
“There’s more than one?” asked Harry.
“There’s the old one and the new one. The old one was lovely. I miss it. The newer one is serviceable enough.” Harry imagined she had no idea she’d just made a pun. “But it was never as nice. You can’t see the old one from here. The new one is back behind, over there.” She said “hee-uh” and “they-uh” in the Old South way of gentlewomen. She pointed a shaking, child-size hand with bent knuckles to a spot somewhere behind them. “Can you see it?”
Harry peered over the back wall of the shrine, through the pine and live oak trees of the lot beyond, and could see a wooden building, his view fragmented by branches; the building was painted white, although the blue-green wood underneath peeked out in occasional blotches. It looked as if it had originally been a two-car garage with a second story. Closer to the road and to the right was a large house, big white columns and tall, thin windows. It had once been stately; it was now forlorn and shabby, with gutters hanging atilt from the eaves and ivy suffocating the side windows. The roof of the front porch sagged in the middle like a giant, insane smile. The roof was dotted with green squares. A shingle salesman made a killing in this neighborhood, he thought. He hadn’t noticed before the narrow dirt driveway next to the shrine that served the big house and the temple.
“Who are the Ascended Masters? I’m sorry, ma’am”—he was proud he’d remembered this southernism in time to avoid offending her—“but I’m new to town, and I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I could tell you weren’t local, honey,” she said and winked. “No more services, I’m afraid. And it’s too bad, because I’m going to ascend myself in just a little while. I still take dictations, and they’ve said they’re getting ready for me.”
Harry pictured celestial CEOs requiring dotty old ladies to “take a letter” for them; questions filled his mind, but he hadn’t gotten a satisfactory answer to his earlier one. “What’s the temple for? What do you do in it?”
Her face didn’t change in any obvious way, but there was a subtle shift, a little tightening, some nervousness. Harry had been a reporter far too long not see such minute changes in expression and know they meant something. She looked away and said, “I see my ride to the stow-uh.”
A car slowed, the first that had come along since Harry had stopped. A giant old Buick pulled onto the narrow verge, aimed toward town. Miss Baby was driving it. There was no one in the passenger seat, but two small girls sat in the back. Harry recognized Charlotte and her friend, sister, or whoever she was with the unfortunate teeth; both girls were in pink dresses and braids. The front passenger window rolled down by itself; the car was obviously not too old to have power windows. Miss Baby leaned over and said, “Why are you here?” She turned her gaze to the old woman. “Miss Tokay, he botherin’ you?”
Miss Tokay didn’t answer, just started wending her rickety way down the steps. Harry scuttled to her side, half expecting her to shoo him away, but she took his arm as he walked her down. When they got to the car, her arm dropped and he opened the door for her.
“We were just chatting,” he said to Miss Baby.
“Pooh,” she said.
After getting Miss Tokay situated in the car and closing the door for her, Harry leaned in the window and asked Miss Baby, “Are Josie and Maggie home?”
“Maggie’s working,” said the girl with the bad teeth from the backseat.
Harry was about to correct her when Miss Baby said, “No, they’re not home. You leave them alone.” She pressed the button to roll up the window and drove away, giving Harry just enough time to step back from the door.
He watched the car shrink as it went on down the road. There were no other cars. In the silence, he could hear something. Music. It was very soft, almost indistinguishable from the breeze through the pines. But it was there, unless he was starting to hallucinate. It was so faint that he couldn’t make out anything specific, no melody, no rhythm, just something, some notes, a trilling, possibly a voice singing. He looked back at the shrine and thought, It’s singing to me.
Miss Baby had lied, although he couldn’t understand why. He wished no one ill in this scrabbly part of town. He saw two cars in the driveway of the double-wide: a battered blue Chevy Nova and a white Toyota Celica, both more than a few years old. Josie Dupree opened the door after the third knock, dressed only, as far as Harry could tell, in a robe of rose satin. Her face was a palette of thick, smeared makeup, and she had on earrings dangling halfway to her shoulders with clusters of what looked like little rubies. He thought of Mae West with everything dyed dark brown instead of blond. She plainly was’t going to let him in.
“Is Maggie here?” he asked.
“She’s at work.”
“No, she’s not. I was just there.”
“You leave her alone. What the hell do you want with her?”
A male voice came from somewhere behind her. “Who the hell is that?” it said.
“Nobody,” said Josie. “He wants Maggie.”
“She’s not working. Is she supposed to be at work?” Harry said. Then he realized that was probably her car in the yard. He had a misty memory of the white Toyota bringing him home. “Isn’t that her car?”
“Go away,” said Josie and closed the door.
8
EIGHT OF SWORDS
Someone with a straitened life
Harry had no classes on Tuesday, so he decided to work at home. He still marveled at this, the wide-openness of academia, the trust placed in faculty by the administration that they would actually do something productive with all that free time. Of course, he told himself, he should be used to it, since being a journalist was much the same. Similar, too, in that not producing anything bore dire consequences. It was’t really trust, it was simply the knowledge that the powers that be could squash you like a bug if you didn’t do something to add to their prestige.
