Читать книгу Mislaid - Nell Zink - Страница 9

Where the yard ended, the pines started. Among them were old ruined houses, just humps left of their two brick chimneys, and little burial grounds. They were popular destinations. Along with thin slabs of marble, some still standing, they had beer bottles, mattresses, and old car seats. The nearby ponds had their banks trampled down from fishing.

Every time they came back from a voyage of discovery, Peggy would examine her house carefully from the deep cover of the underbrush on the edge of the yard. But there was never any sign that anyone had dropped by. No tire tracks in the mud.

Peggy had not forgotten the intellectual and social ambitions she had started life with only a decade before. Years so weary and routine laden, they seemed like a single year that had repeated itself. She wanted to be creative and self-reliant. Her plan was to be a successful playwright. With her earnings from royalties she would one day have a comfortable home again, worthy of Mickey and Byrdie. Though she had her doubts about whether Byrdie would visit, or even want to talk to her, and how all that would make her feel.

First she had other things to attend to. She had saved housekeeping money for years in a sock and had enough to spare to buy provisions. They were not big eaters. They would need a kerosene heater and lamps, but not until the fall. First renovations were in order. She nailed down linoleum to keep from falling through rotten places in the floor. There was a fair-sized gap in a corner of the kitchen, under a dead boiler that sat flaking rust. She discovered the hole when a possum crawled out and startled bumbling around like a fool. Luckily she had a broom and could herd it back down into the crawl space.

The lawn never needed mowing because of the standing water. The bug situation was correspondingly dire, but no worse than the Mekong Delta, as some poets called Stillwater Lake. Still, she fixed the screen doors before she covered the cesspool. That was the obvious order of priority. She acquired a camp stove to heat water. It was easy to sell Mickey on the virtues of simple foods that require no cooking or dishwashing, such as potato chips and cocktail wieners.

She set up her portable typewriter on the table. She would write under a pseudonym as did the Brontës. Anne, Emily, Charlotte, and Branwell. Also known as Acton Bell, Ellis, Currer, and—did the boy Brontë even write? Or just drink himself to death?

She couldn’t remember. She had no place to look it up. She had snagged some books of plays on her way out the door: Shaw, Hart, Synge. She hadn’t thought to take the one-volume Columbia Encyclopedia.

It didn’t matter to her plan. She could still copy the basic principle. Publish under a fake name while dwelling in the lonely fastnesses of the moors. She wasn’t clear on what moors were, but the Brontës made them sound every bit as damp as Tidewater. As well as freezing and tubercular, but that wasn’t her problem. She would be the Brontë of warm, malarial moors, the dramatist of the Great Dismal Swamp.

After the big money started coming in, she would move to New York. From her picture window above Astor Place, Mickey and Byrdie at her side, she would laugh at Lee’s creaky house, his stagnant lake, his noblesse oblige pseudo-income.

Lee had distractions, what with his work at the college and keeping track of where Byrdie was at any given time (students were lined up to babysit and passed him like a baton), but he got a judge to issue a warrant. The charges: kidnapping, reckless endangerment, vandalism, and something about the welfare of a child.

The judiciary was happy to help. The police were not so responsive. Lee called them several times a day, wondering where they were. He wanted them to take copies of Peggy’s fingerprints. She hadn’t stolen any money when she left. Ergo, he surmised, she would soon embark on a life of crime, endangering Mireille’s safety in a criminally insane manner.

But the sheriff and all his deputies seemed to regard Peggy as a grown woman with a right to run away. And who would have expected her to abandon a little daughter? It troubled them more that she hadn’t taken the son.

As they fantasized (a primary investigative tool of law enforcement) freely and at length about her motives, alone or over drinks with friends, the sheriff and his deputies consistently came to feel that getting her son away from Lee ought to have been her first priority.

