Something Rising
Something Rising
Haven Kimmel
From the internationally bestselling author of ‘The Solace of Leaving Early’, a funny, heartwrenching and unforgettable novel following the fortunes of a feisty young female pool hustler.Cassie Claiborne, at ten, was surely too young to be the head of her disparate family. But who else was going to do it? Growing up in Indiana with her distant, heartbroken mother, Laura, her fragile, eccentric sister Belle, and her beloved grandfather Poppy, Cassie got sick of waiting for her father to come home from his everlasting gambling and drinking binges and took matters into her own hands. Taught by her father to play pool, Cassie was a natural and was soon hustling experienced pool players – and winning.We follow Cassie from a complex little girl to a rebellious and impetuous young woman as she tries to create a world for her mother and sister. Overwhelmed but compelled by her family’s love, Cassie feels herself drawn back to the past by the stories of her mother's youth, and she leaves her town for New Orleans, hoping that there she can find a truth to soothe her wounded soul and to allow herself the happiness she has been denied.Funny, heartbreaking, full of the eccentricity of small-town life and the overwrought drama of the close-knit family, ‘Something Rising (Light and Swift)’ is the story of a very unique young woman who knows that 'the worst thing that can happen to you is that you will find what you seek'. It tells of grief and love and growing up and leaving home in a way that is desperately sad but ultimately uplifting.
Haven Kimmel
Something Rising (Light and Swift)
For Melinda
For her children, Josh and Abby
And in memory of her husband, Mark Lawrence Frame 1940-2002
Table of Contents
Cover (#u96f0dd88-961f-58b2-bf64-41ef0628e973)
Title Page (#ua50b6d3f-0de5-5e6c-adf2-fef6640114f0)
PROLOGUE
Part One THE HAMMER IN HER HAND
THE SPECTRUM OF POSSIBLE OUTCOMES,1979
THE FLOOD, 1985
Part Two A PRIVATE LANGUAGE
SAMHAIN, 1987
ALL SAINTS
Part Three RATTLESNAKE KITE
CATTAILS,1999
SHADOW FATHER
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
About the Author
Praise for Something Rising (Light and Swift)
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
Copyright
About the Publisher
PROLOGUE (#ud2fa5dbb-ea60-53f7-9bbd-8007b203d8da)
The man standing across from Cassie had nearly a thousand dollars on the line and a pale absence where his wedding ring should have been. He registered on her periphery: his anger, his receding hairline, the slick shirt, the way he leaned against the corner pocket so that she had to look directly at him as she studied the shot. Cassie noticed these things without thought, the same way she could see Uncle Bud behind the bar, drying glasses and keeping his eye on her, without looking in his direction.
The man had left a mess on the table. Cassie paced, dropped her stick up and down on the toe of her boot. On the break he had sunk the six and the two and had cleared the one and three quickly. But he left the four stranded close to the rail and the cue ball downtable, taking a safety. Cassie had to do many things at once—get to the four; sink the four; position the cue ball to take the recalcitrant five; get back down for the seven; release the eight from where it was stranded; and sink the nine—but the whole process felt like one thing, the way walking doesn’t feel like a thousand articulated events. Just one event.
Some nights she saw the table as a plane, all four sides extending infinitely, and at those times she couldn’t lose. But on other nights, and against opponents like her current one (the Lounge Singer, she’d dubbed him), she fell to earth and used what she could find there. The table was actual and massive, and its borders were discrete. She imagined two protractors joined at the horizontal line, forming a perfect circle, and everything outside that circle was darkness, and all she needed to know was inside. From the ball to the pocket was one side of an angle; from the cue ball to the object ball was the other side. And there, invisible, where the cue and the object met, or would meet: the vertex, her desire. She dreamed sometimes that her whole life was funneled into that point of contact and could be measured in the old ways: acute, right, obtuse, a reflex.
The man across the table had had too much to drink, had bet too much money, and was now showing her his black edge. It was just a look around his eyes, a flush of throat. He thought she’d never take the four, and he was terrified she would. Cassie stopped behind the cue ball, imagined the table flipped into a mirror image, and considered a bank shot. After she’d done her best with angles, the rest was physics. Distance, velocity, and acceleration. The transfer of momentum. And something else: a sensation she’d never understood that caused her throat to close and her heart to pound. She was addicted to the feeling, even though it arrived like heartbreak, with the same thunder and autonomy. The four was too far away, but if she kept her eye on what her opponent couldn’t see, the bisections and intersecting lines, the ghosts, she believed she could do it.
She bent so far at the waist that her chin rested on top of the cue, and the lines on the table shifted like a computer design in a war room. The two practice strokes rubbed lightly against the underside of her chin, where she was developing a permanent red line. On the third stroke, a medium shot, the cue ball traveled the length of the table; the Lounge Singer opened his mouth, closed it again. He hadn’t expected the backspin, the way the bank happened so fast, sending the four right past the eight and into the corner pocket without a sigh of resistance. The cue ball rolled and stopped six inches from the five, and then it was over. The five, the seven, the eight. She sank the nine lightly, stepped away from the table, and rocked her head from side to side. Her shoulders ached.
Her opponent started to say something, but Uncle Bud filled the doorway like a piece of furniture. “Pay her,” he said.
The man reached into his pocket, shaking from the loss, and pulled out a stack of bills held together with a tarnished old clip. His waistband was sweat-stained, and now that she’d beaten him, Cassie had to tum away from seeing him too closely. She took the money, said thanks. He slipped out past Uncle Bud without a word, past the players at the other tables, the regulars who came late and stayed late and seemed to pay attention to no one.
Cassie unscrewed the butt of her cue from the shaft, wiped it down, and put the two parts away as Bud gathered the balls and brushed the felt on the table. When she was ready to go, he walked her to the back door and watched her wheel her bike down the back stairs.
“You going straight home?” he asked.
Cassie nodded.
“He was driving a white Caprice. You see him between here and your house, get off your bike.”
“Okay,” Cassie said.
“Or else go ahead and knock the crap out of him, I don’t care which.”
“Okay.”
Cassie pulled her cap down over her ears, wheeled out on to the main street of Roseville, where every business was long closed and every resident was long asleep. At the edge of town she leaned into the wind and sped up, past the flat fields of central Indiana, expanses that stretched as far as she could see. She sped down the Price Dairy Road in the complete dark, her headlight casting an arc before her, then turned on to her road, The King’s Crossing, which met Price Dairy at a ninety-degree angle. She headed for her house, where her sister, Belle, slept on one line and her mother, Laura, slept on another; and where her father, Jimmy, the vertex, was entirely absent; where there was nothing she could do. No shot to take. No safety.
A light glowed in the trailer at the rear of the property, where her grandfather Poppy had lived with his dogs. Poppy left the light on for her, and the dogs didn’t bark. Cassie carried her bicycle up the three back stairs and into the laundry room, took off her jacket, and hung her cue case on a hook. The air in the kitchen was gray with Laura’s cigarette smoke. Cassie poured herself a glass of orange juice, leaned against the sink. It was two in the morning, and she needed to get up at six-thirty to be at school on time. Her eyes burned, and she let them close, leaning there against the sink in the silent house. She had always hated school, had hated it until recently, when suddenly the girl who had been expelled six times for fighting, who had flunked every subject in one semester last year (including badminton), began collecting report cards that were different from years past. In this, the spring of her tenth-grade year, she had done poorly in everything but math. Her teacher, astonished, had sent a letter to Laura that said one thing: She’s a natural.
Part One (#ud2fa5dbb-ea60-53f7-9bbd-8007b203d8da)THE HAMMER IN HER HAND (#ud2fa5dbb-ea60-53f7-9bbd-8007b203d8da)
THE SPECTRUM OF POSSIBLE OUTCOMES, 1979 (#ud2fa5dbb-ea60-53f7-9bbd-8007b203d8da)
On Thursday, in the middle of June, she waited for her father. He hadn’t been home for two days, so she got up early, because sometimes he showed up very early and went straight to bed, and then the whole agony of having waited for him to come home was compounded by having to wait for him to get up. He could sleep fourteen hours at a time, hardly moving, she’d studied him. She got out of bed without making a sound, pulled on the clothes she’d worn the day before, didn’t bother with brushing her teeth or looking at her hair. There was little left of it anyway, after the episode with the ticks and Poppy’s clippers. She got up very early, before Laura or Belle, and crept down the stairs and into the kitchen tinged with morning light, the pale green kitchen that smelled—above and below food, laundry, visitors—of Laura’s cigarettes, and took out a bottle of chocolate milk that was made of neither chocolate nor milk. Her favorite drink. She took a banana, too, because bananas are by nature quiet foods, and snuck out through the living room, through the foyer with the two glass cases filled with her dead grandmother’s figurines (frolicking baby animals) and out onto the screened porch. The rocker closest to the front door was splintered, the one closer to the road groaned, and in neither did her feet reach the porch. She chose the one that groaned and hoped she wouldn’t move. Even this early the air was warm; later a breeze would come up, she guessed, but for now the trees were still. The view from where she sat dazed her with familiarity, the horseshoe-shaped gravel driveway with the holes no amount of dirt or gravel could fill, the yard on the other side of the drive. Nothing in it, just grass. And then her road, the King’s Crossing, bumpy asphalt with glass sewn in, in sunlight it shone like diamonds. Across the road a ditch that collected stray papers, detritus, once she’d found a child’s tennis shoe, just the one. Beyond the ditch was the fencerow that stretched the whole six hundred acres. To the left of her vision, in the field, was a stand of tall trees—a windbreak—and far to the right was another. Between the stands of trees the corn was pushing up in little shoots, it had been a dry spring, and barely visible to her were the power lines, four gigantic silver men in a row, standing with their hands on their hips, displeased. She knew that if she crossed the field, or rode her bike down to 300 West, also called the Price Dairy Road, and turned left, and got near the power lines, she would hear what Poppy called an infernal hum. The way power speaks. She had no interest in it.
The chocolate milk was gone, the banana was gone, its skin lay bereft next to her rocker. She had hardly moved. When the sun was almost up, the gray burned off, everything that had crouched in the shadow of dawn fully revealed, she knew he wouldn’t come, but still she waited. There was nothing else for it; other people pretended to go about their business, whatever business they fabricated, but really they were waiting, if not for him then for someone else. From its spot behind the house, she heard the door to Poppy’s Airstream open; the sound carried clearly across the early morning silence, she could almost hear him feel the weather, decide if he needed a hat. He didn’t. The dogs clambered down the metal stairs and into the backyard, then rounded the corner of the house, Poppy following.
“That you, Cass?” Poppy asked, shading his eyes and looking through the screen.
“It’s me.”
His three dogs, Marleybone, Juanita, and Roger, stood or scratched or rolled around Poppy’s legs, impatient for their constitutional. Marleybone was Poppy’s favorite, the leader of the pack. His fur was a crazy swirl of dark blue and white, he had one brown eye and one blue, his left ear was bent at the tip, and he stood on three legs. He kept his right rear leg lifted off the ground always, had the crazy look of a herder in his eyes. Juanita was a medium-size black dog who shook and mostly kept her tail tucked. There was a painful history on her face, and sometimes, sitting on the porch, looking at the clouds, she would start to shake. Roger had been Poppy’s latest acquisition, a wiry little blond dog with a big square head that resembled a cement block. There was mange in his past, but he’d managed to keep the tuft of yellow hair that shot up like a patch of weeds between his ears. Although he seemed to have no legs, so low did he hover over the ground, he could, without warning, leap four feet into the crook of his favorite tree in the backyard.
“You waiting for Jimmy?” Poppy asked. He slipped his right hand into his pants pocket, meaning he was embarrassed.
“Naw,” Cassie said, shaking her head.
‘“Cause you might find yourself sittin’ a long time, if you are.” Poppy dressed carefully every day in a flannel shirt and cotton trousers, suspenders. He carried a handkerchief in his breast pocket, shaved every morning, even when he was sick, and kept his white hair cut short. One of his real teeth, in the back, had a gold crown, he smelled like Ivory soap and cherry pipe tobacco. Since Cassie’s grandmother, Buena Vista, died two years ago and before Poppy had begun to collect dogs, he’d moved out to the 1967 Airstream at the back of the property. The world had disappointed him in every imaginable way, but he seemed a happy man. “Want to go with me? On my walk?”
Cassie shook her head.
“All right, then,” he said, and started off down the road.
She waited. It was a fine summer day. Inside the house her mother and sister began to stir. Cassie imagined them: Belle floating down the stairs in her white nightgown, Laura fighting her first cigarette of the day, making coffee. Time was and not so long ago that Belle would have been out here with her, but all had changed in the blink of an eye; it seemed so to Cassie. On her twelfth birthday in May, Belle had awakened full of dissatisfactions and resolutions, all of them spoken and written in her notebook then spoken again, and now it seemed that more than two years separated her from her sister. Something deeper than the river had carved itself out, Belle on one side. Cassie on the other.
“Don’t even tell me,” Belle said from behind the screen door.
Cassie tipped up her empty chocolate milk bottle, pretended to drink.
“Don’t even tell me you’re out here thinking Jimmy will come home.”
“I’m not,” Cassie said, studying the field across the road.
“Did Poppy come by? Laura wants to make sure he got some coffee.”
“He’s out on his walk.”
“That doesn’t tell me if he had any breakfast or coffee.”
Cassie turned and looked at her sister; Belle’s outline behind the screen was ghostly. Her thin arms were crossed over her stomach.
“Edwin will be here soon,” Belle said, glancing at her wrist as if a watch were there. But there was no watch.
Cassie looked off down the road, back at the screen door, Belle was gone. She was right—soon Edwin Meyer would appear, because he’d bought the hardware store from Poppy and felt it was his duty to check in every day, and because Edwin and Poppy were best friends in the way that duty binds. In the kitchen Belle and Laura, Cassie knew, were already working out the morning in silences and gestures that operated like a code Cassie couldn’t crack. It was another summer day, and all things considered, Cassie lived in a predictable house, and none of it mattered if Jimmy didn’t come home. She moved out to the cement steps at the edge of the driveway. She waited.
They came walking down the road with a purpose. Cassie lived in the flattest part of a flat state and could see them coming from a great distance, Leroy Buell and his foster sister, Misty, who lived at the end of the King’s Crossing in a tumbledown house with what Laura called a Plague of Relatives. The house was in bad shape, but Leroy ‘s aunt Betta, who was crazy in all other ways, knew how to step outside the front door and throw a handful of seed at exactly the right time, so that everywhere you looked around their house, all along the sagging fence and covering the old walkways and right up against the dead trucks and cars and tractors, were flowers. No one tended them, no one planted or fertilized, but Laura said the Buell’s house was like the virgin prairie, only crazy. Leroy was actually born there, but Misty was an addition, a child taken in a few years ago from the county home who pretended she had been adopted, so fiercely did she wish it to be true.
Leroy and Misty sent up the alarm in all God-fearing normal people. God-fearing normal people meant nothing to Cassie, who would happily take their names and kick their asses, as Jimmy was fond of saying. The only way to be safe in the world, as Jimmy would have said, was to be the person other people feared, this is the law of the jungle and among all thinking organisms, and just because we have been given the capacity to imagine it might not be so, or to hope there might be another, more enlightened way to live, is no reason to deny that it is so. Trouble, he liked to begin a story by saying, it is widely known.
“Going down the river to the shack, cook up a mess of frogs,” Leroy said without preamble when he and Misty reached Cassie’s horseshoe-shaped yard.
“Build a fire,” Misty said.
Leroy had his right thumb hooked in a belt loop of his jeans, which were six inches too short, while his left hand drummed against his bird chest. He was too skinny, his face too long, he breathed through his mouth with a sound like a train in the distance. Misty stood stiff next to him but couldn’t seem to stop making noise. This happened in school, too; sometimes if the room was quiet, Cassie could hear Misty two rows over humming the theme song to a television show called Run, Joe, Run. She whistled and whispered, snapped her fingers to a hectic beat. But worst of all, Misty was driven toward sound effects, and if she’d been able to hear Cassie think of the faraway train, she would have said: Chug-a-chug-a-chug-a. A high wind: Whooooooooo. A catfight: Yowwwwwl, screeech, etcetera. Laura would have said there was no future in such behavior.
Cassie gave Misty a good hard look. Her hair was straight as a poker, cut jagged at the edges near her shoulders, and with bangs made crooked by a cowlick. Her teeth didn’t meet up right, and she smelled of trapped smoke. Her clothes, a striped shirt too big and blue pants too small, had obviously come from the charity box at the Church of Christ, and Cassie thought it no wonder Misty’s parents had decamped for points unknown.
