by Jeffrey Lent
Victor yellow, pouring sweat, his mouth clamped upon itself. Eyes insensible, gone, eggs of the soul turned inside out. Not moving. Jamie laid the free hand on the table beside its pinned mate and took up the money and stepped around the other man on the floor and then quickly went up the steps and was outside. Suddenly cold and soaked with sweat. No sound yet from the cellar but that wouldn’t last. He closed the bulkhead door, searched in the dark and came up with a heavy brass padlock and this he snapped shut through the loop of the hasp. Then walked to the back corner and stopped and saw no one and began to run down the back alley along the river. His legs grabbing the ground like the dips and bursts of swallows. At some point running he lifted out the empty knife sheath and sent it sailing out into the river. His mouth wide, lungs gaping. His footfalls faint slaps echoing the pump and thrust of his chest.
“You didn’t bring me nothing to eat?” Still in her underwear, the rank tallow stub in the bedside saucer lit.
“Oh boy. Oh boy.” Went to the window and stood to peer down into the street. “No, I didn’t bring you nothing. Get your clothes on.”
“Jesus I’m dying.”
“Shut up. Get dressed.”
“Don’t you talk to me like that.”
He turned and said, “I’m sorry. You got to believe I am. It’s just I figure we got two minutes maybe only one to get out of here. Fuck oh fuck.”
“What’d you do?” Already with the dress over her head, her hands behind her back for the buttons.
He went on his knees and dragged out his valise and danced around the room, picking up his belongings. Remembering the extra set of cuffs under the mattress.
He took his money clip from his trousers and counted out what was left there and handed most of it to Joey. Still feeling the slight heft of the other money in his jacket pocket. “I ain’t got the time for it right this moment. What you need to do is get yourself to the station. Do it quick but don’t cause notice of yourself. Look at the schedule and give me half an hour. No, make it closer to three-quarters. Get us a pair of through tickets to Portland Maine.”
“Maine? Portland Maine? I’m not going to Maine.”
“Just do it. I’m not going to Maine neither. And don’t mess around with food or nothing like that. We’ll get something on the train, we’re lucky enough to get that far. Just buy the tickets and sit somewhere quiet and don’t talk to people. Try not to let anybody see how banged up you are. But just be casual, like it’s just what you’re doing, nothing else. You know what I mean?”
She bent to his valise, snapped it shut and leaned to blow out the candle stub. In the dark she said, “You don’t need to tell me how to act. But I got to get my stuff, we’re going to run.”
“That’s what I need the time for. I figure better me than you. Won’t be anybody expecting me there. At least I hope not. But you got to tell me where it is and how it’s laid out.”
She stood silent in the dark a moment and then said, “I got no reason to trust you.”
“It’ll save us time and trouble, we go on what we got right here. Outside of that, there’s nothing I can say.”
“It’s a pile of money.”
“It’s not your money I’m after.”
“I guess I know that. I guess that’s what bothers me.”
He picked up the valise and knocked it against his knee. “Maybe,” he said, “for right now you just got to have faith. The rest, we can sort out later. But I figure we already used up the time we got. So, are we going or what?”
“Boy Jesus, I hope I’m doing the right thing.” And stepped against him and held the top of his head with her hands and kissed him. Still holding him she told him where she’d lived and described the house inside and out and how her room lay regarding the streets front and back and the yards that grew around it and what to look for when he got inside and what to ignore. And how to go from there rough and quick to the station. Then both stood silent.
“I better get going,” he said
“You just make it to the station quick as you can.”
“I’m not going to run off on you.”
“I’ll see you there then.”
“Don’t even worry about it. Comes time to board, I’ll be the one right behind you, my hand in the middle of your back to help you up.”
“You better be there.”
“I’ll do her.”
She reached and took his head again, this time slipping her fingers deep into his hair and then turning and twisting them to raise him on tiptoes even as his knees swooped. Blood in his eyes, tears breaking onto his face. Her face close to his, that breath clean hot over him. She said, “You don’t make that train, I’ll hunt you down and shoot you.”
“I guess you’d have to stand in line.”
She kissed him. “Don’t you fuck with me.”
He found the house up the hillside and scouted it, walking once along the opposing sidewalk. Lights were on in different rooms and boarders sat out in rockers and gliders on the porch. He went up a ways and cut through into the backyard and stood in the shadow of an old paper birch and studied the back. He counted the second-story windows and found hers. The light was on as she’d left it the night before. A clump of lilac grew up the building, the upper branches obscuring the lower part of her window. He crossed quickly to the base of the lilacs, paused and found the way into their heart, a thin path opening into a small chamber walled round by the woven gnarled growth. He tipped his head back and studied and then went up quickly and paused again. There was no one in the room and it seemed undisturbed. He boosted himself onto the sill on his stomach and wormed his way forward and down. Then was all the way in and rolled onto his back with his knees pulled to his chest, not moving. There was no sound. The room was full of the smell of her. He found her two bags in the closet and went back and forth to fill the bags from her drawers and from under her bed and what was piled atop the bed and then standing in the dark rectangle of the closet to lift dresses down from pegs. Wrapped the three dresser-top bottles of cologne in a blouse and settled them down deep into the already packed clothes. And finally went back into the closet to squat and feel along the baseboard and found the loose lath behind the broken plaster and dug out the tin canister and opened it. It was packed with rolled bills.