After they finally came and went, Lee dragged himself around the house to eradicate all traces of her. Clothes she hadn’t worn in ten years. Light reading for ladies such as the Foxfire books and Virginia Ghosts. Her Mirro omelet pan, open admission of her inability to make an omelet. Cher records. They all went into the trunk of a beat-up Volvo and from there into a Dumpster at a wayside. Except the Cher records, which he abandoned on the shoulder of a deeply shaded back road, to make sure no one would suspect he had anything to do with them.

“You’re suffering from female trouble,” Cary told Lee over lunch at the Bunny Burger. “It’s time you sought professional help.”

“A shrink only helps when you don’t know what you want. I feel I’m in touch with my desires, thank you.”

“I meant a psychic. Your aura is navy blue.”

“Cary.” He used the tone his daughter used to say “Daddy.”

“I took a course at Edgar Cayce,” Cary protested. “My ESP is very strong!”

“And when did you get the diagnosis? In the poetry workshop business, we always wait until the check clears.”

“I have a heightened sensitivity to feelings. Some people only know what you’re feeling when you’re looking at them, but us psychics can feel it over hundreds of miles. We’re tapped into the web of life.”

“And what do you call people who know what you’re feeling and don’t give a shit?”

“That’s why they call it female trouble.”

“My wife is masculine as a mailed fist,” Lee said, paraphrasing a necktie ad from a magazine. “Did you get it on under the pyramid yet?” The Edgar Cayce Center in Virginia Beach was famous for its rooftop pyramid, modeled on the geometric eternity machines of the Egyptians, under which lunch meat would not spoil and orgasms were exceptionally rapturous.

“You want my help finding them or not? You got anything on you now that belongs to one of them? Something related to them, a picture or something.”

“Peggy gave me these gray hairs,” Lee said. “And she might have bought me this shirt.”

“Let me touch it.”

Lee held out his arm. “And? What’s she feeling?”

Cary closed his eyes and stroked Lee’s cuff. “Oh, yes. It’s almost there. Her emotions are coming into focus. I can read you now, baby. It’s so strong. She thinks you need to lose twelve pounds.”

Lee turned his dispassionate gaze on his sandwich. “With friends like you, who needs marriage?” he said, taking a large bite. He thought of Montaigne and Étienne, and felt something was missing from his life.

Lee’s parents hired a private investigator, who drove to Caroline County to see whether she was at her parents’ house. Just because they said she wasn’t there didn’t mean she wasn’t there. He reported back that the Vaillaincourts’ apathy made his blood run cold, as a hardened professional. Peggy’s mother had referred him to her husband, as though the search were a business matter, and Mr. Vaillaincourt had told him, “She knows where to find us!” He claimed to be expecting a call any day. If it never came, well, that was Peggy’s problem.

The Flemings understood the Vaillaincourts better than the detective did. A ruling class is made up entirely of hardened professionals, insofar as it does not sire sissies. Where more sentimental men might remark of their daughters’ marriages, “I’m not losing a daughter, I’m gaining a son,” Peggy’s father had been heard to say no such thing. When two females vanish from a patriarchy, both of them attached to a homosexual, the ripples can be truly minimal.

Soon the detective, a working-class townsman, sympathized with Peggy. If a woman ran away from people like that, might she not have reasons? He didn’t have to know Lee was gay to dislike him. He had other reasons to feel distaste for the Flemings, such as the way they confined him to their front hall, never asking him to come in or sit down.

With his assistance, they placed a newspaper ad featuring Peggy’s senior portrait from high school. The picture showed a big-eyed, arrogant girl in an off-the-shoulder drape. Her long hair, straightened on curlers under a dryer hood for the occasion, was pinned up into a chignon. The likeness was not good. Lee had neglected, in ten years of marriage, to take a close-up picture of Peggy. All his snapshots were from a distance, his wife holding a child or underexposed in the light of a campfire.

The ad appeared many times in newspapers all over the state. missing person, it announced, with a generous reward.

Thousands of people saw it, but no calls came in. Simple, truthful, educated people, the kind who could read and believe a newspaper, sipped their coffee and felt sorry for the parents whose daughter had run away. Not patronizing the haunts of runaways—heroin shooting galleries and red-light districts and whatnot—themselves, the upstanding citizens had no cause to examine their consciences for signs of Peggy.