Cassie stood, stretched herself out, then went inside for her backpack, which had been Jimmy’s long ago when he had mistakenly thought himself a Boy Scout. This was a mystery to Cassie, how the true nature of a person can be so thoroughly concealed in youth that he does humiliating things. It meant Cassie herself could do them, and later someone would hold out the offending object—a dress, a party favor, an unsent letter—and convict her. She was trying to redeem the backpack. She carried in it a Swiss army knife, a compass, a box of waterproof matches, a second box of waterproof matches, a rain poncho, an old snake bitekit, a small flashlight, a harmonica she couldn’t play, a worn guide to dressing field injuries. Now she added a ball-peen hammer—a regular hammer was too heavy to carry—and a small box of nails; boards were always popping loose on the shack, and if she left it to the inbreds and malcontents, as Jimmy called them, the shack would fall down around their ears and they’d go right on sucking the heads off crawdaddies. She also added a second chocolate milk, knowing that everyone down at the river would want it but be afraid to ask; this was the sort of gesture that kept everyone clear about who stood where. Cassie was the person with the chocolate milk and the hammer in her hand, that was all they needed to know.
The three trudged down the road, then cut across the field on Cassie’s side, away from the infernal hum of the power lines. “Them new kids is gonna be there,” Leroy said. “Emmy Somethin’ from Kentucky, and Bobby Puck from up that Granger School that closed.”
Misty made a puck-puck-puck sound.
“I met ‘em already. They was down at the river two days ago when I got there, “ Leroy continued. “I says, ‘How’d you find this shack? It belongs to us and Cassie Claiborne.’ Then that Bobby Puck said something, didn’t make any sense.”
Cassie watched where she was walking, watched for the shimmer of a cottonmouth or the frightened streaking-past of a vole. She could remember when this walk back to the river seemed to take all day. If someone had asked, she would have said the water was miles from her house, but she’d learned it wasn’t even a single mile, maybe only a half. As they approached the edge of the field, she recalled an afternoon she and her parents and grandparents had taken a picnic on the bank, and as they’d reached this point, right about here, Jimmy had swung her up on his shoulders and asked, Do you smell the water? There had been only that once when they were all together here, walking this path, it was before Buena Vista had gotten sick; and Cassie could see, too, that there was hope and faith in the gesture of a picnic that had somehow gone sorely lacking. If she had tried to plan one, Laura would have scoffed, and Belle would have said she didn’t like the river, she couldn’t stand bugs, or maybe even nature itself for all Cassie knew. But whatever complaints they leveled wouldn’t have much relationship to what they meant, which was: that’s all over now.
Cassie smelled the water. As they got closer, she could hear splashing, loud talk, and laughter. A girl said, “You know you’re going to kill them.”
“I won’t! I’m making them happy!”
Leroy lifted a branch and Misty and Cassie walked under. The morning sun hit the water in patches of brilliance; some places were shaded by the tangle of trees overhead. This was a green place, and of ever changing light. The new girl was floating in the river, which was low, in a pair of blue-jean shorts and a Mickey Mouse T-shirt, her arms outstretched and her dark hair floating out behind her. A fat boy was sitting on the bank on top of a fivegallon bucket. Presumably the frogs were in the bucket, and he was making them happy.
“Hark!” the boy called out, waving at the three who were crossing the river on the old log, arms out for balance.
“That’s them,” Leroy said from somewhere behind Cassie.
“What the hell is a hark?” Misty asked, and then made a harkhark-hark sound.
Bobby Puck was chubby everywhere, even his ankles and wrists and knees. He had a moon face and fine, wavy mouse-brown hair brushed up into a cloud over his head. Cassie could see a mother’s hand in that hair. When he smiled, his chubby cheeks rose up and nearly covered his eyes.
Cassie stepped off the log and looked at the two new kids. The river wasn’t on Poppy’s property, and she had found the shack by accident, but Jimmy would say there are in-alien-able rights that govern territory. Years she had been watching her father, sometimes in shadow, and there was plenty she knew about a gambler’s face, the reading—like lightning—of options. It all came down, she’d decided, to the size of the stake. How much you could afford to lose.
The boy on the bucket asked, “Are you Miss Cassie?” She nodded. He pointed at the girl in the water. “That’s Emmy.”
Still floating, Emmy said, “Hey, girl,” in an accent with a curve like Buena Vista’s, it gave Cassie a cold jolt. She tilted up her chin, waited a full beat.
“Hey.” Cassie turned away and headed for the shack; it had been put up and abandoned by hunters at about the time Buena Vista died, and in those two years a lot of stuff had been added to it. Cassie fairly owned it during the summer days, but at night it belonged to teenagers. Someone had dragged an old recliner in, and someone else had brought a mattress. There were pictures tacked to the wall (an elephant being hung in a town square; a toothless woman in sunglasses; a monkey scratching its butt), and lately people had started to bring in books and leave them, old paperbacks creased and dog-eared. Cassie suspected there was more to the books than the plain desire to share literature, since as a group the teenagers weren’t what her teachers would call readers.
She took off her pack, got out the hammer and nails, and walked around the outside of the shack, hammering down boards that had popped up in the last rain. The hunters hadn’t taken the time to make sure the lone cockeyed window actually fit the hole cut for it, so Cassie had chinked in the gaps with river mud. They hadn’t put up a doore either, just left a hole for one and hung a sheet of Visqueen in it. When the plastic came down, Cassie cut a new piece and hung it herself, using small tacks that didn’t tear. It was important, she thought, to keep the plastic up, to acknowledge the difference between inside and out, else what use was a doorway?
“Light the small sticks, Emmy, we don’t have a lot of matches. Did you have these in your pocket when you were swimming?”
“Ooooh, I’m cold now I’m out of the water. The water’s warm.”
“There’s—I tell you, you have to light the small—”
“Did anybody bring a jacket?”
“Emmy’s asking did anybody bring a jacket or whatnot?”
Cassie stepped back and looked at the roof. It hadn’t been done the way Jimmy would have recommended. Just boards and tar paper. She tried to imagine making the walk back here with a ladder (unlikely), then tried to think of some way to bring a ladder on her bike, but there was no road, only the fields and tree line, and the corn was growing higher. A ladder, a tool belt, some shingles.
Inside, someone had straightened up the books and stacked the empty Mountain Dew cans into a pyramid. A big red candle had been added. Cassie stared at it a moment. The big red candle in the shack was a mistake, as any thinking person could see, and she imagined herself flinging it hard into the river. But taking it away smacked of something Laura preached against, which was Getting Too Thick Into Events. One Never Knows, and sometimes the thing that burns is meant to burn and might be interesting to watch. This set up a jangle in Cassie, truth be told, because no one could say that the shack burnt down was a desirable outcome, or even the shack on fire, interesting as it might be. She walked around inside, periodically stooping down to pound in a nail. A puzzle, the way the nails wanted out of the wood.
“All hail Miss Misty, bringer of fire!”
“Shut up, Bobby Puck, you homo.”
“I’m not watching you kill the frogs, Leroy, I’m going over here and also be quiet about it.”
Misty said, rrrbit, rrrbit.
The book on top of the stack was called Mr. and Mrs. Bo Jo Jones. The cover was a photograph, out of focus, of a boy and girl kissing, only one of them was upside down. Mrs. Bo Jo Jones’s nose was on Mr.’s chin and vice versa. Taken in profile. She’s sixteen, he’s seventeen, a pregnant bride, and her bewildered groom … playing a grown-up game with adult consequences. Cassie picked up the red candle and sat it square on the book; this was surely nothing more than treading the edge of events. She walked outside and around back to take a look at the flat platform she’d built between two gnarled-up trees: it was the first project she’d ever finished on her own. She’d built it in case a flash flood came while they were in the shack, and she’d nailed boards into the tree trunk to make a ladder. The platform was about seven feet off the ground—it couldn’t be a biblical sort of flood. She’d come out here and measured and even drawn a diagram in a notebook, then gone back and had Poppy help her cut some tongue-and-groove boards she’d found in the corner of the garage. She climbed up the ladder and stepped on the platform, then jumped up and down. Solid. She knelt down and checked the nails, but they were all snug in, and then she ran her hands over the edge she’d sanded smooth. From here she could see the river slowly moving, and on the shoreline flashes of a white T-shirt. There was a fundamental difference between the shack and this platform, and it could be felt simply by sitting first in one and then on the other, and whatever the discrepancy was made her wonder if maybe she ought not skip putting a new roof on the shack. Below her the fire was just getting going and it smelled good; whatever kind of wood they were using smelled good. A blood scent filled the air.
“You own any guns?” she heard Leroy ask.
Bobby Puck said, “Guns? Are you talking to me?”
Sitting up here, Cassie was waiting for Jimmy but also not waiting, she had let go some. Her own house could be on fire, this was a thing she often considered, and she wouldn’t know it until she made the walk back and found the thing in ruins, the trucks and smoke and neighbors watching. She would have no first thought but many at once. Did Jimmy come home, did Laura stay planted where she was, refusing to leave, did Poppy get the dogs out, was Belle out floating around, weeping in the yard in her white nightgown? Beyond that Cassie didn’t care, there was nothing she would mourn. Who set this fire?
“Cassie?” Puck was looking up at her from the ground, she hadn’t heard him approach. “Can I come up there with you?” He had a very high voice, like a little girl’s. As he climbed the ladder, his green T-shirt came out of his shorts, and Cassie could see a white stripe of skin. She looked away. “Oh, this is rather high up,” he said, looking over the edge of the platform. “I hope it doesn’t make me dizzy. If we were at the tops of these trees we could see my house, it’s over yonder as Leroy would say, the opposite side of the river from your house, we could see my dad’s blue station wagon in the driveway and my mom’s marigolds, my dad has diabetes. He is a diabetic and never leaves the house anymore, one of his legs is gone and he is now blind.” Puck leaned forward and whispered the last word in Cassie’s ear. She turned and looked at him. Mostly she couldn’t abide people who talked too much, and under normal conditions she might have gone ahead and whaled on him. But something in him raised up a loneliness that settled over Cassie like a cloud. “At the Granger School,” he continued, holding Cassie’s eye, “I was assaulted on a regular basis by ruffians. You remind me of them. When I start at your school in the fall, I’m going to be perfectly silent, in class and everywhere else, so I just thought I’d tell you some things now, that my mom is an aide at the nursing home, and about my dad and whatnot. I don’t like sports, I’ve never gone hunting, I prefer comic books and snacks.”
“Puck? Cassie? Want some frog legs?” Emmy called from the shore.
Puck rose, brushed some dried mud from his knees, then bowed to Cassie. “Ladies first,” he said, gesturing toward the stairs with a sweeping motion, like the hands of a clock.
She was back home and on the steps by three o’clock. The day had grown hot, and hours to go yet, so she took off her swampy tennis shoes and wet socks and let her feet dry in the sun. Her gray T-shirt said NOTRE DAME WRESTLING TEAM, it was her favorite shirt. Poppy had found it at the dump, back when he used to be a dump crawler, before Laura put her foot down. Cassie missed those days, the great things he’d come home with: a miniature guitar with no strings, a set of rusty golf clubs, a plastic cereal bowl with an astronaut in the bottom. The astronaut was floating outside of and appeared to be larger than his spaceship. All such things Laura dubbed A Crime. But then Poppy came home with a Memphis Minnie album, and when he handed it to Laura, her eyes filled with tears and she turned around and went up to her room and no one had seen her for a whole day, and Belle said Poppy shouldn’t have told her it came from the dump, and Poppy said, confused, Was I to lie?
Cassie’s eyes were closed and the world behind her eyelids had gone red when she heard the dogs, not Poppy’s dogs who never ran free, but a pack that had been born that winter to a stray down the road. Born in the Taylors’ toolshed. The Taylors had no intention of keeping the puppies or of killing them or of having anything to do with them whatsoever, those were Willie Taylor’s words to Poppy exactly. Anything whatsoever. A stray who picked us out, we didn’t pick her. There were four pups, a brown, a red, a black and white, a black, and they were all hardmuscled, with coats so short they looked like leather, and heads like pigs. Cassie thought of them as the Pig Dogs. They weren’t much bigger than young pigs, either. All day long they killed. They killed chickens, ducks, cats, who knew. Once they had run up to Cassie as she walked down the road, and the head of the brown one was completely covered in blood, all the way back to his shoulder blades, still red and wet. No one could touch them. Now they ran toward Cassie with great joy, nearly bouncing, except for the black and white, who was carrying a dead groundhog in his mouth, an animal more than half his size. They were going to leave it in her yard, she could just feel it. Her opinion was that they’d started killing more than they could eat, so they were spreading the carcasses around for fun. The King’s Crossing was their game board, and they’d left something on every corner. Cassie stood up and took a menacing step toward them, and they all backed up, tails wagging. They had smart eyes, the Pig Dogs, this was one of their worst features. Cassie stomped, waved her arms, yelled Go on! Git! and the dogs turned one at a time, still sneaky and joyous, and started to run back down the road, except for the black and white, who trotted a few steps farther in and dropped the groundhog, then turned and streaked off after his brothers.
“Cassie, you still out here?”
The groundhog had barely hit the earth, and there was Belle so soon, she would take it personally that Cassie had allowed such a thing to happen. Belle stepped out onto the screened porch, wearing a black leotard of Laura’s and an old Indian-print skirt, there was a pointedness in her voice that had arrived only in the past two years but seemed to be here to stay. All the way back in Cassie’s memory to the place it grew dark and muzzy, she saw Belle with her on a day like this, Cassie at five, Belle at seven, performing their different tasks: one her father’s girl, the other belonging solely to Laura. Cassie had her work cut out for her, no doubt about it, being the one to wait and gather clues and wander about the house studying Jimmy’s belongings and trying to capture the smell of him somewhere, in his closet, on his pillow. But Belle, maybe, and this was a thing Cassie had only begun to consider, had it a little worse, because her parent was right there and couldn’t be reached.
Laura, standing in the kitchen, having a contemplative smoke in her butter-yellow capri pants and white blouse, clothes that came from Somewhere Else and marked her. She wore not perfume or cologne but the oil from a love potion made for her by a Yoruba priestess, oil filled with rose petals and something that looked like whole clove. One brutal fight between Laura and Jimmy started when he called her a yat; Cassie had heard yak and assumed her father had been drinking until Belle explained. Bone-thin mother, shoulders slightly hunched, arms crossed loosely over her abdomen, listening to records. She made their meals but didn’t eat with them. She smiled, never lost her patience or raised her voice, it was difficult, in fact, to do anything loudly enough or close enough to her range of vision to even get her to turn her head. Bix Beiderbecke with Frankie Trumbauer’s orchestra, Singin’ the Blues. Louis Armstrong, Jelly Roll Morton, Sidney Bechet. One of the only things Laura loved even a smidge about living in Indiana was that one of the earliest jazz labels, the Starr Piano Company and Gennett Records, had been in Richmond. The Friars Society Orchestra had recorded there, and King Oliver, Armstrong, Bix, Hoagy. Laura knew where the building had stood in the Whitewater Gorge, and had driven the girls by on in what was a rare thing for them, a field trip.
This was what Cassie had been thinking of lately, all those injuries of Belle’s, all the flaps of skin hanging from her knees, the head wounds bleeding furiously, the falls down stairs, the bicycle wreck in the thorn bush, her slightly chipped front tooth. How could it have been, the two of them side by side and playing the same game, that Belle was always falling? Cassie rarely got hurt. If they walked across the backyard, it was Cassie who found the dead baby bird, the caterpillars and nightcrawlers, she found treasure in tall grass because Belle was looking up. What she was looking for Cassie couldn’t say, winged things probably, orioles or nuthatches or bluebirds, or those tiny yellow butterflies that arrive in swarms one day and are gone the next. Belle got hurt, she took her pain in to Laura like a gift, she cried then tried to look brave. There was a demand in her. Cassie thought, but couldn’t say (wasn’t sure what the words would be) that this wasn’t the way to go, Laura didn’t like to touch or be touched, she was doing her work at a minimum and preferred to be alone. Belle’s wounds were akin to getting too thick into events. At eleven Belle started to withdraw from the Great Wide World, as Jimmy called it, she moved inside and became top of her class, at twelve had nearly memorized Edith Hamilton’s Mythology, which a thoughtful librarian had given her as a gift. Every day she begged for a copy of Virgil In Translation. She had taken to the house and could almost always be found at the kitchen table, under the hanging light with the round shade, and there too was Laura, staring out the window above the sink, and Belle thought she had gotten what she wanted, but Cassie wasn’t so sure.
“What’s that in the yard? Do you see what I’m pointing at, Cassie? Go on over there and take a look.”
Cassie walked across the gravel driveway, periodically stepping on a sharp rock that made her say ow, ow, ow, and through the side door that led into the cool garage, where she picked up Poppy’s shovel.
“Do you see the thing I’m talking about, that gray mound over there? Mom’s not going to want to walk out here and see it.”
The groundhog was lying belly up. He’d been a fat little guy. Cassie studied his face: dead. Also his small, expressive hands, curled now: dead. She put the shovel under him and felt that he’d—
“What is it, Cassie, do you know?”
—been turned to liquid. There weren’t bones or organs to offer any resistance. The Pig Dogs had had a time with this one. She got the shovel under his back and tried to lift it; he was very heavy, in addition to being liquid, and he rolled off the end of the shovel and landed facedown.
“I’m going in, I’m not watching this. Take it across the road and over the fence. Drop it over the fence, Cassie, so those dogs can’t get to it and bring it right back. Do you hear me?”