Then, on impulse, reached again into the hole and drew out a small velvet bag with the heavy weight of coin. She had not mentioned this to him. It was a curious thing. Not the sort of thing she’d forget. Did she know him well enough to know he’d probe deep like that? He put the bag in his inner jacket pocket and the canister in among her clothes and fastened closed the bags. Then surveyed the room. There were more belongings but he had what she’d told him to take from there. He hefted the bags. There was no possibility of going down as he’d come up. He turned out the light and opened the door. He took up the bags and pulled the door shut with his wrist and went down the carpeted hall and the front stairs and out the front door where he turned and strolled down the hill.
The station was quiet, some few dozen people waiting on the benches with their luggage at their feet. A boy with a wooden tray on a strap around his neck for hawking cigarettes and sweets was curled sleeping in the hard shoulder of one bench, his cap pulled low to cover his eyes. Jamie set the bags on a bench empty but for an old countrywoman in black, her chin dipped into the wattles of her neck. He scanned over the small group. Joey was not among them. He stood and read the board and figured there were fifteen minutes to the next train running to Montpelier. And from there east. He went to the grillwork window and stood waiting for the clerk to finish reading the evening paper.
“I’m looking for a girl. Dark hair, wearing a yellow dress. Would’ve come in here the last half hour or so. Would’ve bought a pair of tickets to Maine.”
The clerk studied him. “That right?”
“It wasn’t me that knocked her around like that. I’m just trying to help her get to her aunt over there in Maine.”
“I bet.
”
“You think what you like. She did come in here and buy a set of tickets. And that other ticket wasn’t for her little sister to join her.”
The clerk looked hard up at him. Put his visor back on and took up his paper and from behind it said, “She’s on the platform.”
He went back to the bench and took up her bags and headed toward the doors onto the platform. Beside the doors was an old man with a bald dome and long hair growing behind his ears down onto his shoulders. His legs were gone at the knees and he sat on a wood plank with wheels at the four corners, his trousers pinned neat and tight under him. Even in the summer night over his shirt he wore an old greatcoat with epaulets and the vee stripes of a sergeant on the arms. Wedged firm between his knees was a tin cup with seed coins in it. He held a stout short stick in his hand to propel him over floors or cobbles or dirt, the one end capped with an iron spike, the other with a sewn leather pad. When Jamie paused the man spoke out, his voice near song. “Help a man, stranger. I fought the war and luckier was the man what died.”
“Where’d you lose your legs?”
“In the Wilderness, son.”
“That was a bad one, what I heard.”
“No man can imagine it, no man can repeat with words how it was.”
Without taking it from his inner pocket Jamie opened the neck of the drawstring velvet bag and drew out a ten-dollar gold piece and leaned and dropped it in the cup. The old soldier heard the sound, different from the thin chink of coin and his hand scrubbed inside the cup to lift the piece up where he turned it in his fingers, then ran it between his lips for his teeth to try. Then the hand with the gold disappeared into the folds of the coat and Jamie stepped on toward the platform. The man called out a thanks as Jamie went through the doors without looking back.
Joey was on a bench most of the way down the platform, away from the pool of light under the overhang, sitting alone with his valise between her feet. He could hear the train off away down the river, the sound coming through the night like the mighty roar of a band of angels. He set her bags down and sat beside her and said, “I gave one of your ten-dollar gold pieces to that stump-legged man inside.”
She was silent, looking ahead of her, the paper folder with the train tickets held in both hands on her lap.
“I’ll pay you back. There must’ve been some left after buying the tickets.”
She looked at him. Her face cut up and bruised with shadow so all there was to see of her was her loveliness. A face he might have dreamed if he’d known enough to. She said, “You think the train’ll beat the guineas here?”
“I hope. I hear it coming.”
“You wouldn’t hear them.”
“I know it.”
“That gold piece wasn’t yours to give.”
“I’ll pay it back. He’s blind. Wouldn’t know one banknote from another. I wanted him to know what he had.”
“I don’t want it paid back.”
“You didn’t even mention that bag, telling me what to get.”
“I knew you’d find it.”
“I can go get it back from him.”
“No,” she said. “Let him have it.”
