A fire at sea is a terrible thing, because fuel will continue to burn as it spreads out over the surface of the water. Dodie was hospitalized for over a month. I remember overhearing, as a child, that it was there she’d become an addict, that Jimmy the chauffeur had then kept her in drugs for decades.
I always imagined a large box of Blue Tip needles and vials of morphine in her dressing room closet, alongside her bazillion pairs of Belgian shoes.
It was late, and I tried willing myself to feel tired. Over dinner, I’d begged Dean to take me to the Johnston-farm auction, so I wouldn’t have to go alone the next morning with his Uncle Weasel.
“Only if we get up at three,” he’d said. “Otherwise you’re on your own.”
CHAPTER 9
Of all the goddamned pissant jerry-rigged piece-of-shit ways to run a place,” Dean fumed, throwing up the hood of a third tractor.
It was just before Tuesday’s dawn on Collamer Road. Dean and his Uncle Weasel were trying to figure out which vehicle contained the farm’s only working truck battery.
I was trying to stay out of their way.
“Wasn’t me took it out the truck in the first place,” complained Weasel. He ran a hand over his white crewcut, sucking his lower lip high as a bulldog’s.
“You might still for once get your thumb out of your ass and help me,” said Dean.
“Ain’t seen you out balin’ much hay this summer,” said Weasel.
“Didn’t see any of you pay me for last year.”
Weasel strained for a comeback, whining, “Well . . . month ago when I used that battery, I left it right in that truck.”
“Last time you did a lick of work, you still had your own goddamn teeth,” muttered Dean.
He slammed the tractor hood back in place and moved on to the safety-yellow bulk of a prewar Hyster forklift.
Weasel put a cigarette in his mouth and shuffled outside, then scraped a kitchen match along the doorframe.
The air was still, but he cupped a hand around the flame, making his face shine copper in the dim blue.
“Bunny,” said Dean, “you okay? Eyes look like two holes burned in a blanket.”
“Last time I was up this early I was still at the party,” I said. “Want some coffee?”
“Nope.”
“Could we use the battery from my car?”
“Nope.”
“Want me to drive to Sears and buy you one?”
“Oooh,” he said, smiling and aping that drawn-out upstate pronunciation, brimming with secret umlauts and flattened midwestern vowels, “now you wouldn’t want to go’n do that. Might get a perfectly good battery from Weasel’s wife’s second cousin, the one with the broken dryer, if you could find her husband half a fan belt for his brother’s lawnmower.”
“So his brother would fix the dryer?”
“After he got around to, y’know, that snow-m’bile on the front lawn,” he said, giving up on the forklift.
“Wouldn’t want to rush him.”
“Oh, gaaad no. Them snow-m’biles’re no Swiss picnic.”
“Yut,” I agreed, taking a gulp of my coffee.
He moved on to a small red Case. “Not in this one it must be out in the damn pole barn.”
“Tractor drove into a bar,” I said. “Pulled up a stool. Leaned on its front wheels, weeping. Bartender said, ‘Jesus, you look terrible. What happened?’”
Dean nodded and folded up the dented hood.
“Tractor looked up,” I continued, “said, ‘I got a John Deere letter.’”
“Bingo,” crowed Dean.
He smiled and flipped the leads off with his thumbs, lifting the battery up like a grail.
We drove slowly, rattling down godforsaken roads as the sun came up. I was in the middle, and every time Dean had to shift, the gear knob mashed his hand into my knee.
Weasel popped a square of nicotine gum in his mouth and lit a Marlboro chaser. There was no radio, and I knew the two of them could have ridden in silence for days. I wanted to go back to sleep, but every time we took a curve I was afraid I’d end up in Weasel’s lap.
“So how old is Johnston?” I asked Dean.
“Must be in his eighties,” he said. “His daughter’s mom’s age, I think. I played football with a couple of his grandsons. Big fuckers. Nice enough. One of ’em told me in 4-H that if you picked up your calf every day, you’d be able to lift it when it was a cow.”