Nor would they have found anything anyway. The runaway was keeping a very, very low profile.

She couldn’t help herself. Life with Lee had been so drab that running away had a bounden duty to be exciting. She felt she had a right to ask that much. That was why the dramatic flight, the abandoned houses, the new identity.

She hoped he would hunt her with all his might so she could spite him and laugh. Yet she was not in a hurry to deal with stress. Her game was to be invisible. She knew Lee well, and by heading southeast, she had hidden in the folds of his own cerebral cortex. She knew he felt contempt for her. He would imagine her growing old in food service somewhere along Route 1, at Allman’s or the Dixie Pig, dreaming of New York City, never getting the money together to get past DC. He would never imagine her fleeing a rural backwater for its murkier depths.

She was right on all counts.

Lee’s first stop, Transient City: Fredericksburg, an hour south of Washington, DC, on Route 1. Home ownership rate 5 percent. The local gentry had surrendered to solvent government employees and Beltway bandits. Sold every stitch of land, skedaddled to Stafford County or points west. The city was a half-empty ghetto with foreign immigrants. The place you would fetch up if you were trying to get over the Mason-Dixon Line and failing, in Lee’s opinion.

He had lunch at Woolworth’s without seeing his wife. He sat down on a bench in front of a gift shop (the new suburbanites still came into town when they needed kitsch) to wait for her.

He was like a man buying the first lottery ticket of his life. He reads the notice on the back warning him that the odds against him are twelve million to one, and he concludes that he has a chance of winning.

Lee looked up and down the street, watching for slight women with brown hair. He watched for women with blond children. He watched for anyone at all. It was a quiet afternoon, paced by the rhythm of traffic lights. He stood up and walked, thinking he might ask after her, if he happened to see her kind of store. He walked the length of town and as far as the railroad tracks. Ice cream, real estate, musical instruments. Porcelain figurines and teacups. He shook his head at his own dumbness, got back in the car, and sat.

He imagined doing the same thing in Fairfax, Manassas, Reston, Falls Church—all the sprawling towns where he and Peggy knew no one. Where she was driving around in a candy-apple-red ’66 Fairlane. Why was he looking for her, when he could be looking for that car?

He drove to AAA in Richmond. He acquired maps of the state that showed every gas station. He needed a map because without zoning, businesses could crop up anywhere. Almost at random, you might see a barber pole or a green sign with yellow block script announcing the Department of Motor Vehicles. A one-and-a-half-lane highway would round a blind curve and there you were—already past it—the town you were looking for with its post office, gas pump, and population of four.

He returned to northern Virginia, where gas stations grew thick on the ground. But the second day of searching brought no sign of Peggy. Neither did the third.

From being mired in lottery-style thinking, Lee drifted toward magical thinking. He no longer demanded that divine providence reveal Peggy and Mireille in an instant. He was certain if he tortured himself long enough, quizzing gas station attendants on whether they’d seen a conspicuous car containing a woman and a little girl, his persistence would be rewarded. The car was black now, and the woman was routinely addressed as “sir” because she’d given herself an inept crew cut, but he didn’t know that.

His task would have been easier if he’d ever granted her a credit card beyond the one for his father’s Amoco station. It had his own name on it. He discovered it in his wallet, transferred there from hers. It was her way of telling him she had gone through his wallet and taken nothing. She didn’t even have a bank account. Financially, she existed as a tax deduction. A deduction Lee would go on taking whether she lived with him or not. It was only fair. She was much more expensive after she left than before.

Stillwater Lake retreated far from the bamboo grove. It stood in yellowish-gray mud streaked with reddish brown that looked to Lee like diarrhea. The shore went out for forty yards and down six feet before the first puddles appeared. The standing water was almost white, writhing solid with mosquito larvae like maggots in a corpse.

