Читать книгу The Wicked City - Beatriz Williams, Beatriz Williams - Страница 15

AS IT so happens, I can name the exact hour I last saw my stepfather, though I’m not going to inform Special Agent Oliver Anson of the Bureau of Internal Revenue of that fact. I’m not going to inform Anson of anything, see, because the word informer, where I come from, carries about the same ugly weight of blasphemy as the word for a man who engages in a certain intimate act with his nearest maternal relation, from time to time. (Yes, that word.) So what I’m about to say remains right here betwixt you and me, understand? Nobody likes a rat.

The hour was dawn. End of August, nineteen hundred and twenty. Hot as the dickens. Yours truly was up early, gathering the eggs from the miserable henhouse out back, while the sunlight crept down the mountainside and the warm mist coated the grass. In another week, I was supposed to be heading back to college, and by God I should have been counting down the seconds. Not that I especially loved college and the sneering razor-nosed girls who inhabited the joint, oh no. You see, by the time of that burning August of 1920, River Junction had taken on all the aspects of an earthly perdition for me. That’s why I woke up early—not because the eggs needed gathering, although they did, but because nobody else was up. You could stand there in the middle of the chicken coop and watch the creeping of the sun, the stir of the mist, the slow, deliberate greening of the landscape, and your only company was the hens. The birds whistling good morning from the branches of a nearby birch. The damp earth smelling of loam and chicken shit. You know the feeling. Your feet planted firm in the center of all Creation.

Until he turned up, anyway.

He. Him. My mother’s husband. Name of Dennis, but everybody calls him Duke. Duke Kelly. The dear soul was so kind as to bequeath me his surname when he married my mother, and I do believe he’s been aiming to collect the debt in installments ever since.

Now, first and foremost, you have to understand that everybody in River Junction loves Duke. Loves him! He’s not the mayor, but he’s the next closest thing: the mayor’s best pal. Friendly fellow, every brick of him mortared with charm. Dresses in clean, neat clothes; brushes back his dark, curling mane with just the right dollop of peppermint hair oil. You’d like him too, if you happened to be stopping in River Junction for a cup of coffee at the depot café, and he happened to be sitting at the next table drinking his own cup of coffee and smoking a cigarette he’d rolled himself right then. He would strike up a conversation with you, ask you where you were headed, tell you that’s a right nice-looking car you got out there, or else if your car’s a jalopy, remark on your right nice-looking wife. Offer you a cigarette and a light. If you needed directions, say, he would sit down with you and your map and show you the exact best route to your destination, where to pick up a couple gallons of gas if you need them, and you would leave town thinking that River Junction was an awful nice place, nice people, that’s what’s grand about America, don’t you think, small towns like River Junction and the folks who live there. Salt of the earth. And I’m not saying you’d be wrong.

So I was standing in the chicken coop, as I said, basket of eggs hooked over my elbow, armpits a little damp already even though the sun hadn’t yet touched us, there in the holler of two mountains that constitutes the geographic boundaries of River Junction. I heard the soft tread of footsteps on wet grass, the wiry squeak of the chicken coop door. My stomach fell.

“Hello there, Geneva Rose,” he said. “You’s up awful early this morning.”

“Eggs wanted gathering.”

“That so?”

“Every morning.”

“You need a hand, maybe?”

“No, thanks.”

“Lemme give you a hand.”

“I said no thanks. I like to stand out by myself, in the morning.”

“Well, now. That ain’t too friendly, honey.”

I shrugged.

“Why don’t you just turn about and look at me, Geneva Rose? Turn about and say good morning to your old daddy.”

“You ain’t my daddy,” I said, but I turned around anyway, kind of slow, so I might fix my face in just the right expression as I went. Stiff and stony, so he couldn’t see what I was thinking. Couldn’t tell the revulsion coiling around my guts at the sight of his shining hair, his smooth, tanned skin, his blue eyes like the color of summer. His full lips stretched in a smile, just wide enough that you could see the tips of his teeth, golden with tobacco, right upper incisor chipped at the corner from a fall out the saloon door four years back. Or that was the story, anyway. I never was there when it happened.

“You ain’t got no call to speak to me like that, Geneva Rose Kelly. When I reared you up like you was my own. Sent you off to school like your mama wanted. Never asked no questions. Never treated you no different.”