Cassie got the shovel under his belly and tried to lift him. He rolled off and landed on his back, and that was about all it took for Cassie to see what she was up against. Her shoulders strained and her back began to sweat, It wasn’t his weight so much as the fact of him down at the end of the long shovel, and her up at the other end. She gripped the shovel in the middle of the handle, stuck it under the groundhog’s back, he was maybe easier to lift this way, but he rolled off and landed on his belly. Simply by turning him over repeatedly, she’d managed to get him a few feet across the yard, so she did that some more: turned him again and again, rolling him like a sausage in a pan. Belly up, belly down. They made it across the road and to the ditch, and putting him in the ditch was no good, Belle would know or the dogs would know. The sun was a violence against Cassie’s back, sweat ran toward her eyes. She took off her T-shirt, wiped her face with it, then covered her hands and grabbed him by his paws, his front two in her left hand, his back two in her right. She turned herself sideways, spun around twice, then let him fly, across the ditch and over the fence. At the peak of his flight his back arched like a high jumper’s, his chin tilted regally, his arms and legs were loose in surrender. Cassie was, at ten, a child who would have to learn to look away.
Thursday evening, after dinner and a visit with Edwin Meyer and Poppy, a game of Chinese checkers and a bowl of green sherbet, Cassie went out on the screened porch and waited, and Friday she got up very early and went outside and waited.
Saturday morning she woke up and listened; if he was still gone, this would be the longest in a while and would signal nothing good, but then she heard them, the voices that had awakened her. Jimmy and Laura didn’t fight about Everything, as some parents did. The tear and scramble of their lives centered around only two subjects, Money and the Prior Claim. The two could be mixed and matched and combined in novel ways. Cassie had hovered for years at the edge of the conversation and could reduce its complex elements to two sentences:
JIMMY: She has a prior claim.
LAURA: Prior to your children?
Cassie had written these sentences in her notebook: for her they were no less than Virgil in Translation. She and Belle both wanted to get to the bottom of something, and even if they ultimately knew what it was—lost cultures, Barbara Thompson in a trailer park in Hopwood—they would keep at it. Young scholars. Their parents were having the conversation in the bedroom next door, which was the marital bedroom and contained many mysteries. Laura complained that she hated every stick of furniture in there, the bed they slept in, the dressers and mirrored vanity that matched it, all won by Jimmy in a card game with the Minor Criminals of the Midwest, who were not famous for their taste. The queen-size headboard was tall, flat, and covered with quilted, yellowed vinyl, attached to the frame with brass buttons, brass mostly missing. The dresser and vanity were made of blond wood, perhaps for a blonde woman, which was the opposite of Laura but similar to Barbara Thompson, whose name so far had not been mentioned.
The voices weren’t much more than a murmur. Cassie had to get out of bed and creep like a cat across her floor in order to hear what she hoped were the sounds of Jimmy taking his change, his keys, and his breath mints out of his pocket and placing them carefully on his dresser, because this meant he was staying for some hours. Last summer he would sometimes drop in late at night or early in the morning, expecting the girls to be asleep, and deposit with Laura a handful of disputed Money and leave again, that went on for weeks. Cassie heard the loose change land on the dresser top, Jimmy say he was tired, Laura make a sound that was perhaps a word or a cry, and then Cassie knew it was okay to get back in bed awhile. Wherever it was he went—and she didn’t believe she’d ever know—her father got very little sleep, he loved to come home and slip into bed in the morning light. She slipped into bed and lay on her back; the sun was coming up on the other side of the house but would reach her soon enough. Her heart pounded, she could see the plaster on the ceiling very clearly, the crack that zigzagged like a fault line from one side of the room to the other. She tried to close her eyes, but they popped right back open.
Last summer Belle had crept into Cassie’s room late one night and gotten in bed with her, then wrapped her arms around Cassie from behind the way she had when they were small and whispered in Cassie’s ear Are you very very sad? In all the great wide world Cassie couldn’t imagine another soul who would ask a question like that one and not expect to get beaten up good. Cassie hadn’t answered, had just lay there feeling Belle’s breath on the back of her neck and trying to think of a true answer. Every day was a vaccination. She missed her grandmother, who had been old and soft, who said few words but who gave to them: she and Poppy had taken them in without a word so long ago, when they had nowhere to live. They’d opened up all the old bedrooms, Buena Vista had gathered up her sewing things and moved them to the attic, and Cassie remembered those years with Buena Vista like a long party where the party is going on inside and no one talks about it. Cassie could still imagine her grandmother so clearly, her white hair curled tight against her head in a permanent wave, the skin on her face that had fallen and kept falling, her watery blue eyes. Buena Vista had been heavy, especially in her legs, and she walked with a kind of back-and-forth Frankenstein gait, and unable to control the distribution of her weight, she had walked hard and made everything in the house shake, especially her animal figurines. She had been just an old woman in a faded housedress, sometimes she even wore her slippers to the grocery store, but something about her had been their hearts’ salvation.
Now, lying in bed, her father asleep in the next room, Cassie felt herself swaying back into sleep. Can you smell the water? Maybe someday she would tell Belle that she hadn’t been, she wasn’t sad, she was … she almost knew, and then began to dream, there was a wide field, pink and spongy, or maybe it was a desert, there was no sign of anything anywhere, only the vast pinkness all around her, and she guessed she had to cross it, so she started walking.
Laura smoked. Belle sat at the kitchen table doing homework and tearing at her cuticles, her fingernails were already so short they sometimes bled. Poppy came in through the mudroom, “Laurie, have you seen my level?,” and Laura said no, she hadn’t, and he left again. A few minutes later he popped back in with Roger, who made a mad dash around the kitchen table and back out the door. “Laurie, have you seen my old canvas camp stool?” No, she hadn’t. He left. Cassie wandered from the kitchen to the screened porch, drinking a soda that made her stomach burn, as she hadn’t eaten anything all day and here it was almost two in the afternoon. She sat in the rocker with splinters. Finally Belle stuck her head out the door and said, He’s up.
Cassie went into the kitchen and casually sat down at the table, picked up Belle’s history book, and opened it to the page on Eli Whitney and the cotton gin. Upstairs the shower was running, then it turned off. Jimmy hummed as he shaved. When he came downstairs he smelled sweet, had a swing in his step. Cassie wrote on her palm with her fingernail the things she wanted to talk to him about: a door for the shack, help fixing her bicycle chain, would he toss the football with her, would he figure out how to get a better fence around the garden—the deer were tearing it up. Poppy needed new propane tanks on the Airstream, and there was something else. She tapped her fingernail on the table.
“Stop that,” Belle said. Cassie stopped.
“Hey, girls,” Jimmy said, sitting down at the head of the table.
“Hello,” Belle said, not looking up.
“Hey.” Cassie glanced at him, his hair was still wet from the shower and he had some tan across his nose. He’d put on a pressed white shirt, linen pants in a mossy green, one of his thin leather belts. He sat at the table as he always did, with his legs crossed like a woman’s, his torso slightly turned. Other fathers looked to Cassie like livestock; Jimmy was how it was supposed to be, a jangly, dancing man. She remembered she wanted to tell him that last week she’d been walking down the road and a fox had bolted out of the tall grass and run right in front of her, she could almost feel him against her skin, and she’d been tempted to follow him. But they move fast.
“Get a some coffee here, Laura?” Jimmy asked.
Her mother turned away from the window, dropped her cigarette in the sink where she’d been washing dishes, filled the percolator with water, slammed it against the counter.
“Whatcha working on there, Bella Belle?”
Belle blushed, tore at a cuticle. “A book report. On Where the Lilies Bloom.”
“Aren’t you—Isn’t this summer vacation?”
“I’m just,” Belle said, placing her hands over her notebook, “doing it on my own.”
“I see. Good book?”
“I liked it.”
Jimmy nodded. “Well.”
Cassie kicked the chair with the back of her foot until it started to ache.
“How about you, Cass? Having a good summer?”
She glanced down at the palm of her hand, where she’d written her invisible list, then cleared her throat.
“Laura, how about putting a little soup in a pan for me?”
Cassie cleared her throat again—she’d start with the bike chain, she figured—and Laura turned slowly and looked Jimmy up and down, then pulled a pan from the cabinet with a hard rattle and slammed it on the stove.
“And maybe a cheese sandwich.” Jimmy looked at Cassie, grinned, shrinking up his left eye as he did so, his bit of a wink. “Man could starve to death in his own home, huh, Cass?”
Cassie thought she might be called upon to betray her mother, it was not at all out of the question for Jimmy to demand such loyalty, but she was spared the request by a block of cheese sailing from the direction of the refrigerator, not its sailing so much as its landing was the distraction. It skidded underneath Belle’s papers and came to a stop. The three at the table looked up at Laura. Some very bad things had happened this way, some of which could still be discerned on the ceiling.
“I can see I’m not wanted here,” Jimmy said, pushing himself up from the table.
“How dare you,” Laura said, crossing the kitchen like a storm. “How dare you come home after four days—”
“Five,” Cassie said.
“—five days and push me into giving you an excuse to leave again? What in the name of Christ sort of person are you?”
“Mom,” Belle said.
“Shut up, Belle, and you shut up, too, Cassie.”
“I don’t appreciate you talking to me like this in front of my daughters,” Jimmy said, pulling himself up to his full height, an inch shorter than Laura.
“Oh, oh, that’s rich, too, your daughters,” Laura said, getting closer to Jimmy’s face with every word.
“All I came home for was my stick, anyway.” Jimmy turned and walked into the living room, stopping at the coat closet, where he took out his cue case.
Cassie jumped up and ran past him, grabbing her sandals off the porch as she went. She leaped down the porch steps and landed on some sharp rocks, had to make her way down the driveway to where he’d parked, pulled open his passenger door. It was hot inside, it was shocking. Jimmy drove a 1971 Lincoln Continental with suicide doors and red leather interior, and if they were starving to death or would die without penicillin and the only way to save them would be to Sell The Car, then good-bye Cassie, good-bye Belle. This according to Laura. Poppy reluctantly agreed.
A minute passed. Jimmy had undoubtedly gone upstairs to collect his things, and would come sailing out the front door any minute. He favored a dress shirt that allowed room for an entrance, or an exit, in its graceful folds. He sailed out the door. Laura was right behind him, speaking quickly but not loudly, and she threw something but Cassie couldn’t see what it was. Conditions were not ideal, Cassie realized this right away.
Jimmy walked down the driveway, his walk a kind of glide, and pulled his door open. “Get out, Cassie,” he said, starting the engine. Boiling air blew from the vents. “Sweet creeping Jesus, it’s hot in here.”
Sweat poured down her face and in a stream down her chest. “Get out, Cassie, right this minute.”
Laura still stood on the porch but she was hard to see behind the screen.
“Right this goddamn minute, Cassie, I’m not playing.”
She turned and looked at him. His long black eyelashes had never worked to his advantage when he was angry, but she could see he really was. Angry.
“GET OUT OF THE CAR.”
Another minute or two and he’d see what her point was.
“Fine,” he said, his teeth grinding. He pulled the gearshift into reverse as if he wanted to pull it off the column, then backed out so fast stones flew up and hit the bottom of the car, and obviously this wasn’t something Jimmy would wish to happen to the Lincoln. He was beyond himself. His tires screeched against the King’s Crossing as he moved the transmission into drive, and then Cassie was thrown against the red leather seat, and the compass bobbing around in liquid on the dashboard swung around, up and down.
“Do you see what you do to me, all of you, every last blasted one of you? You make me hate my life, Cassie, how does that feel?” Jimmy slammed the lighter into the dash, flipped a cigarette out of the pack in his breast pocket. “I don’t know what I was thinking, picking you out at the zoo. I honestly do not know.”
Cassie rolled down her window, stuck out her head, let the wind fill her mouth and nose. When she leaned back, Jimmy was smoking, driving slowly, listening to his favorite radio station, Frank Sinatra was singing “Fly Me to the Moon.” Jimmy hummed along with him, Jimmy’s beautiful voice.
They drove the four miles into Roseville, a town famous for two things: a small candy factory called April and May’s, after the unmarried sisters who’d run it out of their kitchen; and a restaurant, Holzinger’s, which boasted a large, expensive buffet. Cassie had been there only once, on her parents’ anniversary a few years before, and buffet was probably not the correct word. She and Belle had been stunned into silence when they entered. The restaurant occupied four floors: the first was appetizers, the second was breads, the third was entrées, and the fourth was desserts. Cassie had stopped in the appetizer room—the mountain of cold pink shrimp on ice in the middle of a table, the cold silver platter underneath it beaded with condensation, had made her want to run.
Now they passed the Granger School, which was beautiful and looked as if it might fall down, and then the gas station and a flower shop. The main street was tree-lined and shady.
“High suicide rate in Roseville, you know that, Cass?”
Cassie shook her head.
“Oh yeah. I coulda told anybody who asked, and for free, but they hired an expert instead.”
She doubted it would have been for free.
“County coroner—you know him? Robbie Ballenger?—he suggested it to the county council. Read some article about national suicide rates, saw that ours are as high as an Indian reservation. Don’t want that, do we.” An old rocking horse and a birdcage were sitting on the sidewalk outside the antique shop. “The Christians are calling for Robbie’s resignation. An in-erad-i-cable rule of life, Cassie,” he waved his cigarette at her like a stem finger, “do not piss off the Christians, they will throw their stones at you every time.”
As they approached the center of the downtown there were fewer and fewer businesses, just empty buildings. An evacuation order. Uncle Bud’s sat on the corner of Main and Railroad; it had been a drugstore fifteen years before, a low and long building with a green awning along the front windows. The windows were covered with a film that made them look silver from outside: mirrors. Jimmy pulled into one of the three parking spaces facing the back door. Behind them, on the corner of Railroad and fifth, was a bar called Howdy’s. A sign outside advertised fiftycent Miller drafts for and a whole room devoted to darts. Other than Howdy’s, everything seemed deserted. A few faded storefronts proclaimed fly-by-night mechanics, flown, and body shops. Cassie had been here once, sent inside Uncle Bud’s to fetch Jimmy when Laura was so mad she couldn’t get out of the car for fear her legs would explode. The place had held Cassie in an attraction so powerful she could no longer remember the specifics, only the heart-knocking joy. She felt a shadow of it every time she went past this part of Roseville with Poppy, on the way out to the highway and to the strip of stores at the edge of Hopwood.
Jimmy rolled up the windows, reached into the back for his cue. “You’re not to bother me.” Cassie nodded.
“I’ve come here to visit my table and get in some time, not to focus on you.”
“Okay.”
“And if Bud comes in, who is as you know an old sumbitch, and says you have to leave, then you’re going to have to skedaddle and find something else to do.”
“Okay.”
He leaned over and kissed her on the forehead. His lips were smooth and hard and cool. “You know you’re my favorite, Cassie, although God knows that ain’t saying much.” Stepping out of the car, he pulled his shirt away from his chest, fanning himself witrh it, then looked for the key to the back door.
The door was steel, gunmetal gray, no window. In the back room Jimmy pulled a string, and a bare bulb illuminaed the rough wooden shelves covered with boxes of Master chalk, cases of crackers filled with cheese or peanut butter, new balls. On the floor were boxes overflowing with empty beer and soda cans. Against one wall was a line of cues that looked as if they were awaiting surgery. Cassie took a deep breath. This smelled better than anything in her life, better than a Christmas tree, better than the raspberry bush at the edge of the house, tangled with honeysuckle, better than Jimmy’s winter coat.
“I’m not going to entertain you, and the rules are the same as when the table was at home, you can’t touch it.”
Jimmy used another key to open an ugly green door with a frosted glass panel that seemed to have been stolen from a hardboiled detective agency. They were in the dim main hall. Bud’s bar still looked as it had, Cassie guessed, when the building was a pharmacy—a long counter with stools, and a mirror behind it with Rx painted in vivid blue, a mortar and pestle beside it. On the shelves below the mirror were trays of balls and boxes of chalk, mostly battered, and bags of potato chips clipped to a black metal rack. A single jar held dill pickles in cloudy green brine. There were no draft beers or fountain drinks; everything was lined up squarely in a refrigerator with a glass door.
“And I’m not buying you a soda or chips and have you make a mess in here, so don’t ask.”
Cassie’s eyes glanced from surface to surface. She’d never been anywhere so clean and precise. Bud used a big old-fashioned cash register: five-dollars was the last anyone had paid. On the steel counter next to the cash register was a big rectangular book with a grainy black cover, the word ACCOUNTS. The book was centered so precisely on the counter it looked like Bud had used a speed square. A sign on the bar explained that between three and six in the afternoon the tables were a dollar a person per hour, and between six and two in the morning, they were two-fifty. In one corner was a silent jukebox, and other than that just the tables.
“And don’t ask for quarters for the jukebox because I didn’t bring any.” Jimmy had taken out his cue and was screwing the joint on the butt.