The college could not be relied upon to fix the lake. What it had lost in aesthetics, it had gained in acreage. The lakeshore was the property line. The administration planned to build a spacious campus center on land that used to be underwater. Lee’s parents told him to wait a couple of years for grass to grow and he wouldn’t know the difference.

But the level kept dropping. The college hired a civil engineering bureau to produce a hydrogeological report.

Stillwater Lake, the engineers said, was unnatural, built using a method commonly used to create cattle watering holes in areas without streams. But on the much, much larger scale made possible by slave labor. The Great Pyramid of puddles, concocted from a limestone depression by a forgotten megalomaniac. The lake bed was thousands of tons of clay, dug from riverbanks farther east, plastering an enormous hole.

Occasionally the lake would burp. A bubble of methane would rise from some unseen cavity and a circular wave would race toward the gloppy shores. Lee had not seen it happen because he was unable to look directly at the lake. It pained his retinas. He expected it to heave and drain completely any day now.

He could identify the culprit. He would have known her anywhere, kneecapped her with a high-powered rifle at four hundred yards. He knew everything about her. Except where she was.

The next year, Karen was four years old going on five and still blond. Nonetheless, registering her for first grade as a black six-year-old was easy as pie.

Maybe you have to be from the South to get your head around blond black people. Virginia was settled before slavery began, and it was diverse. There were tawny black people with hazel eyes. Black people with auburn hair, skin like butter, and eyes of deep blue green. Blond, blue-eyed black people resembling a recent chairman of the NAACP. The only way to tell white from colored for purposes of segregation was the one-drop rule: if one of your ancestors was black—ever in the history of the world, all the way back to Noah’s son Ham—so were you.

Meg felt very clever as she handed over the birth certificate. The races of the child’s parents were marked right on it: colored and colored.

When the clerk saw on the slip of paper that that Mrs. Brown was colored, she glanced up in surprise. But a close look revealed that it was true. Meg’s coarse curls and knobby heel bones were dead giveaways to the connoisseur. The daughter was one of those pallid, yellow-haired black kids you sometimes see. Frog-belly white, no trace of pink, curly tendrils all around her hairline. Probably anemic and undernourished—a lot of rural black kids had worms—but very close to passing. “Was she premature?” the clerk inquired. “She’s so little.”

“She’s small, but she can read,” Meg said.

“I can spell ‘astronaut,’ ” Karen volunteered.

“That’s a third-grade word,” the clerk said. “You’re very smart for such a tiny little thing. You sure you don’t want to have her be white?”

“We’re black and proud,” Meg said.

“I’m blond,” Karen objected.

“There’s no blond race,” the clerk corrected her. “But it don’t matter. All God’s children attend the very same school. We like to know who’s black so we can help them out with affirmative action and a free hot lunch.”

The first day of first grade did not go as Meg had hoped. In the early afternoon, Karen descended from the raucous and chaotic school bus sniveling. White girls, she said, had called her “nigger,” while black girls had called her “half-white” and sung a song, “crybaby, crybaby.”

“Crybaby what?” Meg asked ominously.

“Suck yo’ mommy titty.”

“Did you slug them? You’ve got to slug kids who are mean to you. Like this.” Meg demonstrated. “You take and hold their shirt collar and punch them right in the nose.”

“I grab their collar and punch them in the nose,” Karen repeated solemnly.

“Never call them ‘nigger’ back. It’s a bad word. Just grab on tight to their shirt and hit their nose hard. Then let go and run away fast. Never hit anybody bigger than you, or anybody retarded. Only first graders.”

“Okay.”

“And never cry, or say mean things. Insults just aggravate them. If you want to cry, laugh. It sounds the same. They can’t tell the difference.”

The next day Karen came home early, in her teacher’s car. Her knees were skinned and she had a split lip. The teacher wanted to see where the ethereal yet scrappy representative of the sadly nonexistent blond race, whom she had freed from beneath a heap of children shrieking racist taunts, lived and with whom.