“That work?”
“Never really found out. Something always makes you miss a day. Next thing you know, it’s too big.”
I laughed. I could just see him tottering around the barn, thin as a length of bamboo, short hair bristling blond, arms full of baby cow, wanting to get tough enough so his big brother couldn’t kick his ass anymore.
Primogeniture rankled him still, but if the farm had been earmarked for Dean instead of his brother, it would have created terminal drag on our escape velocity.
He denied wanting to go. Told me Syracuse was Real Life, and that I should get used to it, that I’d been raised in the airless Potemkin villages of the rich where there would never be true sustenance—arguments always tinged with his Sparta, my Athens.
But Dean was still that kid who garnered a broken arm flying his bike off the barn roof. The desire to get the hell out had been there long before I showed up, he just needed a little help staying airborne.
I wove my fingers through his and let my head rest on his shoulder. He rubbed the back of my hand with the edge of his thumb. It would happen.
“Johnston wasn’t ever right after he found them girls,” said Weasel, suddenly.
I looked over at him, surprised as hell.
He didn’t turn his head.
Started futzing around with the latch on the wind-wing. His thumbnail, a bloom of red-black, had recently stopped a hammer.
“Kinda let the place run down,” he said. “His daughter’s husband run it, mostly, till he got his hand caught in that old baler. And Johnston had some stroke. Not any of ’em much good after that. Them boys’re down-city, workin’ for wages.”
Workin’ for wages: the yeoman-farmer’s vilest epithet, one Dean’s father applied to us often.
“You ever talk to him about finding the girls?” I asked.
Weasel swung his head slowly left and just looked at me, chewing away.
“Why’d you wanna do that?” he said, finally.
I could see Dean biting his lip to keep from laughing and had to look at the truck’s ceiling myself or we would have both lost it.
I pressed my thigh against his as hard as I could, and he pushed back.
“John Deere letter,” he said, grinning and sputtering. “Not bad.”
“Little slow on the uptake,” I answered, and he gave my hand a squeeze.
“You’re a schmaht man, Vendell, I vant you should know,” said the fabled Fleischmann, eyes twinkling as he hooked a hand around Weasel’s elbow.
We were standing on shit-spattered concrete, the edge of a cattle pen alongside one of Johnston’s barns. Pickups wheezed into the dirt yard behind us, disgorging passengers in bib overalls or shiny high-waisted jeans. They were quiet—no shouted greetings, no Kiwanis-meeting jollity—just grim knots of men pushing back feed-caps, scratching their heads and commiserating about wheat and soybeans and mud. The price of Atrazine. The goddamn government.
“So, Vendell, you ready for getting back in the dairy business?” crooned the auctioneer. He was a little hunchbacked, with a nimbus of white hair.
Weasel shrugged. Chewed his gum.
“Got for you some real beauties, here . . . size, shtyle—”
“Condition and breeding,” I mumbled, smiling.
Fleischmann grinned at that, made me a conspirator with one broad wink over the turtle-shell curve of his shoulder.
He wore a lime windbreaker zipped to the chin. Long sleeves, despite the heat.
“And you are the new Mrs. Bauer?” he asked, releasing Weasel and taking my hand in both
of his. “Izzy Fleischmann.”
“Madeline Dare,” I said. “A pleasure to meet you, Mr. Fleischmann. Dean’s told me you’re the best in the business.”
“Please, call me Izzy. We dispense with formality in such a setting, yes?”
He looked me up and down, eyes pausing on my chest for a second. “A nice gezinta girl.” Izzy pointed his chin at Dean, not letting go of my hand. “So, nu, how you do so good, young Dean, in the marriage department?”
“I showed her the real America—red necks, white bread, blue eyeshadow,” said Dean, putting one strong arm around my shoulders and sweeping the other through the air to present the cow pen’s expanse for my delectation. “Whole new world.”
“Quelle epiphany,” I said, rolling my eyes.