Seven tables, five feet from the wall and five feet apart; a light with a green accountant’s shade hung over every table. At each end of the room was a rack with ten house cues. A shelf for drinks and ashtrays ran the length of the room, and there were four tall chairs against the wall and ten stools scattered around the room. Cassie wandered around, not quite touching anything, taking in the smell of chalk, beer, cigarettes, while Jimmy used a third, smaller key to unlock the door to the glassed-in room at the end of the hall. Inside the glass room was one table, no stool, no chair. Cassie hovered in the doorway, watched him flip the switch to the light that had formerly hung in their garage.
“Ahhhh,” Jimmy said, resting his stick on the toe of his shoe. “There’s my best girl.” He spread his arms as if making a gift of the whole room to his daughter. “I ever tell you how I came into possession of this table?”
Cassie nodded, she had heard the story many times.
“It’s a vintage Brunswick, this one. Built in 1884, probably in New Orleans; moved with a family to Alabama and eighty years later was back in the Big Easy, where one James Claiborne happened to win it in a game that went on so long God wished me luck and went on to bed.” Jimmy lit a cigarette. He bent and studied the length of the table, looking for wear on the felt. “I hauled it in the back of a borrowed station wagon to the boardinghouse where I was staying—oh, don’t worry, it was a Christian boardinghouse for Christian men. The slate, rails, legs, pockets, rack, sticks, and balls, the whole shebang, I reassembled it in an abandoned tobacco warehouse on Tchoupitoulas, the key to which I happened to find upon my person after another difficult game. In an old hotel, that one. Spooky.” Jimmy rested his cigarette on the small shelf against the wall, not in the ashtray provided but on the shelf. There was a series of dark stripes in the wood, as if he’d placed burning ash there on a number of occasions. He ran his hand along the shining hardwood of the rails. “There was a single missing part, believe it or not, and I found it in a Brunswick repair shop on Frenchmen Street. It’s a civilized town, Cassie, that has a Brunswick repair shop. It’s long gone, just like old Jimmy Claiborne. I’d bet I’m still talked about, though. If I were a betting man.”
He didn’t say the table was walnut, but Cassie knew The legs were ornately carved and the pockets woven leather. It was four feet by eight feet, the measurement Uncle Bud called True. The slate had been flawless when Jimmy won the table, and remained so; Bud changed the felt, made of fine wool from somewhere in the Netherlands. Wood spun and dyed by virgins, Jimmy said. Cassie wished he would go on, she wished he would tell the story of the light, too, which she had studied for hours. The glass was deep red and imprinted with black Chinese characters, and red silk fringe hung like liquid from the bottom of the shade. She wanted to hear Jimmy say the words Colorado and mining town, which she’d long ago written in her notebook.
But he said nothing more. His cigarette sent up a ribbon of smoke against the wall. Cassie watched him rack the balls (they came from Belgium, and he would have no others), knowing she was invisible to him. She watched as she had hour after hour, sitting on a kitchen ladder in the garage. The one ball was the yellow of a sunflower; the two was the same shade as the Indiana sky on a flawless summer day, Cassie had often had the feeling they had been made for her, or that they represented, at the very least, the possibility of something beautiful. At night sometimes, unable to sleep, she would imagine the balls spread out across the green table under the red glass of the lamp: someone had stepped on a box of paints and let them fly. Ruined paints on new grass.
Jimmy stood at the foot of the table and, using a house cue left propped in a comer, took two practice strokes (never one or three), then sent the cue ball crashing into the gathered tribe. All fifteen balls careened around the table, and the four and the thirteen fell. He was practicing straight pool, even though he’d been saying for years that the days of the great straight players were over, and that the money was now on 8-ball for hustlers and 9-ball for professionals. Cassie didn’t know which he was. Jimmy moved around the table quickly, as if on a preordained path. When the table had been at their house, all those years, she had watched Uncle Bud and many other men play against Jimmy, and she knew her father had a strange and specific style related to his restless grace; he bent at the knees instead of at the waist and didn’t sight down the cue as if down the barrel of a gun. In deep concentration, he made his bottom lip so thin it vanished. She would have never told him or anyone, but she had missed this table fiercely, and even after spending her whole life with a man to whom objects gravitated and then were lost—things that came and went like the stray men Jimmy invited to dinner and a game, who would never be seen again—she had not understood what had happened, how the table went missing and ended up here at Bud’s.
She had been standing in one spot, watching her father, FOR so long that when she heard another key rattle in the ugly green door, she awoke as if from a dream. Uncle Bud stepped in, gently closing the door behind him. As he passed the glass room where Jimmy played, Bud barely gave him a glance, and there wasn’t the comfort of old friendship in the look, either; Jimmy rarely earned such a thing. Uncle Bud had been Jimmy’s childhood companion, they had a long history. And there WERE a few dark moments in the past two dark years when Bud had stepped into their house in Laura’s name, had roughly set things right.
He was tall and dense, with arms the size of hams, and an enormous head on a thick neck. Bud kept his hair, which was going gray, cut so short he looked like he’d gone missing from some secret branch of the military, and he dressed in T-shirts and blue jeans and motorcycle boots and wore a wide belt with a Harley-Davidson buckle. But he didn’t own a motorcycle. There was a wide gap between his two front teeth and his eyebrows sprouted wild. He had a tattoo of Donald Duck on his forearm, the origin of which he would not discuss, and he had formerly smoked cigarettes but had given them up for cigars; Cassie liked the smell. On the whole Cassie faced the world of men with the wariness of the repeatedly betrayed child—Poppy was the only man she trusted—but long ago she had taken to Bud and felt safe in a room he was in. He kept his distance from her.
“Cassie,” he said, surprised to see her. “What are you doing here?”
She shrugged.
“Well, come help me carry these boxes up front.”
The cases of soda were heavy, but in Bud’s arms and against his stomach, they looked like matchboxes. As she passed the glass room for the third time, Jimmy stuck his head out. “Keep her workin’, Bud. That’s why I had children, although I thought they’d be sons.”
Bud ignored him.
Jimmy came out and sat down at the bar. “Give me a cold something.” He turned to Cassie, winked. “I ever tell you how I came into possession of that table?”
Bud sighed, stopped at the refrigerator door as if he might not open it.
“Okay, okay. I may have mentioned the adventure a time or two. Let me say that I stole so much from that man that night, pretty much everything he held dear, that if we’da kept it up, I woulda left with one of his kidneys.”
Bud relented and got Jimmy the beer.
“I’m back at it,” Jimmy said. “Bud, if she bothers you, send her scootin’.”
Cassie watched him go, accepted the cold Coke that Bud offered her. “You want to play, Cass? I’ve got some bookkeeping to do.”
“I can’t. I’m not allowed.”
“Who says? Jimmy? This is my pool hall, those are my tables, including the one he’s playing on which he keeps insisting is his.” Bud shook his head. “Nothing to be done about him.” He took a tray of balls off the rack and dropped a cube of chalk in the middle. “He never taught you to play?”
Cassie shook her head. “But I’ve watched a lot.”
“I know you have. Jimmy loves an audience. Well, come here, then.”
Bud took down a house cue and examined its tip, then chose another. He said ferrule, scuffer, shaper, mushrooming. He put the cue in Cassie’s hand. She had sometimes snuck Jimmy’s cue out and looked at it, but there was a space that Cassie had never crossed between contraband and the legitimately held thing. She crossed it. The cue felt more formidable than she would have guessed, heavy at the bottom like a weapon and delicate at the top, just a stem. Bud showed her how to rack the balls for 8-ball, 9-ball, straight pool, which she already knew, then taught her the difference between an open and closed bridge, then taught her how to sight and where to hold the cue with her rear arm. He said head spot center spot foot spot comer pocket long string foot string center string head string. Kitchen. Head rail side rail foot rail side rail, and for the next four hours, as they lined up shots and hit them, he said a thousand things that Cassie fought hard to remember. When the tip of the cue strikes the cue ball, the forearm of your rear arm should be at a ninety-degree angle to the floor. Play begins here. This is a foul, and this is a foul, and this is also a foul; one of your feet must remain on the floor at all times. This is a mechanical bridge and there is no shame in using it. Chalk your tip before every shot but not until your opponent has missed because it’s rude not to wait. A slice, a thin slice, an impossible slice. The ghost ball, or phantom ball, the ghost table acting as a mirror. Bank shots and combinations and the massé and jumps. Sharking. Speed of stroke, hold the cue lightly, deadstroke. How to will deadstroke, or if it’s always a gift from God. On the cue ball: the vertical axis, the follow, right English, 3:00, low right, the draw, 6:00, left english, 9:00, high left.
“How old are you?” he asked.
“Ten.”
“You need to get an Introduction to Physics textbook. No one in Hopwood county is going to teach you physics at this age. Also you’ll need to know something about geometry. Your fool father will say he’s good at this game because he thinks in geometry, but he’s lying. He never even learned geometry, they didn’t go that far in reform school. And this game is about physics, so do that, get a book.”
Cassie nodded. She wished she had her notebook.
“And grow. You’re too short to see what’s happening on the table.”
“Okay.”
“Cassie,” Jimmy said, standing at the bar with his cue taken apart and stowed back in the case, “I’m leaving. Put this stuff away and tell Uncle Bud thank you for the lesson.”
“You’re out of here early,” Bud said, crossing his arms across his wide chest. “I thought you’d still be here when the late crowd arrived.”
“You were wrong.” Jimmy pulled his keys out of his pocket. “Get in the car, Cass.”
“You go on, Jimmy. I’ll take her home.”
“Or I’ll call Edwin,” Cassie said, shocked as she heard herself say it.
“Get in the car, Cassie.”
Bud took a step toward Jimmy. “I’ve got an idea, how about you head on wherever you were going, which was surely not home where you belong, and I’ll take care of getting Cassie back. Sound good?”
The muscles in Jimmy’s face tightened and relaxed; Cassie had seen this many times, he did it when he was furious, as lions yawn before they attack. His whole body was tense. But he said, smiling at the end, “Whatever. Save me the trip.” He walked over and kissed Cassie on top of her head. “Don’t let Bud talk you into playing for money.” He strolled out the front door, unlocked now, even by leaving through a door you didn’t enter through is very bad luck, Cassie almost said something.
“All right, come here now,” Bud said, setting up the three ball in front of a side pocket. “I want you to take this shot a hundred times, I’m going to stand here and count. If you make it fifty times you can come back tomorrow.”
It was an easy shot in some ways; she was shooting from the side of the table, and she didn’t have to reach. The three was eighteen inches from the pocket at what Bud said was about a thirty-degree angle. But Cassie had seen right away that this was a game in which mysterious forces seemed to be at work, which meant that sometimes things might go well and that was a surprise, and sometimes everything went wrong and that was also a surprise. Bud said there were an infinite number of variables to consider, and Cassie didn’t understand what that meant but remembered the phrase so she could ask Belle. He said take the best shot available to you, and if there isn’t one, go safe. If you practice a shot many times, you add it to a repertoire until you own the table. He said don’t go for the slice beyond ninety degrees, because when you do, you’re pushing hard against the spectrum of possible outcomes.
Other people began to trickle in, a middle-aged couple who looked like they’d just woken up and eaten fried eggs. A thin bald man playing alone. Cassie barely registered them. She made the shot sixty-two times, told Bud he could go about his business, then lined the balls up and started all over, and she did that right up until Edwin Meyer touched her on the arm and told her it was time to go home.
They got in Edwin’s car, a clean, modest Dodge that smelled like nothing but an unfolded map, and headed home. Edwin was younger than Jimmy but had started school at four and skipped two grades, so they ended up in the same class. Unlike Uncle Bud’s, Edwin’s life had diverged early from Jimmy’s, when Poppy wanted Jimmy to work at the hardware store and he refused. Edwin took the after-school job and stayed right there, no ladder to move up, just more responsibility to take on, longer hours to work, until Poppy decided to retire and sell, and Edwin bought the place. He’d been at Public Hardware twenty years now, Cassie guessed, and he was so much entwined with the building and the smell of nails in wooden bins, the creaking of the old floor, that if the store didn’t exist, Edwin wouldn’t, either. He’d go trinner and thinner until finally he couldn’t be seen, couldn’t be remembered. Cassie forgot him all the time. Laura said he felt responsibility for them all, as if, when he purchased Poppy’s business he also purchased his failings; Jimmy was clearly a failing. Someone, Edwin was fond of saying, had to keep everything in working order. He had no family of his own.
“Are you—you were there a long time—all right?” Edwin was wearing the clothes he favored for work: polyester trousers in a horrible shade of tan or green and a seersucker dress shirt from Sears. His thin dark hair lay flat against his head, Laura said he had a Lovely Face. Laura called him Sweet Reason. Cassie told Belle one night she thought Edwin loved Laura, and that’s why he was always calling on them for Chinese checkers and hot tea, but Belle said Cassie was wrong. She said he came for other reasons, and he was Pure.
“I’m fine, yeah.”
“A pool hall,” Edwin said, shaking his head. “I would have been in all kinds of trouble if I’d been caught in a pool hall at your age.”
Cassie looked out the window. Roseville was closing the shutters and rolling up the streets, as Jimmy would say. “What kind of music is this?”
Edwin turned the volume up. “It’s a polka. A German polka. My parents were German, you know, very firm. Firm, hardworking people.”
“Okay.”
“This is my favorite kind of music, although I don’t ordinarily say so. My parents had a Victrola, a real one, and a collection of seventy-eights. Big records. They used to put on a polka record on Saturday nights, just like tonight, and we would dance, it’s very joyful music, as you can hear.”
“Okay.”
“And my father became a different man. All week long he”— Edwin paused, drove—” counted the grains of salt we were allowed to put on our potatoes. He counted for my mother so she wouldn’t cheat. So Saturdays were great. For me.”
They drove out to the edge of town, turned on 300 West, headed for the King’s Crossing. “Do you know anything about bicycle chains?” Cassie asked, embarrassed.
“I surely do. I’m thinking about your bike, what sort of chain you need.” He thought. “It’s too old and slow and meant for a boy,” he said, as he turned the car around and headed back to the hardware store.
“Not if it’s a bother,” Cassie said.
“We’ll take care of it.” Edwin leaned in toward the steering wheel, smiled. “A project.”
They finished late. Cassie rode the bike down to the crossroads and back, and told Edwin it felt like new.
“I don’t think it was ever new, Cassie.”
“It’s better, though.” She thanked him, and he tipped an imaginary hat and got in his car and drove away, the faint strains of a German polka following him.
The house was quiet: Cassie found Belle at the table, reading her book and making notes. Her reports were so exhaustive, Laura said, that no one would ever need to read the things themselves. Belle drained a book.
Laura was standing at the kitchen sink, staring out into the dark yard where the finches fed, as if it were daylight and as if there were finches. The dinner dishes were done, and Cassie realized she hadn’t eaten. She fixed a peanut-butter sandwich, poured herself a glass of milk, and sat down on the floor next to her mother, leaning up against the cabinet door. Behind the door were cleaning solvents and toilet-bowl chemicals and various ammonias and bleaches, some still bearing the neon-green MR. YUCK! stickers from years before. Poppy had put the stickers on.
“Look how dirty your hands are,” Laura said, “up against that perfectly white bread.”
Cassie looked. “Yep.”
“It’s sort of pretty, isn’t it, the contrast.”
Belle made a sound from the table, a small disgusted explosion.
“Is that—Are your fingers blue?” Laura’s innocent, beleagured tone. “Were you playing pool?”
Cassie shrugged, looked away from Laura, whom she could feel continuing to stare at her for some seconds. Then there was the snap of the cigarette case opening, and the grinding of the wheel on the fighter, and Laura had looked back out the window, Cassie knew. Leaning against the cabinet door reminded her of a dream she’d had lately, a Replacement Dream, she was thinking of calling it. The Original Dream had been of flying way up in the air, above rooftops and treetops; once she had seen the details of a weathervane on top of an old bam. Once she had crash-landed in a pond and scared herself so badly she’d jumped out of bed. She had those dreams for a long time, she just spread her arms and fell forward (or backward, on one memorable occasion) and let the wind take her, nothing to it. And then she had a dream in which flying required a code word, and Cassie didn’t have it. The only way she could get it was to turn her head and look over her left shoulder as a flying horse crossed the path of the moon, and somehow she managed it, and then she was up in the air and the feeling in her gut was stronger than when she was just sailing over barns like Peter Pan. That went on a while, the searching for the code or the key; once it was in a refrigerator in a dark basement, and the refrigerator was filled with vials of something. But the Original Dream was completely gone, Cassie could sense it, because now she was dreaming that she had to enter a windowless room of her own house, or at least she was told repeatedly it was her own house, and kneel in front of what might be a filing cabinet or a kitchen cabinet just like this one, open the door, and roll into it backward as if she were doing a backward somersault, and then she was propelled into what the Other People in the dream called flying, except where was the sky, where was the air? She seemed to remain in the cabinet with this strange, tossed-about, sick feeling in her gut that was like the flying feeling, only much stronger. And no flying.
Laura cleared her throat, said, “I know you’re the only one who remembers, Cassie, besides me, and that’s what’s wrong with you.”
Cassie put her milk glass down slowly and rested the sandwich on top of the glass and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. Belle’s pencil stopped for a moment, then continued.
