A Hidden Place

by Robert Charles Wilson

  “My!” Creath said expansively. “This is a treat.”

  * * *

  It was round about midnight when Nancy Wilcox walked past the Burack house on DeVille.

  She was coming from the open field where the railway trestle crossed the Fresnel River, where Greg Morrow had left her when she refused to let him put his hand up her skirt.

  Greg was a pretty rough character, oldest son of a granary worker. He owned a decade-old Tin Lizzie with a blown cylinder in which he squired around whichever female he could talk into a ride. He chewed tobacco and he used what the Baptist Women called “gutter language.” Precisely the kind of date her mother would disapprove of … which was maybe why Nancy had agreed to go with him in the first place. His crudity was kind of fascinating.

  Ultimately, however, Greg was not the person Nancy wanted to do it with. If she had had any doubts, the events at the trestle had settled them. She was not a prude; she had read about free love in a book by H. G. Wells before her mother caught her with it (and had the small volume deleted from the town library); she had even done it a couple of times before, with a boy named Marcus whose family had since moved west.

  But not with Greg. Greg seemed to think it was owed him, something that was his by right, and Nancy did not feel obliged to encourage him in this delusion. So he had kicked her out of the Lizzie down by the trestle, which made her a little nervous because lately there had been hoboes gathering there,- she had seen their fires flickering in the angular darkness under the railway bridge. But she just walked steady and kept her head about her and pretty soon she was back among the streetlights and the box elders. She would catch righteous hell for getting home so late, of course. But in a way she was glad. She liked this time of night, liked to listen to the town ticking and cooling after a blast-furnace July day like this one had been. The midnight breeze on her face was soothing; the trees chattered to themselves in what she liked to imagine was a secret language.

  She gazed up at the gray outline of the Burack house against the stars.

  In the darkness it appeared to be just what that Mrs. Burack obviously imagined it was: a sturdy keystone in Haute Montagne’s social structure. You couldn’t see the peeling paint, the rain gutters clotted with mulch. Nancy smiled to herself, thinking of what her mother always said about the Buracks: something odd there, something definitely odd, and that girl in the attic!—about as talkative as a deaf-mute, and a lot less wholesome.

  Nancy peered up at the attic room and saw a faint light flicker there, like fox fire behind the sun-yellowed blinds.

  “Strange,” she said to herself….

  And there was that Fisher boy, now, too, the one who had stopped by the diner this afternoon. There had been rumblings about his situation, a fatherless family, mother a runabout, hints of some darker truth. But that could have been just the Baptist Women’s rumor mill at work, Nancy thought, grinding a very modest kernel of truth. He had seemed nice. If distracted. He had left his magazine at the diner. Nancy had gazed a long time at the cover of it: horses, guns, a range of purple mountains. He is from far away.

  She let the night air carry back her hair. She felt like a shadow sometimes, blowing through these night streets. Time carried her on like a cork on a wave—she was already eighteen—and she had lately become desperate with wondering: where was she bound? She sometimes dreamed of mountains (like the mountains on Travis Fisher’s pulp magazine), of cities, of oceans. She shivered, gazing up at the old Burack house.

  She wondered what sort of person Travis Fisher was, and what he dreamed about.

  In the attic room, the light flared brighter.

  Travis lay in bed, exhausted but helplessly awake, an uneasy excitement running in him like a river. He felt the unfamiliar pressure of the mattress under him. He had covered his nakedness with a single sheet, because it was summer and all the heat in the house traveled up to these high narrow rooms and was retained there. The attic, he thought, must be sizzling.

  She doesn’t make much noise.

  Anna Blaise, he thought, tasting the name: Anna Blaise, Anna Blaise.

  He had heard, during the long evening, the restless treadle of her sewing machine, her radio playing briefly. Then silence. Later on, the quick compression of bedsprings.

  The house made its own sounds, sighs and moans. Travis had propped open the window with a hardware-store expansion screen and every once in a while a breeze picked up the corner of the sheet. Sleep, he thought, and it was a prayer now: sleep, oh, sleep.