“Won her heart,” continued my intrepid spouse. “Danced her into the ranks of white trash.”
“I prefer garbage blanc.”
“French,” said Dean. “Candyass language.”
“Please excuse my husband,” I sweetly countered. “He studied German in school. After years of work and dedication, he can open his mouth and make rocks fall out.”
Izzy pinched my cheek. “You,” he said, “I like.”
Weasel, too long ignored, spat his gum onto the ground. “She wants to talk to Johnston ’bout them two girls was killed on his place. Works for that newspaper.” He kicked up a little pile of dirt and mashed it over the wrinkled wad of Nicorette, then walked away down the long railing.
“Oh, for chrissake,” said Dean, setting off behind him.
Izzy watched them go, then turned to me. “The newspaper?” he asked.
I shivered, a little “goose walked over my grave” tremor.
“It’s not for the paper,” I said.
He crossed his arms. “For what, then?”
I looked away. “I’m just, uh, curious.”
“So, Mrs. Curious,” said Izzy.
He waited until I was uncomfortable enough to glance back, to find him squinting in appraisal of me.
“He’s in the barn over there, Farmer Johnston,” he said. “In a wheelchair. My opinion, I don’t think he can tell you much, anymore. I don’t think he knows what day this is. Today, his own what-they-call-it, heartbreak auction.”
“Oh, you know . . . that’s okay,” I said.
“So, then, you don’t care about knowing, why come here?” he said, cocking an eyebrow. “Is a little fishiness. A puzzle.”
“Indeed,” I said.
“No, really,” he said. “Now you make me curious. Now I am actually fascinated.”
I smiled at him.
He ducked his head a little, sideways. “You don’t want to answer me? So, don’t answer.”
I didn’t. We both stood there until the silence started making me jumpy. He was good at this.
I couldn’t stand it, blurted, “So, Izzy . . . That’s short for Isaac?”
He nodded. Maybe warmed a little.
“I had a great-great-grandfather Isaac,” I rattled on. “Always liked the name. Makes me think of whaling captains . . . all those Yankee guys.”
“Me it reminds of little old men in Brooklyn, or maybe Vilnius,” he said, smiling so his crows’-feet got all crinkly. “Always having an argument . . . still with herring in their beards, shaking a finger in the other one’s face.”
He raised both hands, right index fingers bent.
The gesture made his sleeves pull back, revealing the start of a bluish scrawl down his left forearm.
1436 . . .
I flinched.
“The four,” I said.
I lifted my hand, resting a fingertip on his arm, just beneath the spot at which that second numeral’s crossbar terminated.
The tattooist had taken the time to ink a neat little perpendicular stroke there. A flourish. “How could anyone—”
Fleischmann cleared his throat. “Long time ago,” he said.
My hand fell away, and he tugged the elasticized cuff back over his wrist.
“I beg your pardon,” I said. “That was thoughtless of me.”
“No,” he said. “Not thoughtless. I don’t believe you could manage that, to stop thinking. Such a state, such a condition . . . I don’t believe you are quite capable of it.”
Fleischmann passed his hand slowly across my line of sight.
“Watch,” he said. “Follow . . .”
He worked his fingers through an odd pose, a stage gesture, drawing my gaze with the motion until he’d brought that same bent index finger to the corner of his own eye.
“Look here . . .” he said, smiling again. “You like, I tell your fortune.”
“Right now?”
“You don’t believe? Oh, but I am very good. With this I made my living, first year in America. Just like the lady who taught me promised. She said, ‘If you can tell people part of the truth about themselves, you never again go hungry.’”
“But if you tell them more than part?”
“Ah,” he said, “I asked her the same question. She said, ‘Most cases they kill you. My advice, you want to hold something back.’”
“Very wise,” I said.
“Of course wise, because she was old like you can’t believe,” he said. “So old she was growing backwards. Everything shrinking, even her head. Her nose touched her chin, almost. The Rom, sometimes you can’t tell what age, but this lady—”
“Rom?”