“He was so sweet,” Laura said, “he was the sweetest, funniest man. I was engaged to someone else, you know, at home, before I came here.”
Cassie didn’t move, but of course she knew, she’d known for years.
“He had money. He had old family money, which doesn’t mean anything here, there’s no such thing. And I had my whole life planned out, how things would be after I’d married him, what our children would be named and where I’d sit in church and what my relationship to his mother would be, his brothers. And all that money, like Christmas every day. I even knew which chair on the veranda would be mine during the carnival season. I didn’t know, I was nineteen years old, I didn’t know that the heart can make grave mistakes and that who you end up married to is largely a matter of accident and then you’re stuck with it forever, and I know there are people who are not stuck forever and I envy them. They have something, there’s a switch in them or a special gene, I don’t understand it. But from the very beginning with your father, I felt that every decision we made, every move we made, was wrapped in a kind of holy light, no doubt because I had been driven mad by Catholic school and I felt guilty for the things I’d done with him which are not the issue and I’m not going to mention them. Two weeks, that was how long we had together. And then he left New Orleans in a stolen truck with a pool table in the back. And I. Cassie. If you ever engage in something you perceive or misperceive as holy, you will not let it go and you will not defile it. And so I packed one suitcase and jumped on a bus and followed him here, it took twenty-six hours, and all that time I was feverish with fear and it seemed such a long time but in fact was nothing. Because time is relative, isn’t it, Belle, and now I’ve been sick with following him for thirteen years and that bus trip passed in the blink of an eye.”
Cassie turned her head and looked at she, the tight posture Belle had developed from sitting so long at the table with a pencil in her hand, her head tilted to the right. Belle glanced up, and the look she gave her sister was complicated, it seemed part cold anger and part fish on a hook. If someone else were here, Poppy or Edwin, Laura would stop. But Cassie couldn’t make her stop.
“And when I got here, you know. But what I want to tell you is something I’ve been remembering all day today, it was something that happened after all the drama—well, all the initial drama— had cleared up, and Jimmy and I went to the justice of the peace and got married, I cried all through the ceremony, I didn’t even know why I was crying.” Laura stared at the yard as if the answer were there somehow, a scene she’d missed in an old tale. “I bet a lot of women would say the same, if they were honest. We were married at the courthouse in Hopwood by a little man who looked just like Elvis would have if he’d lived to be eighty, and if he’d somehow gotten shrunk by a ray gun. And this little judge or clerk or whatever he was couldn’t read our names, he called us Larry and Sally. And when he said Do you Larry, your dad said so officiously, / Do, and I was laughing and crying at the same time, and we were married under those names. We might not be legally married for all I know. And we went to a motel at the edge of Hopwood and spent one night there and I know the whole idea of your parents’ wedding night must be psychologically shocking, but in truth we spent the whole night laughing, Jimmy detailing his many exploits to me, remember we didn’t know each other. And then the next morning he said he had to go take care of a few things and he left me there, and I slept awhile, and then walked around the parking lot, and watched the cars on the highway, and the whole day passed. There wasn’t a telephone in the room and I didn’t know where to call anyway, and that’s when it started, I was sitting on the curb in the parking lot and I started saying to myself, I married him, I married him, I married him, and I knew I couldn’t call my mother because she’d said I was dead to her. I’d left her to clean up the mess of my broken engagement, and remember she still had to work for his family, and all of her hopes for the future had been tied up in my marrying him. And Jimmy didn’t come back all that day or that night, and then I got really scared, because I didn’t know if he’d paid for the room or if I was going to get kicked out and I didn’t have any money, not a dime, and I was from the South and the people in the Midwest are so cold, they’re so judgmental and superior, they act as if we aren’t all human making human mistakes, but in fact they are human and you are something lower in the hierarchy and you disgust them. I’m exaggerating but if you knew how people in Louisiana would react to an abandoned pregnant bride as opposed to how people in Indiana would you’d see I’m not far off the mark. I walked around in a daze saying I married him, I married him, and I had no money and no food. I finally took the change Jimmy left on the dresser, and got something out of a vending machine. But the more important thing is that I didn’t call my mother or Buena Vista because it was already too late, no one could help me, I had crossed over. All I could do was wait for him and hope he would return and save me, because no one could do it but him. There’s probably a name for this illness, I don’t know, I had entered some other atmosphere. I married him. And he showed up the next day and of course I cried and hit him and screamed and threw things, and then he gathered me up and we came here to Poppy’s house, and Belle was born and I knew he was still seeing Barbara, everyone knew it and he didn’t really try to hide it, and then you were born, Cassie, and he was still seeing her, and there was a single time I might have left him but it passed. Everything before that time and everything after it was the same and it is still the same, I want you to understand this, because later you’re going to look back I’m afraid and think I had no pride or I was filled with selfhatred, that’s probably all true but it isn’t the whole story.”
Laura lit another cigarette and blew the smoke out through her nose, and Cassie looked down at the blue chalk on her fingertips. She scrubbed her hands against her jeans, but it was embedded in her nails and even in the whorls of her fingerprints and wouldn’t come off.
“I stayed and I stay, Cassie, because of that holy light. To this very day I pass the grocery store where he and I went for a cold root beer the day I first got here, the day I got off the bus, and even though he told me he was engaged to someone else, I look at that grocery store and see the holy light. The courthouse in Hopwood is holy, the little wizened Elvis clerk is one of the saints. And after you girls were born, you can’t imagine how that increased. Everything you wore, every piece of furniture you touched, it’s all sacred, this house and yard where you took your first steps, even—I swear this is true—the faucets in the bathtub, because I turned them on and off so many times giving you baths, and he gave you baths, those are our faucets and they’re filled with holy light. Do you see what I’m saying, I could leave him, I could leave this house and try to find a way to start again but there is no place to go because I took my vows and what is done can’t be undone. I can’t very well take you away from Poppy, he has nothing else left, and so I’d have to stay in Roseville and Roseville is sacred because my marriage and my children are sacred, and so I’d be living in the shadow of my own life and every day seeing the light in the grocery store and in a park bench where I sat with him once and in the gas station where we stopped to get gas on a family trip to Clifty Falls when you were babies; it’s tender, this feeling I’m talking about, it’s a feeling you can’t put any pressure on because it hurts too much. If I could go back to the time I had the strength to leave I would, I’d do it and accept the consequences, but I can’t go back.”
The clock ticked in the sudden silence, Belle’s pencil scratched out a description or a question or a revelation.
“I’m trying to say it really really irritates me, Cassie, the way you favor him and wait for him and suffer his cruelties, but I understand it perfectly well. I do. If he said to me any day, any hour, that he was coming home, I’d let him come, I’d welcome him home, and so there might be days ahead, they might have already happened, when I act like I hate you because of him, but in fact it’s the other way around.”
Cassie stood, stretched her legs. They’d fallen asleep, sitting on the hard floor. She threw the rest of her sandwich away, then stepped in front of Laura and washed out her milk glass, placing it carefully on the towel. “Good-night,” she said, to no one in particular.
‘“Night,” Belle said.
“Good-night, sweetheart,” Laura said, without looking at her.
In her bed, Cassie lay on her back and looked out the west-facing window; she thought she would never sleep. Her shoulders ached and she wondered if maybe she should get up and try to remember some of the things Uncle Bud had said so she would write them down, but it was no use. They were tangled up now in Laura’s story. When Laura was growing up, Cassie knew, she’d had a religion, she’d gone to Catholic school, and her whole life had been Catholic. Cassie had found a cigar box in the attic years before, filled with cards, prayer cards and funeral cards, Laura must have collected them when she was a girl. There were pictures of Mary, shepherds, guardian angels, guiding children over a rickety bridge. And some of Jesus. Cassie had stolen one of him, for reasons she didn’t understand. He was looking out, looking at her, and his robes were wide open and the inside of his chest exposed. Belle found it in Cassie’s drawer one afternoon, putting laundry away, and had carried it into the kitchen, saying, “Look what I found: the Radioactive Heart of Jesus.” Belle had laughed, she had no use for Catholicism, thinking the Greeks far superior. And Laura had laughed for reasons of her own. But Cassie had snatched the card away and, unable to remember why she’d wanted it at all, buried it in the backyard in a sandwich bag.
Laura had had all those cards and a rosary and a lace cap she wore in church—Cassie couldn’t quite put a structure on what she was thinking—but her daughters had done without. Jimmy had the gods he believed in and no others, and no one could put a name to them or quite work out their powers; sometimes they were kind and sometimes they kicked his ass, is what Jimmy said. But Laura. She had traveled a long distance, a long, long way. Cassie stretched out her legs and raised her arms above her head, comer pockets, then lowered her arms like a snow angel: side rails. And when Laura found herself alone in that motel room, no mother father sister Christ crucified or Blessed Virgin Mary, she had been … Cassie raised and lowered her arms, she felt like the bed was rocking her … Laura hadn’t been completely alone, had she? Belle had been there, just a seed. But Laura hadn’t mentioned that, and Belle, too, had kept her peace. Cassie slept.
In the morning she got up very early and went downstairs, trying hard not to wake anyone. She made lunch, left a note on the kitchen table, got her bike out of the garage, and tested the chain. It was still good. She rode down the King’s Crossing to 300 West, turned right, and headed in to Roseville, then through town to Railroad Street. At Uncle Bud’s she parked her bicycle in the shade and sat down on the rear steps and waited for him to come and open the back door. She took an apple and a sandwich out of her backpack, along with a chocolate milk; she finished them before the sun was fully up. All that day she waited, and when Uncle Bud arrived at three o’clock, she asked him if he’d be willing to give her a set of keys. She told him she was a person he could trust.
THE FLOOD, 1985 (#ulink_62a518d7-2a56-5cb5-ab02-37bf5abc0d11)
Cassie had gathered up Laura’s library books from around the house and matched them against the receipt she’d been given when she checked them out. They were all present and accounted for. She put them in the truck. Belle had given her the grocery list, and she’d put that in her back pocket and gone to Uncle Bud’s to practice for three hours, then over to his ramshackle house on a back street in Roseville. He needed help hanging the kitchen cabinets he’d gotten at an auction. By late afternoon she was headed out of town toward the library in Hopwood.
In the library parking lot she’d gone through the books, removing Laura’s bookmarks, the scraps of paper on which she sometimes made notes, and had come across a whole piece of paper folded in half. This:
1. We dream of rational creatures transcending the stain. Gauze and feathertip, the spill of clean scent like a trumpet bell, a bargain in the confectioner’s marketIn truth they judge and bruise.
2 Rather than kick it we tried to lift the dead horse He stood for a moment and we prayed he would fall away from us. I remember the place on his belly where the fur was rubbed thin and how when he landed his head hit last and the remaining air in his lungs rutted the grass. O, for a falconer’s voice, To lure this tassel-gentle back again!
It had been handwritten by Laura, with no date and no title, on a light green sheet torn from a stenographer’s pad with the orphaned scraps of paper clinging to the top. Cassie had never held with leaving such scraps, and now, reading the poem, or whatever it was—an idea, a group of sentences—she plucked them off one by one and dropped them on the floor of the truck. Laura and Belle talked about poetry all the time, but Cassie had no particular feelings about it. There was a way in which the obscuring of communication was painful, but the opposite was also true. She had no interest in anyone presenting her with the bleak, unvarnished truth. If Belle were here, Cassie thought, she would try to figure it out a word at a time, and she’d stick with it until she could make some judgment. Belle would take this tack in part because she had nothing better to do, and because the process of analysis struck her as pleasurable. Cassie shook her head at the notion. Belle enjoyed analysis, with the result that she was back at the house with Laura; and Cassie, at sixteen, was the only person in the house with a driver’s license and a vehicle, and the beginnings of tendinitis in her right elbow. She rubbed her elbow, then went inside the library to face the kindness of the librarians. The librarians were always kind.
She had memorized the poem, or whatever it was, and was repeating it to herself as she turned on to 732 East, the Percy Creek Pike. It was a long straight road all the way to the reservoir, and she would travel it for miles, so she sped up. Who were they who judged and bruised? Which rational creatures could transcend the stain, and the stain of what? And when had Laura ever been on a horse? And when had she seen a horse fall? Cassie passed the squat cinder-block building out of which a man with a wooden leg (which he kept displayed at all times; he actually rolled up his pant leg to do so) used to sell produce in the summer. The building had been unused for years. Next to the front door, in emphatic black lettering, someone had painted No CAR WASHING!, as if that were the world’s gravest temptation. Then there was nothing on either side of the road, just trees and fields. Cassie squinted. Far in the distance she could see something in the middle of the road. Heat shimmered upward. Beware the mee-rahj, as Jimmy used to say; a lot of the world looks like one thing but is really something else. When she was fourteen, she and Bud had traveled to Georgia for a big game, a serious money game, with the man who was at that time unbeatable, Lewis Lee. Cassie had played him all night in a cowboy bar (no cowboys in evidence), her fortunes rising and falling, until finally Lewis pulled it out and remained unbeatable, and Cassie and Bud turned around and headed home. She had been driving for hours in the dead of night when she saw a deer standing in the middle of the road (had it been a horse?), standing only a few feet away, standing and staring in that impassive way of the massive thing. Cassie had slammed on the brakes and thrown Bud, even wearing a seat belt, so far forward he had bruised his sternum nd been mad at her for a week. She kept asking, Should I have hit it? And he would say, There was No Damn Deer, and she would say, Yes, but should I have hit it?
She slowed. The thing in the middle of the road was about the size of a three-year-old boy and was picking at the stringy remains of something, raising and lowering its head. It was mostly in her lane. A turkey buzzard. She was getting closer to it, and she would be damned if she would swerve. She thought she’d go ahead and speed up, she’d go ahead and get thick into events with this bird. She didn’t care what they did or how foul they were, they could ravage all the carcasses of her county. But they weren’t going to boss her around in terms of driving. She was twenty feet from the bird and it didn’t move, and she was ten feet from it, a hot day and both her windows down, and just as she moved over—she did move at the last minute—the buzzard decided to take flight, and took flight. It spread its wings like an enormous black kite, and as Cassie passed it, the wind moving through the cab of the truck pulled the bird in through her window. For a single moment its lizard-skinned claws, its breast and face, were on her, one claw caught her forearm and tore it. She slammed on her brakes, and the bird tumbled out. It took flight with an awkward turn and then a terrible, fluid ease.
Cassie parked the truck at the side of the road and got out, doubling over in the heat. That, Cassie decided, was what a nightmare would smell like; the unbelievably dense odor of decay, layer after layer, no end to it. Her forearm was bleeding, and she could still smell the bird on her clothes, and in her hair. She gasped, kept her head down. Beneath her the pavement shimmered.
“Where are the groceries?” Belle asked.
“I didn’t get to the grocery store,” Cassie said from the mudroom, taking off her work boots, her jeans.
“Why not? Oh my God, what is that smell, don’t even think you’re coming in here. What happened, what is that smell? Where are the groceries?”
“Get me some clean clothes, Belle.”
“You smell like. Not a morgue, not a cemetery, not a funeral home. None of those places smell. A slaughterhouse, no, I don’t know. A war crime. That’s what you smell like.” Belle picked at a scab on the back of her hand, under which there was an imaginary blackberry thorn that she had been trying to remove for a couple of years. She was wearing Laura’s shoes; every time she took a step, her feet slid out.
Cassie remembered the poem in the pocket of her jeans, removed it, and put the jeans in the washing machine. “I could use some clean clothes here, Belle.”
“Did you, have you, did you roll in something?”
“And a towel. I’ll shower in the basement.”
“Please don’t go down there, Cassie, those stairs don’t have any backs on them, and I don’t like the way that bare bulb is, the way that bulb is. And I remember that shower, it’s just a nozzle sticking out of the wall, and you just stand there in the middle of the room, no stall or anything, there could be all sorts of, I think you should come on in.”
“In my room, Belle, clean clothes and underwear, a towel.”
“What is that, what’s on your arm? What happened to your arm?”
“I had a run-in with a buzzard.”
“Oh God. You’re going to get septus, septu-something, I can’t remember the rest, like a cat scratch, how did it happen, a buzzard? Did you say a buzzard, like a vulture, you mean?” For a long time Belle’s hair had been blond, but lately it had turned toward brown and was dry, she tucked it compulsively behind her ears. She was thin, thinner than Laura, her grocery lists always said: yogurt, celery, ice. Laura added: cigarettes, butane fluid, corn flakes. One of the scabs on Belle’s upper arm was bleeding, and a piece of toilet paper was stuck to it.
“It was squatting in the road like a three-year-old boy.”
Belle swallowed, picked now at her left arm. “A three-year-old boy?”
“Or a midget dressed all in black.”
Belle said nothing, looked away.
“It was picking at the strings of a rabbit.”
“A rabbit?”
“I passed it too close with my windows down, I thought it would fly away before I reached it.”
“So you were in a bit of a contest. With the vulture.”
“Sort of.”
“And you lost.”