  Shortly after midnight he heard footsteps on the stairway beyond his door.

  Slow, heavy footsteps coming up from below. Aunt Liza didn’t carry that much bulk—it could only be Creath.

  This time of night! Travis thought.

  The footsteps paused outside his door and then proceeded upward.

  Strange, Travis thought.

  And now they were over his head. Creath, for sure.

  A brief, low burr of conversation. Anna’s voice like faraway music, Creath’s like the grumble of some rusted old machine.

  The repetitive complaint of the bedsprings.

  Jesus God Almighty, Travis thought, that poor little girl!—and he covered his ears with his pillow.

  Chapter Two

  The evenings were essentially the same for the next week and a half: an elaborate ritual dinner, Anna’s opacity and silences, Creath’s clenched-fist approach to conversation. Later there might be radio, Creath lighting up a cigar and occupying the parlor easy chair for the duration of “Amos &. Andy” or Ed Wynn or, Sundays, Father Coughlin’s “Golden Hour of the Little Flower.” Then everybody eased upstairs to hot and insulated beds, and Travis, if he stayed awake, might hear Creath tiptoeing into the attic room … not always, but too often. It forced Travis to look at his Aunt Liza’s nervous flutters with a greater degree of sympathy: she knows, he thought, she must know.

  Weekdays Creath drove him down to the ice plant before dawn. The thought of all that ice had made Travis imagine the plant might be a nice place in which to endure this long summer. But—although he did sometimes enter the cool length of the storeroom where block ice lay stacked like uncut fragments from some fairy-tale diamond mine—most of his work was in the tin shed where the refrigerating machinery roared and thumped, perversely twenty degrees hotter than the outside air. The work he did was mostly lifting and cleaning, and he quickly learned that the other men who worked here, mechanics and loaders and drivers, considered him a liability, contemptible, the boss’s nephew. He ate bagged lunches alone in a weedy field beyond the loading dock, staring into the brown Fresnel River. The ice industry was doomed, Creath had said, victim of the goddamned Kelvinator. It might survive a while longer here in Haute Montagne, but orders were already way down for this time of year. Travis found the knowledge perversely consoling. The work itself was tedious and frustrating, and when the frustration threatened to overwhelm him he decided to ask Nancy Wilcox for a date.

  That Friday evening after work he told Creath to let him off at the corner of Lambeth and The Spur. Creath accelerated his Model A pickup through a yellow light and said, “Your aunt will have dinner ready. You not hungry?”

  “I’ll get something down here.” He avoided the older man’s eyes. “Maybe see a movie.”

  “Waste of money,” Creath said, but he downshifted the truck and slowed long enough to allow Travis to leap out.

  There were still a couple of hours of daylight left. The sky was a powdery blue, the shadows stark and angular. He went directly to the diner. Nancy Wilcox had not been on his mind nearly as much as Anna Blaise … but Anna Blaise was a mystery, at once violated and aloof, as unapproachable as a cat. Nancy was someone he might talk to.

  She was there in the murky interior of the diner. An overhead fan stirred the air. The tables were all busy and there was a second waitress on duty. He sat at the counter, smiled, ordered the chuck steak and a cole slaw side and wondered how to approach her.

  He was not shy w
ith women, not in the ordinary sense, but he had had only a pittance of real experience. Back home only Millie Gardner, the neighbor girl, had spoken much with him, and by the time Travis left Millie was just turning twelve and had already begun to grow aloof. Other than that he had talked to his mother, his schoolteachers, a couple of girls doing what they obviously perceived as a kind of distasteful social work when he was left conspicuously alone at school functions. It was humiliating; but there were others who were, in a way, worse off; who were ostracized for some mental or physical deformity and not solely on account of their family situation. And although he had often enough prayed that it was otherwise, Travis knew, at least, that he was not despised altogether for himself.

  But that was back home. This was a new place. Here it was still possible that Travis could expect some of what he had so far been pointedly denied. Nobody knew him here, and that simple fact was as tantalizing as a promise.