“A Gypsy,” he explained.
“Thought they hated outsiders . . .”
“Me and this lady,” he said, “in the war it happened that we got jammed together on a train. A journey of several days, during which we faced some uncertainty . . .”
I swallowed.
“She was with her youngest son—youngest but older than me, back then, maybe even old as I am now.”
A small gaggle of farmers walked by. Fleischmann’s eyes flicked over them, and he kept silent until they were well past us.
“Very ill, this man,” he continued, “and I was able to do him a small kindness before he died. His mother was grateful. She wanted to give me something in return. We had nothing, you understand? We had been left nothing, for this journey.
“‘Another time,’ she said, ‘I would have given you a horse or a fine coat. But I do not have even bread, and so I will give a secret. I will teach you to know the future.’”
“With cards?” I asked.
“We had no cards,” he said. “I told you, we had nothing.”
I waited, didn’t want to interrupt.
He was quiet for another moment, glancing away before he spoke again. “She taught me how to study faces. ‘It’s not difficult,’ she said, ‘but you have to look and look, until the secrets come out. They cannot stay hidden, if you are quiet for long enough, because the secrets are foolish, and they have no patience.’”
He stopped, looking at me. “She told me to practice on her,” he said, finally. “I complained that it was too dark to see her face. ‘For this you need no light,’ she said, ‘just to look. Just to wait.’”
He sighed.
“What did you see?”
“Everything,” he said. “I saw everything.”
“And did you hold something back?” I asked.
“I told her nothing,” he said.
“Why not?”
“Because she died, while I was watching. The real secret. Her gift to me, even. She took with her my fear.”
I believed him.
“As for you, Mrs. Curious,” he said, “you got a good face. More than pretty . . .”
I could feel my cheeks flush, and I looked down at my shoes.
“So, you don’t believe it?” He tilted my chin back up with the tip of his finger. “Just look,” he said. “Don’t blink. Try for me, long as you can. Hold your head still.”
I couldn’t relax, having someone peer at me so intently. The only way I could stand it was just to let my eyes go unfocused.
He laughed. “Of course you don’
t believe it,” he said. “Or maybe you think you don’t deserve it, but people always gonna look at you when you walk in a room. Men. Not a common face. Too sad, though, too serious, and maybe a little scared now, like you taking on something big, something you’re not sure about . . .”
He looked thoughtful and leaned toward me, raising my head another half inch. “You think you got no protection. But I see strength here, determination.”
He tapped twice on the center of my chin and then took his finger away.
“What the hell you doing in this place is another question,” he continued. “Not your people here. You think I’m kidding when I say I know condition und breeding . . .”
That made me look him in the eye.
“There it is,” he said, “you come here because you got no place else . . . not yet. Maybe you gonna find . . .”
Fleischmann stopped and shifted his eyes away, looking past my shoulder.
“Wait,” I protested, “when you say I might find . . .”
“Not everything,” he said. “Already I told you—”
“Just that. Not everything. Just if ‘not yet’ means ‘someday.’”
Fleischmann looked at me, hard. “Truth?”
I swallowed again. Nodded.
He put a hand around my wrist, gripping it tight from beneath. The gravity of the gesture made the back of my neck buzz.
“You want to find a destination, you gotta take a road,” he said, “gotta start walking.”
He kept talking, faster now. “Some people, they pick the soft one. The easy one. You gonna take the hardest road. Only thing you can do.”
I closed my eyes, and this time he didn’t tell me not to blink.
“But when you start,” he said, “could be you don’t come back.”
“Come back here?” I asked, hopeful.
Fleischmann shook his head, dropped his voice to a confidential hiss. “Zei gesund,” he said. Go in health. Survive.
He made it a blessing.
“Thank you,” I said.
“And here is coming your husband,” he said, voice louder, slipping back into professional bonhomie.
He laid a hand along my shoulder and turned me to face the approach of Dean and Weasel.
A Field of Darkness Page 7