In the past, he had been a hard worker, tirelessly crossing the city, the country, even the world, to complete a story. He’d written two books in addition to his regular newspaper work, and each one had taken him months of globe-trotting before he could really start writing. He liked the traveling, the searching and questioning and digging. He was’t wild about deadlines, but he used to be good at meeting them. Now he hadn’t turned in even an outline; his agent had nurtured interest in a third book because of the success of the last two, but his editor was tapping his smartly clad toe, waiting for Harry to at least suggest a topic. Harry had been a journalism major as an undergraduate, and so, before he graduated from Georgetown Law School, he’d written a series of articles for the school paper on the homeless. It had gotten a lot of attention; this in turn had led to an internship at The Washington Post, while his classmates had gone on to law firms around the country. He’d found his calling, and his rapid rise at the Post from intern to senior reporter had been admired by some, envied by more, and resented by most of his coworkers. He knew that his fall, or at least tumble, was’t unwelcome to a lot of people. If those folks could read my mind, he thought, if they could see how little is really going on in there, they’d piss themselves with delight.
Now, sitting at the oak desk at which he’d written two well-received books, all he wanted to do
was sleep. But he knew that was’t going to happen anyway, so he got himself a cup of coffee and opened his laptop and began looking for anything else he could find on Charles Ziegart. After two hours he stood, massaged his neck, and dug through his briefcase for the number that Serge had given him. He left a message on Frank Milford’s campus voice mail and massaged his neck again.
He went back online and looked up the main number of the Lucasta Mirror. He asked to speak to Todd Greenleaf. The woman spoke with a Pennsylvania accent that he recognized with some discomfort. “He’s retahred,” she said.
“Does he still live locally?”
“No. Moved to Florida. I can’t give out more information than that.”
“I’m interested in the articles he wrote about the death of Charles Ziegart in the Mirror. Would anyone else have his notes, or any information about those stories?”
“No. He took all his files (fahls) with him.”
He thanked her and hung up, wondering where in Florida Todd Greenleaf lived. Probably not close by; it was a big state, and people who left cold climates tended to go farther south than Stoweville. Harry looked at the clock. He’d find out more about the old reporter later. It was lunchtime.
She was working this time, as was Shawntelle, who waited on him. He didn’t want to provoke the waitress’s toothy amusement by asking after Maggie again, so he took his time over his soup and chicken salad sandwich, checking his watch every few minutes, trying to remember exactly what time it had been when she’d left the restaurant the first time he’d come here. Around one o’clock, he thought, and sure enough, a few minutes after the hour, she pushed through the swinging kitchen doors behind the cash register. He was embarrassed at how glad this made him, that he’d finally tracked her down. She was wearing what looked like the same jeans and top that she’d had on three days before, with the addition of a fanny pack of lined brown leather circling her hips. She was prettier than he’d remembered, in a nondescript, even-featured sort of way, though still so white she was almost transparent. She looked ghostly. Then the thought struck him from nowhere. This is what sadness looks like after it’s been sitting on someone for a while. He wondered if he ever looked like that.
He was even more pleased when she made a slight gesture of recognition after she saw him, her hand moving up in a tiny, almost surreptitious wave. She spoke to the fat man behind the register, something quick, possibly a single word, and even as the fat man nodded in acknowledgment, she began walking toward where Harry sat.
“Hey,” she said as soon as she was close enough to be heard over the roar of the lunch crowd.
Harry suddenly remembered his kindergarten teacher correcting another child in his class, saying, “Hay is for horses,” and he resisted an urge to pass this on. “Hello,” he said. He hadn’t thought ahead about any possible topic of conversation, so he fell back on the one thing he knew they had in common. He looked down at his plate, then up at her again. “Did you make the soup?”
She shook her head, making the ponytail bob. “Just the sandwich.”
“Good chicken salad.”
“Thanks.” She looked at him, then at her clean, short fingernails. “I’m going for a walk. Bye.”
As she turned to leave, Harry said, “I was going to do the same thing myself, right after I was done here.” He looked again at his empty plate. “Which I am now.” He worked his hand into his pocket to retrieve his wallet. “Where do you go? To walk?”
She didn’t say anything for a moment, just stared at him with those eyes of broken blue glass, while he pulled the lining out of his pants pocket along with his wallet. His keys tumbled with a clatter onto the vinyl seat of the booth. She said, “There’s a place I go. The cemetery. But there’s a park, too.” She stared at the keys, then at his hand as he tried to push the fabric back into place. Then she looked back at his face. “It’s shady.”
Harry finally got himself put together enough that he felt he could stand up without looking even more ridiculous. “Would you mind some company?” He fished some dollar bills out of his wallet to put on the table as she said, “If you want.”