Well, I could dissect the falsehoods in that speech one by one, the way they taught me in college: how to disassemble somebody’s argument like you might disassemble a chicken for frying. Not that any of the other girls at college had ever fried a chicken, my goodness no, let alone plucked it and pieced it and dipped it in flour. But I didn’t pick those words apart. Not out loud. Dear reader, I am no idiot.

“And I appreciate that kindness, Duke. I really do. But I’m not your daughter, and that’s a fact. And I never was any good at pretending things that aren’t true.”

“Just listen to you, baby girl. Sounding like some kind-a lady. Like one-a them grammar books or something. You learn to talk that way at college? You set to thinking you’re too good for your old daddy?”

“Course not.”

“Because that’s how it sounds to me, Geneva Rose.”

“Well, that ain’t how it is.”

“Now, that’s better.” He nodded and reached for my cheek. “That’s more like my baby girl. You was but two years old when I laid eyes on you. When your mama come back home from New York City. Prettiest baby I ever seen.”

I turned my head away. Took a step back. The smell of his hair oil stung my nostrils. The smell of his shaving soap. He wore a blue checked shirt, same color as his eyes, tucked into dungarees held high by plain black suspenders. Sweat already beading at his temples. Lips red and damp.

“Don’t you go a-larking off, baby girl,” he crooned. “Ain’t nobody up around here excepting you and me. Your mama’s still abed.”

“She won’t be long.”

“Sure she will, sugar. She don’t rise herself up till noon sometimes. Just a-drinking and a-staring at the ceiling, your mama.”

His breath smelled like cigarettes. Wee dram of brown skee, too, if I wasn’t mistaken. Liquid courage, to use another word for it, which maybe explained what he was doing there in that chicken coop, in the thick August dawn while my mother slept in her bed, one week less a day before I should have been leaving for my second year of college.

“Baby girl,” he said. “Don’t you be shy, now. I’ll treat you right. You know I will. I treat everybody right that treats me right.”

“I think you best be fixing to get back inside that house, Duke Kelly,” I said. Edging to the right. Clear line for the frail wire-screen door of the coop. The patch of sun on the opposite slope was falling fast now. The air turning to a foggy gold. “You best fix to get back inside before somebody sees you out here.”

“Who’s a-going-a see us? Ain’t nobody up. Not on a hot old morning like this-un.”

I kept on staring at his nose without looking, imagining some kind of shade between our two faces, I guess, some kind of blind, so I wouldn’t be giving myself away. Another rightward step.

“Johnnie’s up, I reckon. Johnnie’s always up early.”

“Johnnie don’t know from nothing. Now just you stop yourself a-moving about like that, Geneva Rose. Let me get a look at you. See how you filled out this summer. Almost a woman grown now, ain’t you? Just almost.”

So I froze up, and you would, too, if you’d heard his voice like that, like the purr of an African cat, chilling your young bones from the inside out, worrying down your spine. Or maybe you wouldn’t. Maybe I’m the only one who hears that bass snarl of malice in Duke Kelly’s voice. Everybody else just thinks he’s a real nice fellow. Anyway, I froze up, paralysis of fear, muscles all stuck in their joints, such that I didn’t even flinch when Duke’s big hand came to rest on the collar of my dress.

“That’s better,” he said. “That’s my good baby girl.”

I waited and waited while that hand crawled all over my bosom, pinching and squeezing. While that voice crawled over my ears. I waited until he came in close with his mouth open, panting hot on my face, cheeks smudged red, and then I drove my fist into his stomach hard as I could, knocking his rank skee breath right from his belly, and then I ran. Ran straight through the door of that chicken coop, ripping the wire, ripping my skin, and then I did a stupid thing. See, I should have gone into the house, where Mama and the boys lay asleep, where Johnnie sat eating his porridge at the kitchen table, spoon by spoon with a drop of molasses, but I was so scared I wasn’t thinking straight. I ran for the creek instead, dumb bunny as I was back then, ran for the creek and the old fishing hole where we used to spend our summer afternoons, me and the boys, when I was home from school. Of course, the creek was screened by willows and thick with skeeters, and nobody came down there at that time of day, nobody at all, and you couldn’t hear nobody talking or screaming from down there, either, on account of the trees and the way the creek makes a holler betwixt two sloping banks, see, into which all these sounds find themselves trapped like crawdads at the bottom of a wooden barrel.

So why did I make for the creek? God knows. Just a young, dumb bunny as I was back then. Not thinking straight.