“It would appear.” Cassie stood in the mudroom in her boxer shorts and sports bra, her arm throbbing. She remembered the grocery list, retrieved it from the jeans. Put them back in the washer.
“Should I get Laura?”
“No, you should get the things I asked for, along with some iodine and a bandage. I need to get this washed out and medicine on it.
“Should I call Poppy or Edwin Meyer?”
“No. You should think about the iodine, it’s in the upstairs bathroom, and a bandage, and some clothes and a towel for me.”
Belle nodded, then looked down and studied one of the imaginary thorns under her skin. “A little boy, you say? Or a dwarf?” She would write these phrases, Belle would, on slips of paper and save them.
“That’s right. I’ll shower, then go to the grocery store, then I’m going to Emmy’s. And bring me my cowboy boots, they’re next to my bedroom door. The ones with the two holes over the left ankle.”
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Haven Kimmel
From the internationally bestselling author of ‘The Solace of Leaving Early’, a funny, heartwrenching and unforgettable novel following the fortunes of a feisty young female pool hustler.Cassie Claiborne, at ten, was surely too young to be the head of her disparate family. But who else was going to do it? Growing up in Indiana with her distant, heartbroken mother, Laura, her fragile, eccentric sister Belle, and her beloved grandfather Poppy, Cassie got sick of waiting for her father to come home from his everlasting gambling and drinking binges and took matters into her own hands. Taught by her father to play pool, Cassie was a natural and was soon hustling experienced pool players – and winning.We follow Cassie from a complex little girl to a rebellious and impetuous young woman as she tries to create a world for her mother and sister. Overwhelmed but compelled by her family’s love, Cassie feels herself drawn back to the past by the stories of her mother's youth, and she leaves her town for New Orleans, hoping that there she can find a truth to soothe her wounded soul and to allow herself the happiness she has been denied.Funny, heartbreaking, full of the eccentricity of small-town life and the overwrought drama of the close-knit family, ‘Something Rising (Light and Swift)’ is the story of a very unique young woman who knows that 'the worst thing that can happen to you is that you will find what you seek'. It tells of grief and love and growing up and leaving home in a way that is desperately sad but ultimately uplifting.
Haven Kimmel
Something Rising (Light and Swift)
For Melinda
For her children, Josh and Abby
And in memory of her husband, Mark Lawrence Frame 1940-2002
Table of Contents
Cover (#u96f0dd88-961f-58b2-bf64-41ef0628e973)
Title Page (#ua50b6d3f-0de5-5e6c-adf2-fef6640114f0)
PROLOGUE
Part One THE HAMMER IN HER HAND
THE SPECTRUM OF POSSIBLE OUTCOMES,1979
THE FLOOD, 1985
Part Two A PRIVATE LANGUAGE
SAMHAIN, 1987
ALL SAINTS
Part Three RATTLESNAKE KITE
CATTAILS,1999
SHADOW FATHER
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
About the Author
Praise for Something Rising (Light and Swift)
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
Copyright
About the Publisher
PROLOGUE (#ud2fa5dbb-ea60-53f7-9bbd-8007b203d8da)
The man standing across from Cassie had nearly a thousand dollars on the line and a pale absence where his wedding ring should have been. He registered on her periphery: his anger, his receding hairline, the slick shirt, the way he leaned against the corner pocket so that she had to look directly at him as she studied the shot. Cassie noticed these things without thought, the same way she could see Uncle Bud behind the bar, drying glasses and keeping his eye on her, without looking in his direction.
The man had left a mess on the table. Cassie paced, dropped her stick up and down on the toe of her boot. On the break he had sunk the six and the two and had cleared the one and three quickly. But he left the four stranded close to the rail and the cue ball downtable, taking a safety. Cassie had to do many things at once—get to the four; sink the four; position the cue ball to take the recalcitrant five; get back down for the seven; release the eight from where it was stranded; and sink the nine—but the whole process felt like one thing, the way walking doesn’t feel like a thousand articulated events. Just one event.
Some nights she saw the table as a plane, all four sides extending infinitely, and at those times she couldn’t lose. But on other nights, and against opponents like her current one (the Lounge Singer, she’d dubbed him), she fell to earth and used what she could find there. The table was actual and massive, and its borders were discrete. She imagined two protractors joined at the horizontal line, forming a perfect circle, and everything outside that circle was darkness, and all she needed to know was inside. From the ball to the pocket was one side of an angle; from the cue ball to the object ball was the other side. And there, invisible, where the cue and the object met, or would meet: the vertex, her desire. She dreamed sometimes that her whole life was funneled into that point of contact and could be measured in the old ways: acute, right, obtuse, a reflex.
The man across the table had had too much to drink, had bet too much money, and was now showing her his black edge. It was just a look around his eyes, a flush of throat. He thought she’d never take the four, and he was terrified she would. Cassie stopped behind the cue ball, imagined the table flipped into a mirror image, and considered a bank shot. After she’d done her best with angles, the rest was physics. Distance, velocity, and acceleration. The transfer of momentum. And something else: a sensation she’d never understood that caused her throat to close and her heart to pound. She was addicted to the feeling, even though it arrived like heartbreak, with the same thunder and autonomy. The four was too far away, but if she kept her eye on what her opponent couldn’t see, the bisections and intersecting lines, the ghosts, she believed she could do it.
She bent so far at the waist that her chin rested on top of the cue, and the lines on the table shifted like a computer design in a war room. The two practice strokes rubbed lightly against the underside of her chin, where she was developing a permanent red line. On the third stroke, a medium shot, the cue ball traveled the length of the table; the Lounge Singer opened his mouth, closed it again. He hadn’t expected the backspin, the way the bank happened so fast, sending the four right past the eight and into the corner pocket without a sigh of resistance. The cue ball rolled and stopped six inches from the five, and then it was over. The five, the seven, the eight. She sank the nine lightly, stepped away from the table, and rocked her head from side to side. Her shoulders ached.
Her opponent started to say something, but Uncle Bud filled the doorway like a piece of furniture. “Pay her,” he said.
The man reached into his pocket, shaking from the loss, and pulled out a stack of bills held together with a tarnished old clip. His waistband was sweat-stained, and now that she’d beaten him, Cassie had to tum away from seeing him too closely. She took the money, said thanks. He slipped out past Uncle Bud without a word, past the players at the other tables, the regulars who came late and stayed late and seemed to pay attention to no one.
Cassie unscrewed the butt of her cue from the shaft, wiped it down, and put the two parts away as Bud gathered the balls and brushed the felt on the table. When she was ready to go, he walked her to the back door and watched her wheel her bike down the back stairs.
“You going straight home?” he asked.
Cassie nodded.
“He was driving a white Caprice. You see him between here and your house, get off your bike.”
“Okay,” Cassie said.
“Or else go ahead and knock the crap out of him, I don’t care which.”
“Okay.”
Cassie pulled her cap down over her ears, wheeled out on to the main street of Roseville, where every business was long closed and every resident was long asleep. At the edge of town she leaned into the wind and sped up, past the flat fields of central Indiana, expanses that stretched as far as she could see. She sped down the Price Dairy Road in the complete dark, her headlight casting an arc before her, then turned on to her road, The King’s Crossing, which met Price Dairy at a ninety-degree angle. She headed for her house, where her sister, Belle, slept on one line and her mother, Laura, slept on another; and where her father, Jimmy, the vertex, was entirely absent; where there was nothing she could do. No shot to take. No safety.
A light glowed in the trailer at the rear of the property, where her grandfather Poppy had lived with his dogs. Poppy left the light on for her, and the dogs didn’t bark. Cassie carried her bicycle up the three back stairs and into the laundry room, took off her jacket, and hung her cue case on a hook. The air in the kitchen was gray with Laura’s cigarette smoke. Cassie poured herself a glass of orange juice, leaned against the sink. It was two in the morning, and she needed to get up at six-thirty to be at school on time. Her eyes burned, and she let them close, leaning there against the sink in the silent house. She had always hated school, had hated it until recently, when suddenly the girl who had been expelled six times for fighting, who had flunked every subject in one semester last year (including badminton), began collecting report cards that were different from years past. In this, the spring of her tenth-grade year, she had done poorly in everything but math. Her teacher, astonished, had sent a letter to Laura that said one thing: She’s a natural.
Part One (#ud2fa5dbb-ea60-53f7-9bbd-8007b203d8da)THE HAMMER IN HER HAND (#ud2fa5dbb-ea60-53f7-9bbd-8007b203d8da)
THE SPECTRUM OF POSSIBLE OUTCOMES, 1979 (#ud2fa5dbb-ea60-53f7-9bbd-8007b203d8da)
On Thursday, in the middle of June, she waited for her father. He hadn’t been home for two days, so she got up early, because sometimes he showed up very early and went straight to bed, and then the whole agony of having waited for him to come home was compounded by having to wait for him to get up. He could sleep fourteen hours at a time, hardly moving, she’d studied him. She got out of bed without making a sound, pulled on the clothes she’d worn the day before, didn’t bother with brushing her teeth or looking at her hair. There was little left of it anyway, after the episode with the ticks and Poppy’s clippers. She got up very early, before Laura or Belle, and crept down the stairs and into the kitchen tinged with morning light, the pale green kitchen that smelled—above and below food, laundry, visitors—of Laura’s cigarettes, and took out a bottle of chocolate milk that was made of neither chocolate nor milk. Her favorite drink. She took a banana, too, because bananas are by nature quiet foods, and snuck out through the living room, through the foyer with the two glass cases filled with her dead grandmother’s figurines (frolicking baby animals) and out onto the screened porch. The rocker closest to the front door was splintered, the one closer to the road groaned, and in neither did her feet reach the porch. She chose the one that groaned and hoped she wouldn’t move. Even this early the air was warm; later a breeze would come up, she guessed, but for now the trees were still. The view from where she sat dazed her with familiarity, the horseshoe-shaped gravel driveway with the holes no amount of dirt or gravel could fill, the yard on the other side of the drive. Nothing in it, just grass. And then her road, the King’s Crossing, bumpy asphalt with glass sewn in, in sunlight it shone like diamonds. Across the road a ditch that collected stray papers, detritus, once she’d found a child’s tennis shoe, just the one. Beyond the ditch was the fencerow that stretched the whole six hundred acres. To the left of her vision, in the field, was a stand of tall trees—a windbreak—and far to the right was another. Between the stands of trees the corn was pushing up in little shoots, it had been a dry spring, and barely visible to her were the power lines, four gigantic silver men in a row, standing with their hands on their hips, displeased. She knew that if she crossed the field, or rode her bike down to 300 West, also called the Price Dairy Road, and turned left, and got near the power lines, she would hear what Poppy called an infernal hum. The way power speaks. She had no interest in it.
The chocolate milk was gone, the banana was gone, its skin lay bereft next to her rocker. She had hardly moved. When the sun was almost up, the gray burned off, everything that had crouched in the shadow of dawn fully revealed, she knew he wouldn’t come, but still she waited. There was nothing else for it; other people pretended to go about their business, whatever business they fabricated, but really they were waiting, if not for him then for someone else. From its spot behind the house, she heard the door to Poppy’s Airstream open; the sound carried clearly across the early morning silence, she could almost hear him feel the weather, decide if he needed a hat. He didn’t. The dogs clambered down the metal stairs and into the backyard, then rounded the corner of the house, Poppy following.
“That you, Cass?” Poppy asked, shading his eyes and looking through the screen.
“It’s me.”
His three dogs, Marleybone, Juanita, and Roger, stood or scratched or rolled around Poppy’s legs, impatient for their constitutional. Marleybone was Poppy’s favorite, the leader of the pack. His fur was a crazy swirl of dark blue and white, he had one brown eye and one blue, his left ear was bent at the tip, and he stood on three legs. He kept his right rear leg lifted off the ground always, had the crazy look of a herder in his eyes. Juanita was a medium-size black dog who shook and mostly kept her tail tucked. There was a painful history on her face, and sometimes, sitting on the porch, looking at the clouds, she would start to shake. Roger had been Poppy’s latest acquisition, a wiry little blond dog with a big square head that resembled a cement block. There was mange in his past, but he’d managed to keep the tuft of yellow hair that shot up like a patch of weeds between his ears. Although he seemed to have no legs, so low did he hover over the ground, he could, without warning, leap four feet into the crook of his favorite tree in the backyard.
“You waiting for Jimmy?” Poppy asked. He slipped his right hand into his pants pocket, meaning he was embarrassed.
“Naw,” Cassie said, shaking her head.
‘“Cause you might find yourself sittin’ a long time, if you are.” Poppy dressed carefully every day in a flannel shirt and cotton trousers, suspenders. He carried a handkerchief in his breast pocket, shaved every morning, even when he was sick, and kept his white hair cut short. One of his real teeth, in the back, had a gold crown, he smelled like Ivory soap and cherry pipe tobacco. Since Cassie’s grandmother, Buena Vista, died two years ago and before Poppy had begun to collect dogs, he’d moved out to the 1967 Airstream at the back of the property. The world had disappointed him in every imaginable way, but he seemed a happy man. “Want to go with me? On my walk?”
Cassie shook her head.
“All right, then,” he said, and started off down the road.
She waited. It was a fine summer day. Inside the house her mother and sister began to stir. Cassie imagined them: Belle floating down the stairs in her white nightgown, Laura fighting her first cigarette of the day, making coffee. Time was and not so long ago that Belle would have been out here with her, but all had changed in the blink of an eye; it seemed so to Cassie. On her twelfth birthday in May, Belle had awakened full of dissatisfactions and resolutions, all of them spoken and written in her notebook then spoken again, and now it seemed that more than two years separated her from her sister. Something deeper than the river had carved itself out, Belle on one side. Cassie on the other.
“Don’t even tell me,” Belle said from behind the screen door.
Cassie tipped up her empty chocolate milk bottle, pretended to drink.
“Don’t even tell me you’re out here thinking Jimmy will come home.”
“I’m not,” Cassie said, studying the field across the road.
“Did Poppy come by? Laura wants to make sure he got some coffee.”
“He’s out on his walk.”
“That doesn’t tell me if he had any breakfast or coffee.”
Cassie turned and looked at her sister; Belle’s outline behind the screen was ghostly. Her thin arms were crossed over her stomach.
“Edwin will be here soon,” Belle said, glancing at her wrist as if a watch were there. But there was no watch.
Cassie looked off down the road, back at the screen door, Belle was gone. She was right—soon Edwin Meyer would appear, because he’d bought the hardware store from Poppy and felt it was his duty to check in every day, and because Edwin and Poppy were best friends in the way that duty binds. In the kitchen Belle and Laura, Cassie knew, were already working out the morning in silences and gestures that operated like a code Cassie couldn’t crack. It was another summer day, and all things considered, Cassie lived in a predictable house, and none of it mattered if Jimmy didn’t come home. She moved out to the cement steps at the edge of the driveway. She waited.
They came walking down the road with a purpose. Cassie lived in the flattest part of a flat state and could see them coming from a great distance, Leroy Buell and his foster sister, Misty, who lived at the end of the King’s Crossing in a tumbledown house with what Laura called a Plague of Relatives. The house was in bad shape, but Leroy ‘s aunt Betta, who was crazy in all other ways, knew how to step outside the front door and throw a handful of seed at exactly the right time, so that everywhere you looked around their house, all along the sagging fence and covering the old walkways and right up against the dead trucks and cars and tractors, were flowers. No one tended them, no one planted or fertilized, but Laura said the Buell’s house was like the virgin prairie, only crazy. Leroy was actually born there, but Misty was an addition, a child taken in a few years ago from the county home who pretended she had been adopted, so fiercely did she wish it to be true.
Leroy and Misty sent up the alarm in all God-fearing normal people. God-fearing normal people meant nothing to Cassie, who would happily take their names and kick their asses, as Jimmy was fond of saying. The only way to be safe in the world, as Jimmy would have said, was to be the person other people feared, this is the law of the jungle and among all thinking organisms, and just because we have been given the capacity to imagine it might not be so, or to hope there might be another, more enlightened way to live, is no reason to deny that it is so. Trouble, he liked to begin a story by saying, it is widely known.
“Going down the river to the shack, cook up a mess of frogs,” Leroy said without preamble when he and Misty reached Cassie’s horseshoe-shaped yard.
“Build a fire,” Misty said.
Leroy had his right thumb hooked in a belt loop of his jeans, which were six inches too short, while his left hand drummed against his bird chest. He was too skinny, his face too long, he breathed through his mouth with a sound like a train in the distance. Misty stood stiff next to him but couldn’t seem to stop making noise. This happened in school, too; sometimes if the room was quiet, Cassie could hear Misty two rows over humming the theme song to a television show called Run, Joe, Run. She whistled and whispered, snapped her fingers to a hectic beat. But worst of all, Misty was driven toward sound effects, and if she’d been able to hear Cassie think of the faraway train, she would have said: Chug-a-chug-a-chug-a. A high wind: Whooooooooo. A catfight: Yowwwwwl, screeech, etcetera. Laura would have said there was no future in such behavior.