They rode the Boston train to Montpelier and waited an hour and caught a local east to St. Johnsbury, where they would wait again for the Maine Central eastbound toward Portland. He had been stiff and silent during the first layover as they sat off again down in the shadows, able to see the statehouse dome lighted against the night sky somewhere behind them, and she sat without speaking as she had on the train, her head tipped a little to one side as if to conceal her marking but also as if to leave him be. He thinking all through that first layover that a fast man angry enough could make the distance from Barre during that hour. Once back on a train this lifted and she responded by relaxing enough to lean against him and sleep. So they came into St. Johnsbury in the long pale thin summer dawn, the town this early only ghosts of structures within the river mist and empty but for a stray handful of dogs teamed up to patrol the streets, and once a glimpsed milkwagon, the canary yellow paint blunted by the dawn but still brilliant, as if a voice speaking, calling some name down the empty streets. Here they got out and went away from the station to a nearby place where they ate red-flannel hash topped with fried eggs and toasted loaf-bread and then he reached across the table and she sat looking a long moment before she reached out and ran her curled fingers down the back of his hand. Except for small words of excuse or reassurance neither had spoken to the other since the evening before. But still they went away from their breakfast back toward the train hand in hand, as if for the moment God had paused and turned away, lingering elsewhere, content to let these two be the life of the world, their sweet unspoken understanding all the judgment ever needed.
They rode east less than an hour and left the Portland train in Littleton, New Hampshire, the train filled with families and groups traveling on into the White Mountains on holiday excursions. It was only drummers and salesmen and local people returning home who got off with them at the depot, the town west enough from the mountains to miss the splendor and air of the resorts just miles to the east. Instead there were mills and tanning sheds and leatherworks and shoe factories spread along the Ammonoosuc River that ran out of the mountains. They ignored the trolleys and trudged east from Main Street and followed the bow of the river past the leather sheds and found a cheap rooming house where the woman looked from Joey to Jamie and back again, her eyes bright with contempt for both but her wash-scalded red hand took his money paid out for a week.
Mornings he went out and bought hard rolls at a bakery and meat and cheese from a butcher and brought them back to the room where they had breakfast and then she made a sandwich and wrapped it up in the bag from the bakery and he stuck it in his pocket and walked to the depot to catch the train. This way he spent his days in Bethlehem and Twin Mountain and Fabyan and Bretton Woods and Crawford and Franconia, making his way around the high-storied white-colonnaded hotels, each one a thing imperial, seeming to him as magnificent and self-contained as ships upon the calm waters of tended sweeps of lawn, all overhung with the mountains close, upswept, delineated in the rarefied sharp-edged air. He studied the men playing golf and lingered near the tennis courts where men and women both played on the packed red clay surfaces. He made his way to the rear buildings and there talked with men in the stables and dairies and women working in the laundries and kitchen and dining room workers on breaks. He was offered work and each time he turned it down. He decided they had come to a very good place.
Late afternoons when he returned to the room she would be silent, angry, impatient as her face slowly lightened down the shades from purple black to reds and yellows over the days, as her skin transformed slowly back to its own tone, with only the impressions of watery proud-flesh around her eye, and the broken vessels of her nose healed and the small crusts appearing daily around the flanges of her nostrils grew smaller and then fell away altogether. And after the first day he learned to wait to tell her of his journeying. In the long summer evenings she would brush out her hair and with it loose and wild around her face they would go out to find someplace to eat. Sit silent eating the rough good food as around them men whose arms and faces were stained the color of walnut sat eating and speaking low to one another in a patois of French and English, a smell rising from them that was not death or putrescence but a mixture of lye and tannin and the sharp tang of some chemical compound—not so much the smell of dead cow or the waxen gleam of calf-leather but rather some crude shadow of the creature in between. And from time to time he’d look across to her and see her head tilted a way that made clear she was listening and following the jabber beside them. And he did not ask what she heard. They did not eat two nights in a row at the same place.
After eating they’d walk slowly back to their rooming house through the bat-slung dusk where they would sit on the bed and smoke his cigarettes, both of them barefooted, and he would tell her of his day, of what he’d s
een and where. Of what they might do and where when she was ready, and he held nothing out as absolute as if he was not the maker of plans but a simple scout for her authority. And as he talked he would always find the point to reach to her and begin to make his way through her clothes, still talking and she still listening, and sometime after this her hands would come over to him until they were both naked in the settling dusk when the words would stop, sometimes petering out as if a trail lost and other times clamped away with speed and violence.
Later, in full dark, they would lie side by side on their stomachs with their heads lifted up to the window and one’s hand laid smooth on the sweat-slick bowl of the small of the other’s back. One would smoke and hold the cigarette to the other’s mouth. The air already cool enough to chill delicious their sweat. And it was then she talked to him.
She could not remember her father. There had been a photograph so she knew what he’d looked like and she recalled sensations that matched the figure in the image: great roughened hands that enwrapped her body, the coarse bristle of his mustache, huge shoes, a shadow over the grass. She remembered being lifted and tossed up above his head while he stood, his hands up to catch and toss her again, over and over: Quebec. She remembered the trees on the lawn of the place in Saint-Camille and the bright whiteness of the house and the sailing summer clouds, all these things as she was thrown wild into the sky; but she could not, in her memory, make herself look down at that face looking up to watch her. All she remembered was the trees and the house and the sky. And not even the hands that caught her, only the moment of safety those hands made before they freed her again into the air. Marc LeBaron. “I got my mother’s hair,” she told Jamie. “His was blond, that thick blond hair that falls in waves not single strands.”