She was impressed with the simplicity and poverty of Meg’s life. There was something monastic and almost elegant in the neatly scrubbed cabin standing in four inches of water in a settlement that had been given up decades before. Meg offered her a choice between water from the pump and warm Fresca. As she drank the Fresca, she wondered silently to herself about the Lord’s mysterious ways, choosing an anemic black child with arms like twigs to demonstrate the ironies of nonviolent resistance. (She assumed Karen’s tactic was nonviolence, possibly because Karen pulled her punches to the extent that mosquitoes she swatted flew away stunned.) She told Meg that Karen was very special. They prayed together.

When she had gone, Meg said, “You should stop telling people you’re blond. There are a lot of mean jokes about blondes. It’s nothing to be proud of.”

Karen became the special concern of every adult at the school. Children instinctively hated her for being different, and adults identified with her for the exact same reason. To be perfect (adorably wee and blond) yet marked for failure (black and dressed in rags)—don’t we all know that feeling? The principal, who had voted for George Wallace for president, couldn’t watch her bounce away across the schoolyard without musing that a petite female with a white body and a black soul might in ten or twelve years’ time be a sort of dream come true, assuming she moved away to the city and pursued a career in show business, broadly defined.

He spoke about her at a teachers’ conference, and it was resolved that she would be groomed for export despite her handicap. It was decided to skip her over second grade, since she knew the names of the months and all nine planets. Skipping her would catch her up to the other smart black kid and save them from creating an extra independent study group later on. Her promotion would have the added virtue of raising black enrollment in the all-white “academic” track to two and acquitting the school of lingering charges of tokenism.

Karen’s sole black classmate was a boy named Temple Moody. They sat together at lunch the day they met—the first day of third grade—and every school day after that.

To look at, Temple was about as black as a person could get, as though the school were hoping to pack as much blackness as possible into each “token black” seat in each of his successive integrated classrooms. Initially he was chosen for his mannerly comportment and tidy clothes and resented only for making it impossible for his classmates to win at Eraser Walk. The eraser nestled in his hair like an egg in a nest. He could have hopped to the blackboard on one foot. The class voted never to play Eraser Walk again. One by one, his superior achievements were acknowledged with surrender. He called it “raising the white flag.”

By week five of third grade, Karen had forgotten what it was like to be bullied. Temple was not about to let competing children distract her.

It was soon a done deal among the children that they would marry. There was no question of a white boy’s teasing her or kissing her. No girls of either race played with her hair.

Meg bought a packet of thirty Valentines, enough for the entire class. Karen labeled and distributed them all, but she brought home only three: one from the teacher, one from Temple, and one from a Catholic girl whose exotic last name—Schmidt—regularly made the class dissolve in laughter. Birthdays were a nonstarter, since Meg couldn’t have kids over to that house. Plus the date and the year were false, so it seemed like tempting fate to make a big deal out of Karen’s birthday. Christmas depressed Meg, and she did her best to ignore it. Amber “Shit” Schmidt was not a big party-thrower either.

So for several years in a row, the high point of Karen’s year was Temple Moody’s birthday. Possibly it more than made up for the Neapolitan ice cream and Pin the Tail on the Donkey she missed by not being white. Temple’s birthday involved adults and older children—approximately fifty in all—along with hard liquor, catfish, chicken, trifle, and a piñata.

He lived in a sprawling compound on a creek bank, hundreds of years old, with a four-seater outhouse and a shed full of broken farm implements from before the trees grew. The woods leading to it were dense with greenbrier through which deer had beaten paths like a hedge maze. There was only one party game: Run Wild. The adults would settle in, on and around the porch, while the children ran wild. Eventually one of Temple’s older brothers would throw a rope over a high oak bough and haul up the piñata.

The Moodys regarded piñatas as a neglected Native American tradition. They assumed partial descent from Indians. Temple’s mother had a fond uncle in Reno, Nevada, at the end of the Trail of Tears, and he mailed her authentic Indian crafts every year for Christmas: Navajo sand paintings, Pomo baskets, Hopi dolls. And for Temple’s birthday, a piñata.