Cassie gave Misty a good hard look. Her hair was straight as a poker, cut jagged at the edges near her shoulders, and with bangs made crooked by a cowlick. Her teeth didn’t meet up right, and she smelled of trapped smoke. Her clothes, a striped shirt too big and blue pants too small, had obviously come from the charity box at the Church of Christ, and Cassie thought it no wonder Misty’s parents had decamped for points unknown.
Cassie stood, stretched herself out, then went inside for her backpack, which had been Jimmy’s long ago when he had mistakenly thought himself a Boy Scout. This was a mystery to Cassie, how the true nature of a person can be so thoroughly concealed in youth that he does humiliating things. It meant Cassie herself could do them, and later someone would hold out the offending object—a dress, a party favor, an unsent letter—and convict her. She was trying to redeem the backpack. She carried in it a Swiss army knife, a compass, a box of waterproof matches, a second box of waterproof matches, a rain poncho, an old snake bitekit, a small flashlight, a harmonica she couldn’t play, a worn guide to dressing field injuries. Now she added a ball-peen hammer—a regular hammer was too heavy to carry—and a small box of nails; boards were always popping loose on the shack, and if she left it to the inbreds and malcontents, as Jimmy called them, the shack would fall down around their ears and they’d go right on sucking the heads off crawdaddies. She also added a second chocolate milk, knowing that everyone down at the river would want it but be afraid to ask; this was the sort of gesture that kept everyone clear about who stood where. Cassie was the person with the chocolate milk and the hammer in her hand, that was all they needed to know.
The three trudged down the road, then cut across the field on Cassie’s side, away from the infernal hum of the power lines. “Them new kids is gonna be there,” Leroy said. “Emmy Somethin’ from Kentucky, and Bobby Puck from up that Granger School that closed.”
Misty made a puck-puck-puck sound.
“I met ‘em already. They was down at the river two days ago when I got there, “ Leroy continued. “I says, ‘How’d you find this shack? It belongs to us and Cassie Claiborne.’ Then that Bobby Puck said something, didn’t make any sense.”
Cassie watched where she was walking, watched for the shimmer of a cottonmouth or the frightened streaking-past of a vole. She could remember when this walk back to the river seemed to take all day. If someone had asked, she would have said the water was miles from her house, but she’d learned it wasn’t even a single mile, maybe only a half. As they approached the edge of the field, she recalled an afternoon she and her parents and grandparents had taken a picnic on the bank, and as they’d reached this point, right about here, Jimmy had swung her up on his shoulders and asked, Do you smell the water? There had been only that once when they were all together here, walking this path, it was before Buena Vista had gotten sick; and Cassie could see, too, that there was hope and faith in the gesture of a picnic that had somehow gone sorely lacking. If she had tried to plan one, Laura would have scoffed, and Belle would have said she didn’t like the river, she couldn’t stand bugs, or maybe even nature itself for all Cassie knew. But whatever complaints they leveled wouldn’t have much relationship to what they meant, which was: that’s all over now.
Cassie smelled the water. As they got closer, she could hear splashing, loud talk, and laughter. A girl said, “You know you’re going to kill them.”
“I won’t! I’m making them happy!”
Leroy lifted a branch and Misty and Cassie walked under. The morning sun hit the water in patches of brilliance; some places were shaded by the tangle of trees overhead. This was a green place, and of ever changing light. The new girl was floating in the river, which was low, in a pair of blue-jean shorts and a Mickey Mouse T-shirt, her arms outstretched and her dark hair floating out behind her. A fat boy was sitting on the bank on top of a fivegallon bucket. Presumably the frogs were in the bucket, and he was making them happy.
“Hark!” the boy called out, waving at the three who were crossing the river on the old log, arms out for balance.
“That’s them,” Leroy said from somewhere behind Cassie.
“What the hell is a hark?” Misty asked, and then made a harkhark-hark sound.
Bobby Puck was chubby everywhere, even his ankles and wrists and knees. He had a moon face and fine, wavy mouse-brown hair brushed up into a cloud over his head. Cassie could see a mother’s hand in that hair. When he smiled, his chubby cheeks rose up and nearly covered his eyes.
Cassie stepped off the log and looked at the two new kids. The river wasn’t on Poppy’s property, and she had found the shack by accident, but Jimmy would say there are in-alien-able rights that govern territory. Years she had been watching her father, sometimes in shadow, and there was plenty she knew about a gambler’s face, the reading—like lightning—of options. It all came down, she’d decided, to the size of the stake. How much you could afford to lose.
The boy on the bucket asked, “Are you Miss Cassie?” She nodded. He pointed at the girl in the water. “That’s Emmy.”
Still floating, Emmy said, “Hey, girl,” in an accent with a curve like Buena Vista’s, it gave Cassie a cold jolt. She tilted up her chin, waited a full beat.
“Hey.” Cassie turned away and headed for the shack; it had been put up and abandoned by hunters at about the time Buena Vista died, and in those two years a lot of stuff had been added to it. Cassie fairly owned it during the summer days, but at night it belonged to teenagers. Someone had dragged an old recliner in, and someone else had brought a mattress. There were pictures tacked to the wall (an elephant being hung in a town square; a toothless woman in sunglasses; a monkey scratching its butt), and lately people had started to bring in books and leave them, old paperbacks creased and dog-eared. Cassie suspected there was more to the books than the plain desire to share literature, since as a group the teenagers weren’t what her teachers would call readers.
She took off her pack, got out the hammer and nails, and walked around the outside of the shack, hammering down boards that had popped up in the last rain. The hunters hadn’t taken the time to make sure the lone cockeyed window actually fit the hole cut for it, so Cassie had chinked in the gaps with river mud. They hadn’t put up a doore either, just left a hole for one and hung a sheet of Visqueen in it. When the plastic came down, Cassie cut a new piece and hung it herself, using small tacks that didn’t tear. It was important, she thought, to keep the plastic up, to acknowledge the difference between inside and out, else what use was a doorway?
“Light the small sticks, Emmy, we don’t have a lot of matches. Did you have these in your pocket when you were swimming?”
“Ooooh, I’m cold now I’m out of the water. The water’s warm.”
“There’s—I tell you, you have to light the small—”
“Did anybody bring a jacket?”
“Emmy’s asking did anybody bring a jacket or whatnot?”
Cassie stepped back and looked at the roof. It hadn’t been done the way Jimmy would have recommended. Just boards and tar paper. She tried to imagine making the walk back here with a ladder (unlikely), then tried to think of some way to bring a ladder on her bike, but there was no road, only the fields and tree line, and the corn was growing higher. A ladder, a tool belt, some shingles.
Inside, someone had straightened up the books and stacked the empty Mountain Dew cans into a pyramid. A big red candle had been added. Cassie stared at it a moment. The big red candle in the shack was a mistake, as any thinking person could see, and she imagined herself flinging it hard into the river. But taking it away smacked of something Laura preached against, which was Getting Too Thick Into Events. One Never Knows, and sometimes the thing that burns is meant to burn and might be interesting to watch. This set up a jangle in Cassie, truth be told, because no one could say that the shack burnt down was a desirable outcome, or even the shack on fire, interesting as it might be. She walked around inside, periodically stooping down to pound in a nail. A puzzle, the way the nails wanted out of the wood.
“All hail Miss Misty, bringer of fire!”
“Shut up, Bobby Puck, you homo.”
“I’m not watching you kill the frogs, Leroy, I’m going over here and also be quiet about it.”
Misty said, rrrbit, rrrbit.
The book on top of the stack was called Mr. and Mrs. Bo Jo Jones. The cover was a photograph, out of focus, of a boy and girl kissing, only one of them was upside down. Mrs. Bo Jo Jones’s nose was on Mr.’s chin and vice versa. Taken in profile. She’s sixteen, he’s seventeen, a pregnant bride, and her bewildered groom … playing a grown-up game with adult consequences. Cassie picked up the red candle and sat it square on the book; this was surely nothing more than treading the edge of events. She walked outside and around back to take a look at the flat platform she’d built between two gnarled-up trees: it was the first project she’d ever finished on her own. She’d built it in case a flash flood came while they were in the shack, and she’d nailed boards into the tree trunk to make a ladder. The platform was about seven feet off the ground—it couldn’t be a biblical sort of flood. She’d come out here and measured and even drawn a diagram in a notebook, then gone back and had Poppy help her cut some tongue-and-groove boards she’d found in the corner of the garage. She climbed up the ladder and stepped on the platform, then jumped up and down. Solid. She knelt down and checked the nails, but they were all snug in, and then she ran her hands over the edge she’d sanded smooth. From here she could see the river slowly moving, and on the shoreline flashes of a white T-shirt. There was a fundamental difference between the shack and this platform, and it could be felt simply by sitting first in one and then on the other, and whatever the discrepancy was made her wonder if maybe she ought not skip putting a new roof on the shack. Below her the fire was just getting going and it smelled good; whatever kind of wood they were using smelled good. A blood scent filled the air.
“You own any guns?” she heard Leroy ask.
Bobby Puck said, “Guns? Are you talking to me?”
Sitting up here, Cassie was waiting for Jimmy but also not waiting, she had let go some. Her own house could be on fire, this was a thing she often considered, and she wouldn’t know it until she made the walk back and found the thing in ruins, the trucks and smoke and neighbors watching. She would have no first thought but many at once. Did Jimmy come home, did Laura stay planted where she was, refusing to leave, did Poppy get the dogs out, was Belle out floating around, weeping in the yard in her white nightgown? Beyond that Cassie didn’t care, there was nothing she would mourn. Who set this fire?
“Cassie?” Puck was looking up at her from the ground, she hadn’t heard him approach. “Can I come up there with you?” He had a very high voice, like a little girl’s. As he climbed the ladder, his green T-shirt came out of his shorts, and Cassie could see a white stripe of skin. She looked away. “Oh, this is rather high up,” he said, looking over the edge of the platform. “I hope it doesn’t make me dizzy. If we were at the tops of these trees we could see my house, it’s over yonder as Leroy would say, the opposite side of the river from your house, we could see my dad’s blue station wagon in the driveway and my mom’s marigolds, my dad has diabetes. He is a diabetic and never leaves the house anymore, one of his legs is gone and he is now blind.” Puck leaned forward and whispered the last word in Cassie’s ear. She turned and looked at him. Mostly she couldn’t abide people who talked too much, and under normal conditions she might have gone ahead and whaled on him. But something in him raised up a loneliness that settled over Cassie like a cloud. “At the Granger School,” he continued, holding Cassie’s eye, “I was assaulted on a regular basis by ruffians. You remind me of them. When I start at your school in the fall, I’m going to be perfectly silent, in class and everywhere else, so I just thought I’d tell you some things now, that my mom is an aide at the nursing home, and about my dad and whatnot. I don’t like sports, I’ve never gone hunting, I prefer comic books and snacks.”
“Puck? Cassie? Want some frog legs?” Emmy called from the shore.
Puck rose, brushed some dried mud from his knees, then bowed to Cassie. “Ladies first,” he said, gesturing toward the stairs with a sweeping motion, like the hands of a clock.
She was back home and on the steps by three o’clock. The day had grown hot, and hours to go yet, so she took off her swampy tennis shoes and wet socks and let her feet dry in the sun. Her gray T-shirt said NOTRE DAME WRESTLING TEAM, it was her favorite shirt. Poppy had found it at the dump, back when he used to be a dump crawler, before Laura put her foot down. Cassie missed those days, the great things he’d come home with: a miniature guitar with no strings, a set of rusty golf clubs, a plastic cereal bowl with an astronaut in the bottom. The astronaut was floating outside of and appeared to be larger than his spaceship. All such things Laura dubbed A Crime. But then Poppy came home with a Memphis Minnie album, and when he handed it to Laura, her eyes filled with tears and she turned around and went up to her room and no one had seen her for a whole day, and Belle said Poppy shouldn’t have told her it came from the dump, and Poppy said, confused, Was I to lie?
Cassie’s eyes were closed and the world behind her eyelids had gone red when she heard the dogs, not Poppy’s dogs who never ran free, but a pack that had been born that winter to a stray down the road. Born in the Taylors’ toolshed. The Taylors had no intention of keeping the puppies or of killing them or of having anything to do with them whatsoever, those were Willie Taylor’s words to Poppy exactly. Anything whatsoever. A stray who picked us out, we didn’t pick her. There were four pups, a brown, a red, a black and white, a black, and they were all hardmuscled, with coats so short they looked like leather, and heads like pigs. Cassie thought of them as the Pig Dogs. They weren’t much bigger than young pigs, either. All day long they killed. They killed chickens, ducks, cats, who knew. Once they had run up to Cassie as she walked down the road, and the head of the brown one was completely covered in blood, all the way back to his shoulder blades, still red and wet. No one could touch them. Now they ran toward Cassie with great joy, nearly bouncing, except for the black and white, who was carrying a dead groundhog in his mouth, an animal more than half his size. They were going to leave it in her yard, she could just feel it. Her opinion was that they’d started killing more than they could eat, so they were spreading the carcasses around for fun. The King’s Crossing was their game board, and they’d left something on every corner. Cassie stood up and took a menacing step toward them, and they all backed up, tails wagging. They had smart eyes, the Pig Dogs, this was one of their worst features. Cassie stomped, waved her arms, yelled Go on! Git! and the dogs turned one at a time, still sneaky and joyous, and started to run back down the road, except for the black and white, who trotted a few steps farther in and dropped the groundhog, then turned and streaked off after his brothers.
“Cassie, you still out here?”
The groundhog had barely hit the earth, and there was Belle so soon, she would take it personally that Cassie had allowed such a thing to happen. Belle stepped out onto the screened porch, wearing a black leotard of Laura’s and an old Indian-print skirt, there was a pointedness in her voice that had arrived only in the past two years but seemed to be here to stay. All the way back in Cassie’s memory to the place it grew dark and muzzy, she saw Belle with her on a day like this, Cassie at five, Belle at seven, performing their different tasks: one her father’s girl, the other belonging solely to Laura. Cassie had her work cut out for her, no doubt about it, being the one to wait and gather clues and wander about the house studying Jimmy’s belongings and trying to capture the smell of him somewhere, in his closet, on his pillow. But Belle, maybe, and this was a thing Cassie had only begun to consider, had it a little worse, because her parent was right there and couldn’t be reached.
Laura, standing in the kitchen, having a contemplative smoke in her butter-yellow capri pants and white blouse, clothes that came from Somewhere Else and marked her. She wore not perfume or cologne but the oil from a love potion made for her by a Yoruba priestess, oil filled with rose petals and something that looked like whole clove. One brutal fight between Laura and Jimmy started when he called her a yat; Cassie had heard yak and assumed her father had been drinking until Belle explained. Bone-thin mother, shoulders slightly hunched, arms crossed loosely over her abdomen, listening to records. She made their meals but didn’t eat with them. She smiled, never lost her patience or raised her voice, it was difficult, in fact, to do anything loudly enough or close enough to her range of vision to even get her to turn her head. Bix Beiderbecke with Frankie Trumbauer’s orchestra, Singin’ the Blues. Louis Armstrong, Jelly Roll Morton, Sidney Bechet. One of the only things Laura loved even a smidge about living in Indiana was that one of the earliest jazz labels, the Starr Piano Company and Gennett Records, had been in Richmond. The Friars Society Orchestra had recorded there, and King Oliver, Armstrong, Bix, Hoagy. Laura knew where the building had stood in the Whitewater Gorge, and had driven the girls by on in what was a rare thing for them, a field trip.
This was what Cassie had been thinking of lately, all those injuries of Belle’s, all the flaps of skin hanging from her knees, the head wounds bleeding furiously, the falls down stairs, the bicycle wreck in the thorn bush, her slightly chipped front tooth. How could it have been, the two of them side by side and playing the same game, that Belle was always falling? Cassie rarely got hurt. If they walked across the backyard, it was Cassie who found the dead baby bird, the caterpillars and nightcrawlers, she found treasure in tall grass because Belle was looking up. What she was looking for Cassie couldn’t say, winged things probably, orioles or nuthatches or bluebirds, or those tiny yellow butterflies that arrive in swarms one day and are gone the next. Belle got hurt, she took her pain in to Laura like a gift, she cried then tried to look brave. There was a demand in her. Cassie thought, but couldn’t say (wasn’t sure what the words would be) that this wasn’t the way to go, Laura didn’t like to touch or be touched, she was doing her work at a minimum and preferred to be alone. Belle’s wounds were akin to getting too thick into events. At eleven Belle started to withdraw from the Great Wide World, as Jimmy called it, she moved inside and became top of her class, at twelve had nearly memorized Edith Hamilton’s Mythology, which a thoughtful librarian had given her as a gift. Every day she begged for a copy of Virgil In Translation. She had taken to the house and could almost always be found at the kitchen table, under the hanging light with the round shade, and there too was Laura, staring out the window above the sink, and Belle thought she had gotten what she wanted, but Cassie wasn’t so sure.
“What’s that in the yard? Do you see what I’m pointing at, Cassie? Go on over there and take a look.”
Cassie walked across the gravel driveway, periodically stepping on a sharp rock that made her say ow, ow, ow, and through the side door that led into the cool garage, where she picked up Poppy’s shovel.