Harry followed her car as they drove away from Crane’s, down Highway 21 south toward the shrine. The cemetery was only a mile or so away, halfway between the restaurant and Maggie’s house. You could see it from the road, but not the vastness of it, rolling away under live oak and pine trees, random concrete markers lacing the grass between the trees and the occasional azalea bush. At the far end of the cemetery was a small stream that crooked its way through the headstones into the trees that bordered the north end. He parked his truck next to her Toyota in the small parking lot near the road. She had a big straw hat in her hands, limp and soft with age, which she put on her head, tying a brown ribbon under her chin. Harry couldn’t stop himself from commenting. Maggie said, “Miss Baby makes me wear it. To keep the sun off me. I wear sunblock, but she says it’s not always enough. I burn pretty bad. She says it gives you wrinkles before you need them.”
“Who needs wrinkles?”
“Anybody who wants to be taken serious, I guess.”
“You don’t want to be taken seriously?”
She shrugged.
They walked among the headstones at first, through the shady parts that spilled across the grass and islands of concrete. The dates started in the fifties; the cemetery was’t as old as Harry had first thought. He was used to northern graveyards, the deaths starting as early as before the Revolutionary War. Here, anything before the twentieth century was considered impossibly old; Stoweville had been nothing more than a crossroads during the Civil War, with only a single battlefield. It had been an insignificant skirmish, now inflated to a fake grandeur by the local chamber of commerce. The gravestones were small and sad, cheap cement worn down quickly by the torrential thunderstorms that peppered the summer days with astonishing regularity. Poor-looking graves, he thought. No grand monuments to wealth and immortality, though many of them wore epitaphs of a flowery religiosity. Harry looked at the names: Smith, Townsend, DeLisle, Camden. All Anglo names, or French. No interesting ethnicities, not even Spanish, which would have been all over the place if the graveyard had been situated even a hundred miles to the south.
They didn’t talk at first, just walked at an easy pace on the pine-needle-covered path. He was grateful he had running shoes on, as did she, he noticed, an old pair, creased and stained; comfortable shoes for someone who had to work on her feet all day. The path paralleled the stream and wound between the graves, then broke through a hedge of azalea bushes into a pine wood. Harry was grateful for the extra shade. The thick stand of trees made the path dark enough that he debated whether or not to remove his sunglasses.
“Is this still part of the cemetery?” he asked.
“No. It borders on Gunhill Park. That’s where we are now.”
He had a notion that a number of acres of woodland had long ago been donated to the county by an eccentric paper magnate. The path wound through the trees, breaking after a hundred feet or so into an open area, a round garden with tiers of flowers in full bloom in concentric circles around a fountain, poured concrete in the shape of a horse in full gallop. The horse’s head was pointed up to the sky, and a thick jet of water spewed from its open mouth, projecting forward in a clear arc. It reminded Harry of puking. He managed to keep the thought to himself. Instead he said, “Kind of upsetting.”
This got a glance from Maggie but nothing more. Harry didn’t know why her silence didn’t bother him, nor did he understand why it felt so important to be with her at all. She was attractive, but not overwhelmingly so, and he didn’t feel that kind of pull toward her. She was too young anyway; he figured she couldn’t be much over twenty-five, and his initial gratitude should have been eaten away by mortification. It was’t gratitude, he thought; it was something else. Curiosity, he guessed, but why she should excite this in him was a mystery. He could read her life in the circumstances that he knew. Poor, semirural, relatively uneduc
ated, single motherhood too young, a life that fit the definition of the word straitened. Maybe strangled would be a better word. But it was’t as if he could fix anything for her. He was’t Henry Higgins, had no power to make her affluent or enlightened. Yet here he was, unable to resist knowing more about her strangled life.
She walked more rapidly now, like a woman who had somewhere to go, and Harry found himself panting a little as he worked to keep up. They passed the fountain, making their way to where the path continued into trees on the other side. Harry asked a question that bobbed to the surface of his mind. “Why are you letting me do this?” At her glance, he said, “I’m not anybody bad to know, but you don’t know that. I could be a serial killer.”
She kept walking, but now with the tiniest, most ghostly of smiles on her face. “I know you’re okay.”
“How? The aura thing? I’d watch depending too much on that if I were you. Get some independent confirmation before you let drunken strangers into your house in the middle of the night.”
She gave that ghost smile again. “It doesn’t come up much. We know most of the drunks that show up on our porch.”
He followed her along a mile-long trail through more pine woods and several more gardens of gardenia and crepe myrtle, then over a small wooden footbridge that spanned a cypress swamp. The heat was’t too bad yet this early in the spring, but the shade was still welcome. She stopped for a moment on the bridge. The floppy hat gave her a comic silliness, a contrast to her customary gravity. She turned to look out over the black water, dotted with islands of green algae and water lilies. It was quiet, far enough from the highway that you could hear the plop of frogs into the water and the cheeping of the crickets. Harry was startled by a sudden hammering sound, loud and harsh; he thought there must be some construction going on nearby. Maggie watched his face as he strained to see something mechanical through the trees. She gave that almost-smile again and said, “Woodpecker. See?” She pointed upward and to the left, and then he saw it, a huge bird not fifty feet from them, halfway up a dying pine, its head jackhammering so fast you couldn’t see the movement, could only hear the rat-a-tat-tat of its beak tearing at the bark to strip it of termites. Its head was topped by a bright red crest, and it looked to be at least as big as a crow, maybe bigger.