  He lingered over the steaming plate of food, which he did not much want, killing time. There was no good opportunity to talk. Nancy moved deftly between the tall aluminum coffee urn and the soda fountain, balanced plates on her arms, pinned table orders on the silver carousel for the kitchen to pick up. He watched her pluck a strand of steamed black hair out of her eyes and thought: well, this is impossible. Nevertheless he lingered over his coffee and asked for refills. The hot black coffee made his heart beat faster. His eyes were on her constantly. And he thought: she at least notices me here.

  In time the tables began to empty, the humidity eased. She filled his cup for the third time and said, “Eight o’clock.”

  He looked at her, stupefied.

  She put her elbows on the counter. “That’s when I get off. Eight o’clock. That’s what you want to know, isn’t it?”

  “I guess it is.”

  “I’ve seen the Cagney film at the Rialto but there’s a new one at the Fox. Jewel Robbery. William Powell and Kay Francis. You like William Powell?”

  “He’s pretty good.”

  Travis had seen three moving pictures in his life.

  She smiled. “Well, I guess I’m going over there after work.”

  “I guess so am I,” he said.

  She surprised him by stopping off at the Haute Montagne Public Library and slipping three fat volumes into the night depository: a Hemingway novel, a book on astronomy, and something by a German named Carl Gustav Jung.

  Travis said, “You read all that?”

  “Uh-huh.” She gave him that smile again- it was harder now, defiant, and he guessed she must have been ribbed about her reading. “Don’t you read?”

  “Magazines mostly.” In fact he had had a fair amount of time for reading in the long winters back home. She would already have seen the dime western; and he was not prepared to admit to the stacks of stolen, borrowed, or dearly bought science fiction and adventure pulps he had ploughed through. Not when she was dumping Carl Gustav Jung into the night slot.

  They moved along the darkened sidewalks back toward Lawson Spur and the Fox Theater.

  There was a short line at the ticket box and Travis saw other girls there, high-school girls or just older, and observed how they looked at Nancy Wilcox, the crabbed sidelong glances and covert stares. It was a phenomenon he recognized, and he thought: What is there about her? He paid for two tickets and they sat together in the mezzanine, gazing down silently for a time at the plush velvet curtains over the screen while a fat woman played overtures on the Wurlitzer. Travis felt the girl’s warm pressure next to him. She smelled good, he thought, some perfume and just a lingering indication that she had put in a long day in a hot restaurant. It was a wholesome smell. It aroused him and it made him nervous: he wondered what was expected of him, whether he should hold her hand or keep to himself. He did not want to insult her. Then the lights flickered down, the organ hissed into silence, the movie started. It was one of those cock-tail-and-evening-gown movies, everybody pronouncing calculated bon mots in rooms that seemed to Travis too impossibly large and lushly furnished. He watched in a sort of dazed incomprehension, and when Nancy pressed her body toward him he intertwined his arm with hers and they were, at least, that close.

  After the movie they went for Cokes.

  The Wilcox girl’s hair had strayed down in front of her eyes again. She probed at the ice with her straw and said, “You don’t go out much, do you?”

  “Is it so obvious?”

  “No, Travis. Nothing wrong. Just you seemed a bit uncomfortable is all.”

  Travis was carefully silent.

  She said, “I guess you were kind of a misfit back where you came from.”

  “Your mother told you that?”

  “Said as much, I guess, but that’s not what I mean. I mean the way you move, the way you talk. Very, I don’t know, wary. Like something’s going to jump out at you.”

  “A misfit,” he said. “I guess that’s about it.”

  “I’m a misfit. Did you know that?” She sipped her Coke again.

  “Those books?”

  “Partly. Nobody reads in this town. Miss Thayer who works at the library, she doesn’t even read. But that’s not all of it.” She said, as if offering a vital confidence, “I don’t get along with people.”

  “I know what that’s like,” Travis said.

