Читать книгу The Coffins of Little Hope - Timothy Schaffert - Страница 20

In the morning Elvis was gone, and Lenore was gone too. Or, as many might say, she was not gone at all but suddenly there, newly sprung from her mother’s imagination.

What woke Daisy in the early morning wasn’t the racket of the airplane’s motor but rather the tickle of the pickup seat she lay against. A mouse scurried beneath the vinyl, tiny among the rusty springs, working into Daisy’s dream about sleeping on the kitchen floor. A chill shimmied up her spine from the thought of the mouse, and she sat up just soon enough to see the plane lift into the sky and only just clear the electrical lines at the tops of the poles.

Elvis was an aerial photographer, flying from town to town across the country’s farmlands—he would take photos of a home place from far enough above to capture several verdant acres, to offer a rare view of rooftops, and rows of corn bins, and the geodesic patterns in the colors of the crops. But somehow, also, and this was his gift, he’d bring out some fine detail that made the photo more than just a view of a farm from a few miles up. In a photo of the Ruskind place, you can see the dots of Mrs. Ruskind’s prize Whirly-Girl tomatoes, still only a lemony orange in midsummer, like freckles, in the vegetable garden near the house. In the photo of the Jansenn farm, there’s the family’s snow-white husky, since dead from a sudden liver failure, a blur, chasing a passing car. Sunflowers along fence lines, pale green apples visible in the dark green leaves of trees. In these photos taken from a distance, Elvis allowed farmers a new intimacy with their own homes.

Elvis would develop the photos, put them in fancy gilt frames, and peddle them door to door, asking you to pay for pictures of your own place. He’d wear a charmingly outdated denim leisure suit, with a pair of aviator sunglasses pushed up on the top of his head. His hair was just a tad too long, tucked behind his ears. Women were happy to invite him in for a cup of coffee (but he preferred tea, Darjeeling if you happened to have it), and he might stay for an hour, or longer, complimenting your needlepoint or demanding your recipe for the rhubarb pudding cake you cut him a slice or two of. By the time you wrote the check, you hated to see him leave.

This was all before, though, a few years before, during his other sweep through town, before he cultivated the Vegas-style pompadour and whatever kind of beard that was. We didn’t know his name—some of us remembered him as Kip; others remembered him as Jeb; others seemed to think his name was Mickey. Kim, Hank, Dusty, Max, Seymour. Some of us insisted his name was Cash, as that was who we all made our checks out to.

But the farm wives did remember, vividly, some other names—the women’s names on his arms. Because Elvis calculated his sales calls so they’d fall when only the missus was likely to be home, he’d at some point take off his jacket, revealing short sleeves and the names tattooed and crossed out up his forearm. Vicki. Mitzi. Veronica. Lois. It might have been his idea of a joke, but the women liked entertaining the thought of him falling so passionately, so permanently for these temporary loves.

All the winking and drawling he did, the effortless romancing of the women in and around our town, probably didn’t help Daisy’s case, especially when she told her stories to the newspaper—all that “Daddy” and “Baby” business, all that Baby needs her daddy. It sounded perverse to the women in our town, but, worse yet, many of them were jealous. No, no, worse than that: they were regretful. Why, for God’s sake, had they led the lives that had led them to sit there, dusting their thimble collections or stirring ice cubes into their Jell-O mixes, while this prettylipped freak sat, sex on the brain, wrinkling the doilies on their sofas? Why did that very strange woman, only a few farms over, get to be the one to be violated? All any of the farm wives would have had to do was reach over and flick a few top buttons of his shirt to see his hairy chest—they’d all been within arm’s reach of complete self-destruction. Why wasn’t it themselves they were reading about in the morning papers?

Not that anyone could love a man who would endanger a child. And that was why it was easy for some of us to cast Lenore into nothingness. Elvis had not abducted a little girl. He loved women. We all knew that by the names on his arm—they were women’s names. There were no little girls anywhere, anymore, named Mitzi or Veronica.