  “Partly it’s my mother. She makes a profession out of being righteous. She believes the world is going straight to hell. So I guess the pressure’s on me to live up to all that. I’m supposed to be perfect—a saintly little female Imitation of Christ. I guess I just, ah, cracked.” She laughed. “She’s so afraid of everything, you know, Travis? Afraid and suspicious. And I’m the opposite.”

  He smiled distantly. “Never afraid?”

  “Not of what she’s afraid of.”

  “What’s she afraid of?”

  Nancy gazed out the big window of the diner. It was way past dark now. All the cars had their lights on. “Love. Sex. Politics. Dirty words.” She waved her hand. “All that.”

  “Oh,” Travis said, taken aback.

  “Are you afraid of those things?” She was staring at him now.

  “Hell, no,” he said, hoping it was not a lie.

  But she laughed and seemed to loosen up. “No,” she said, “no, I don’t guess you are.” And she drained her Coke. “Walk me home?”

  At the corner of the street where she lived Nancy turned and touched his arm. “I don’t want my mother to see us. She’ll be on to us soon enough anyway. You can kiss me if you want, Travis.”

  The offer surprised him. He was clumsy but earnest.

  She nodded thoughtfully then, as if she had entered some particularly revealing notation in a private notebook. His hands lingered on her.

  “One day,” she said, “you have to tell me the truth about it.”

  “About what?”

  “You know. Where you came from. What happened there.” She hesitated. “Your mother.”

  “She was a very fine woman,” Travis said.

  “Is that the truth?”

  He stepped away from her. “Yes.”

  Chapter Three

  Three Sundays after Travis arrived in Haute Montagne, Liza Burack made up her special mille-feuilles for the Baptist Women’s bake sale.

  The day was dusty and hot, as all the days had been that parched summer, and the baked goods were set up on the lawn of the First Baptist, in the shadow of the high quatrefoil stained-glass windows which were the building’s only adornment. Reverend Shaffer had brought out the big sprucewood tables and Mrs. Clawson had provided drop cloths. The edibles were displayed thereon—quite artistically, Liza thought, the candies and pastries in attractive circles like tiny works of art. Shirley Croft’s almond cake had been given, as usual, pride of place. Shirley herself stood guard against the circling flies, flailing with an elder branch and wearing the sort of vigilant expression her late husband might have displayed to the Germans at the Battle of the Somme. Faye Wilcox was at one end of the table, Liza at the othe
r, like the two polarities of an electrical cell.

  I will just drift down, Liza thought. After all. Appearances. And what with the way things were going … well.

  She moved lightly past the creamhorns and butter cookies.

  She liked these times best, she thought, all the people around her, the aimless chatter. It was like being pulled in many directions at once. If she closed her eyes she could almost imagine herself floating, the baked goods like scattered islands in an ocean of afternoon, the heat on her like a benediction. Everything condensed in this minute point of experience.

  But such ideas worried her (her thoughts strayed too easily these days) and she forced herself to stay on course: Faye Wilcox, she instructed herself, talk to Faye.

  The Wilcox woman was heavy and hostile. Her arms were laced under her bosom. It looked for all the world as if her body were some unpleasant excresence that had leaked, unavoidably, into public sight. Well, Liza thought, it’s that outfit, hardly better than a sack. But who am I to talk? She glanced with momentary embarrassment at herself. Her cornflower dress was streaked with white from the morning’s baking. She had neglected to change. And had she combed her hair? Lord, Lord, where, was her mind?

  “Lovely afternoon, Liza.” It was Reverend Shaffer, cruising across the broad green church lawn. He was a young man and there was, Liza thought, something almost feminine about him, such a contrast with the Reverend Kinney who had died just two autumns ago. Reverend Shaffer used the pulpit to deliver obscure parables, to pose questions; Reverend Kinney had been more concerned with answers. It was, Liza thought, too symptomatic of the changes that had overtaken the nation, the town, her life. But she mustn’t dwell on that. “It is nice,” she said.

  The flies were intense, the heat debilitating, there were no customers.

  “Everybody loves your napoleons,” the Reverend said.

  “Mille-feuilles,” Liza said automatically.