“Do you see the thing I’m talking about, that gray mound over there? Mom’s not going to want to walk out here and see it.”
The groundhog was lying belly up. He’d been a fat little guy. Cassie studied his face: dead. Also his small, expressive hands, curled now: dead. She put the shovel under him and felt that he’d—
“What is it, Cassie, do you know?”
—been turned to liquid. There weren’t bones or organs to offer any resistance. The Pig Dogs had had a time with this one. She got the shovel under his back and tried to lift it; he was very heavy, in addition to being liquid, and he rolled off the end of the shovel and landed facedown.
“I’m going in, I’m not watching this. Take it across the road and over the fence. Drop it over the fence, Cassie, so those dogs can’t get to it and bring it right back. Do you hear me?”
Cassie got the shovel under his belly and tried to lift him. He rolled off and landed on his back, and that was about all it took for Cassie to see what she was up against. Her shoulders strained and her back began to sweat, It wasn’t his weight so much as the fact of him down at the end of the long shovel, and her up at the other end. She gripped the shovel in the middle of the handle, stuck it under the groundhog’s back, he was maybe easier to lift this way, but he rolled off and landed on his belly. Simply by turning him over repeatedly, she’d managed to get him a few feet across the yard, so she did that some more: turned him again and again, rolling him like a sausage in a pan. Belly up, belly down. They made it across the road and to the ditch, and putting him in the ditch was no good, Belle would know or the dogs would know. The sun was a violence against Cassie’s back, sweat ran toward her eyes. She took off her T-shirt, wiped her face with it, then covered her hands and grabbed him by his paws, his front two in her left hand, his back two in her right. She turned herself sideways, spun around twice, then let him fly, across the ditch and over the fence. At the peak of his flight his back arched like a high jumper’s, his chin tilted regally, his arms and legs were loose in surrender. Cassie was, at ten, a child who would have to learn to look away.
Thursday evening, after dinner and a visit with Edwin Meyer and Poppy, a game of Chinese checkers and a bowl of green sherbet, Cassie went out on the screened porch and waited, and Friday she got up very early and went outside and waited.
Saturday morning she woke up and listened; if he was still gone, this would be the longest in a while and would signal nothing good, but then she heard them, the voices that had awakened her. Jimmy and Laura didn’t fight about Everything, as some parents did. The tear and scramble of their lives centered around only two subjects, Money and the Prior Claim. The two could be mixed and matched and combined in novel ways. Cassie had hovered for years at the edge of the conversation and could reduce its complex elements to two sentences:
JIMMY: She has a prior claim.
LAURA: Prior to your children?
Cassie had written these sentences in her notebook: for her they were no less than Virgil in Translation. She and Belle both wanted to get to the bottom of something, and even if they ultimately knew what it was—lost cultures, Barbara Thompson in a trailer park in Hopwood—they would keep at it. Young scholars. Their parents were having the conversation in the bedroom next door, which was the marital bedroom and contained many mysteries. Laura complained that she hated every stick of furniture in there, the bed they slept in, the dressers and mirrored vanity that matched it, all won by Jimmy in a card game with the Minor Criminals of the Midwest, who were not famous for their taste. The queen-size headboard was tall, flat, and covered with quilted, yellowed vinyl, attached to the frame with brass buttons, brass mostly missing. The dresser and vanity were made of blond wood, perhaps for a blonde woman, which was the opposite of Laura but similar to Barbara Thompson, whose name so far had not been mentioned.
The voices weren’t much more than a murmur. Cassie had to get out of bed and creep like a cat across her floor in order to hear what she hoped were the sounds of Jimmy taking his change, his keys, and his breath mints out of his pocket and placing them carefully on his dresser, because this meant he was staying for some hours. Last summer he would sometimes drop in late at night or early in the morning, expecting the girls to be asleep, and deposit with Laura a handful of disputed Money and leave again, that went on for weeks. Cassie heard the loose change land on the dresser top, Jimmy say he was tired, Laura make a sound that was perhaps a word or a cry, and then Cassie knew it was okay to get back in bed awhile. Wherever it was he went—and she didn’t believe she’d ever know—her father got very little sleep, he loved to come home and slip into bed in the morning light. She slipped into bed and lay on her back; the sun was coming up on the other side of the house but would reach her soon enough. Her heart pounded, she could see the plaster on the ceiling very clearly, the crack that zigzagged like a fault line from one side of the room to the other. She tried to close her eyes, but they popped right back open.
Last summer Belle had crept into Cassie’s room late one night and gotten in bed with her, then wrapped her arms around Cassie from behind the way she had when they were small and whispered in Cassie’s ear Are you very very sad? In all the great wide world Cassie couldn’t imagine another soul who would ask a question like that one and not expect to get beaten up good. Cassie hadn’t answered, had just lay there feeling Belle’s breath on the back of her neck and trying to think of a true answer. Every day was a vaccination. She missed her grandmother, who had been old and soft, who said few words but who gave to them: she and Poppy had taken them in without a word so long ago, when they had nowhere to live. They’d opened up all the old bedrooms, Buena Vista had gathered up her sewing things and moved them to the attic, and Cassie remembered those years with Buena Vista like a long party where the party is going on inside and no one talks about it. Cassie could still imagine her grandmother so clearly, her white hair curled tight against her head in a permanent wave, the skin on her face that had fallen and kept falling, her watery blue eyes. Buena Vista had been heavy, especially in her legs, and she walked with a kind of back-and-forth Frankenstein gait, and unable to control the distribution of her weight, she had walked hard and made everything in the house shake, especially her animal figurines. She had been just an old woman in a faded housedress, sometimes she even wore her slippers to the grocery store, but something about her had been their hearts’ salvation.
Now, lying in bed, her father asleep in the next room, Cassie felt herself swaying back into sleep. Can you smell the water? Maybe someday she would tell Belle that she hadn’t been, she wasn’t sad, she was … she almost knew, and then began to dream, there was a wide field, pink and spongy, or maybe it was a desert, there was no sign of anything anywhere, only the vast pinkness all around her, and she guessed she had to cross it, so she started walking.
Laura smoked. Belle sat at the kitchen table doing homework and tearing at her cuticles, her fingernails were already so short they sometimes bled. Poppy came in through the mudroom, “Laurie, have you seen my level?,” and Laura said no, she hadn’t, and he left again. A few minutes later he popped back in with Roger, who made a mad dash around the kitchen table and back out the door. “Laurie, have you seen my old canvas camp stool?” No, she hadn’t. He left. Cassie wandered from the kitchen to the screened porch, drinking a soda that made her stomach burn, as she hadn’t eaten anything all day and here it was almost two in the afternoon. She sat in the rocker with splinters. Finally Belle stuck her head out the door and said, He’s up.
Cassie went into the kitchen and casually sat down at the table, picked up Belle’s history book, and opened it to the page on Eli Whitney and the cotton gin. Upstairs the shower was running, then it turned off. Jimmy hummed as he shaved. When he came downstairs he smelled sweet, had a swing in his step. Cassie wrote on her palm with her fingernail the things she wanted to talk to him about: a door for the shack, help fixing her bicycle chain, would he toss the football with her, would he figure out how to get a better fence around the garden—the deer were tearing it up. Poppy needed new propane tanks on the Airstream, and there was something else. She tapped her fingernail on the table.
“Stop that,” Belle said. Cassie stopped.
“Hey, girls,” Jimmy said, sitting down at the head of the table.
“Hello,” Belle said, not looking up.
“Hey.” Cassie glanced at him, his hair was still wet from the shower and he had some tan across his nose. He’d put on a pressed white shirt, linen pants in a mossy green, one of his thin leather belts. He sat at the table as he always did, with his legs crossed like a woman’s, his torso slightly turned. Other fathers looked to Cassie like livestock; Jimmy was how it was supposed to be, a jangly, dancing man. She remembered she wanted to tell him that last week she’d been walking down the road and a fox had bolted out of the tall grass and run right in front of her, she could almost feel him against her skin, and she’d been tempted to follow him. But they move fast.
“Get a some coffee here, Laura?” Jimmy asked.
Her mother turned away from the window, dropped her cigarette in the sink where she’d been washing dishes, filled the percolator with water, slammed it against the counter.
“Whatcha working on there, Bella Belle?”
Belle blushed, tore at a cuticle. “A book report. On Where the Lilies Bloom.”
“Aren’t you—Isn’t this summer vacation?”
“I’m just,” Belle said, placing her hands over her notebook, “doing it on my own.”
“I see. Good book?”
“I liked it.”
Jimmy nodded. “Well.”
Cassie kicked the chair with the back of her foot until it started to ache.
“How about you, Cass? Having a good summer?”
She glanced down at the palm of her hand, where she’d written her invisible list, then cleared her throat.
“Laura, how about putting a little soup in a pan for me?”
Cassie cleared her throat again—she’d start with the bike chain, she figured—and Laura turned slowly and looked Jimmy up and down, then pulled a pan from the cabinet with a hard rattle and slammed it on the stove.
“And maybe a cheese sandwich.” Jimmy looked at Cassie, grinned, shrinking up his left eye as he did so, his bit of a wink. “Man could starve to death in his own home, huh, Cass?”
Cassie thought she might be called upon to betray her mother, it was not at all out of the question for Jimmy to demand such loyalty, but she was spared the request by a block of cheese sailing from the direction of the refrigerator, not its sailing so much as its landing was the distraction. It skidded underneath Belle’s papers and came to a stop. The three at the table looked up at Laura. Some very bad things had happened this way, some of which could still be discerned on the ceiling.
“I can see I’m not wanted here,” Jimmy said, pushing himself up from the table.
“How dare you,” Laura said, crossing the kitchen like a storm. “How dare you come home after four days—”
“Five,” Cassie said.
“—five days and push me into giving you an excuse to leave again? What in the name of Christ sort of person are you?”
“Mom,” Belle said.
“Shut up, Belle, and you shut up, too, Cassie.”
“I don’t appreciate you talking to me like this in front of my daughters,” Jimmy said, pulling himself up to his full height, an inch shorter than Laura.
“Oh, oh, that’s rich, too, your daughters,” Laura said, getting closer to Jimmy’s face with every word.
“All I came home for was my stick, anyway.” Jimmy turned and walked into the living room, stopping at the coat closet, where he took out his cue case.
Cassie jumped up and ran past him, grabbing her sandals off the porch as she went. She leaped down the porch steps and landed on some sharp rocks, had to make her way down the driveway to where he’d parked, pulled open his passenger door. It was hot inside, it was shocking. Jimmy drove a 1971 Lincoln Continental with suicide doors and red leather interior, and if they were starving to death or would die without penicillin and the only way to save them would be to Sell The Car, then good-bye Cassie, good-bye Belle. This according to Laura. Poppy reluctantly agreed.
A minute passed. Jimmy had undoubtedly gone upstairs to collect his things, and would come sailing out the front door any minute. He favored a dress shirt that allowed room for an entrance, or an exit, in its graceful folds. He sailed out the door. Laura was right behind him, speaking quickly but not loudly, and she threw something but Cassie couldn’t see what it was. Conditions were not ideal, Cassie realized this right away.
Jimmy walked down the driveway, his walk a kind of glide, and pulled his door open. “Get out, Cassie,” he said, starting the engine. Boiling air blew from the vents. “Sweet creeping Jesus, it’s hot in here.”
Sweat poured down her face and in a stream down her chest. “Get out, Cassie, right this minute.”
Laura still stood on the porch but she was hard to see behind the screen.
“Right this goddamn minute, Cassie, I’m not playing.”
She turned and looked at him. His long black eyelashes had never worked to his advantage when he was angry, but she could see he really was. Angry.
“GET OUT OF THE CAR.”
Another minute or two and he’d see what her point was.
“Fine,” he said, his teeth grinding. He pulled the gearshift into reverse as if he wanted to pull it off the column, then backed out so fast stones flew up and hit the bottom of the car, and obviously this wasn’t something Jimmy would wish to happen to the Lincoln. He was beyond himself. His tires screeched against the King’s Crossing as he moved the transmission into drive, and then Cassie was thrown against the red leather seat, and the compass bobbing around in liquid on the dashboard swung around, up and down.
“Do you see what you do to me, all of you, every last blasted one of you? You make me hate my life, Cassie, how does that feel?” Jimmy slammed the lighter into the dash, flipped a cigarette out of the pack in his breast pocket. “I don’t know what I was thinking, picking you out at the zoo. I honestly do not know.”
Cassie rolled down her window, stuck out her head, let the wind fill her mouth and nose. When she leaned back, Jimmy was smoking, driving slowly, listening to his favorite radio station, Frank Sinatra was singing “Fly Me to the Moon.” Jimmy hummed along with him, Jimmy’s beautiful voice.
They drove the four miles into Roseville, a town famous for two things: a small candy factory called April and May’s, after the unmarried sisters who’d run it out of their kitchen; and a restaurant, Holzinger’s, which boasted a large, expensive buffet. Cassie had been there only once, on her parents’ anniversary a few years before, and buffet was probably not the correct word. She and Belle had been stunned into silence when they entered. The restaurant occupied four floors: the first was appetizers, the second was breads, the third was entrées, and the fourth was desserts. Cassie had stopped in the appetizer room—the mountain of cold pink shrimp on ice in the middle of a table, the cold silver platter underneath it beaded with condensation, had made her want to run.
Now they passed the Granger School, which was beautiful and looked as if it might fall down, and then the gas station and a flower shop. The main street was tree-lined and shady.
“High suicide rate in Roseville, you know that, Cass?”
Cassie shook her head.
“Oh yeah. I coulda told anybody who asked, and for free, but they hired an expert instead.”
She doubted it would have been for free.
“County coroner—you know him? Robbie Ballenger?—he suggested it to the county council. Read some article about national suicide rates, saw that ours are as high as an Indian reservation. Don’t want that, do we.” An old rocking horse and a birdcage were sitting on the sidewalk outside the antique shop. “The Christians are calling for Robbie’s resignation. An in-erad-i-cable rule of life, Cassie,” he waved his cigarette at her like a stem finger, “do not piss off the Christians, they will throw their stones at you every time.”
As they approached the center of the downtown there were fewer and fewer businesses, just empty buildings. An evacuation order. Uncle Bud’s sat on the corner of Main and Railroad; it had been a drugstore fifteen years before, a low and long building with a green awning along the front windows. The windows were covered with a film that made them look silver from outside: mirrors. Jimmy pulled into one of the three parking spaces facing the back door. Behind them, on the corner of Railroad and fifth, was a bar called Howdy’s. A sign outside advertised fiftycent Miller drafts for and a whole room devoted to darts. Other than Howdy’s, everything seemed deserted. A few faded storefronts proclaimed fly-by-night mechanics, flown, and body shops. Cassie had been here once, sent inside Uncle Bud’s to fetch Jimmy when Laura was so mad she couldn’t get out of the car for fear her legs would explode. The place had held Cassie in an attraction so powerful she could no longer remember the specifics, only the heart-knocking joy. She felt a shadow of it every time she went past this part of Roseville with Poppy, on the way out to the highway and to the strip of stores at the edge of Hopwood.
Jimmy rolled up the windows, reached into the back for his cue. “You’re not to bother me.” Cassie nodded.
“I’ve come here to visit my table and get in some time, not to focus on you.”
“Okay.”
“And if Bud comes in, who is as you know an old sumbitch, and says you have to leave, then you’re going to have to skedaddle and find something else to do.”
“Okay.”
He leaned over and kissed her on the forehead. His lips were smooth and hard and cool. “You know you’re my favorite, Cassie, although God knows that ain’t saying much.” Stepping out of the car, he pulled his shirt away from his chest, fanning himself witrh it, then looked for the key to the back door.
The door was steel, gunmetal gray, no window. In the back room Jimmy pulled a string, and a bare bulb illuminaed the rough wooden shelves covered with boxes of Master chalk, cases of crackers filled with cheese or peanut butter, new balls. On the floor were boxes overflowing with empty beer and soda cans. Against one wall was a line of cues that looked as if they were awaiting surgery. Cassie took a deep breath. This smelled better than anything in her life, better than a Christmas tree, better than the raspberry bush at the edge of the house, tangled with honeysuckle, better than Jimmy’s winter coat.
“I’m not going to entertain you, and the rules are the same as when the table was at home, you can’t touch it.”
Jimmy used another key to open an ugly green door with a frosted glass panel that seemed to have been stolen from a hardboiled detective agency. They were in the dim main hall. Bud’s bar still looked as it had, Cassie guessed, when the building was a pharmacy—a long counter with stools, and a mirror behind it with Rx painted in vivid blue, a mortar and pestle beside it. On the shelves below the mirror were trays of balls and boxes of chalk, mostly battered, and bags of potato chips clipped to a black metal rack. A single jar held dill pickles in cloudy green brine. There were no draft beers or fountain drinks; everything was lined up squarely in a refrigerator with a glass door.
“And I’m not buying you a soda or chips and have you make a mess in here, so don’t ask.”
Cassie’s eyes glanced from surface to surface. She’d never been anywhere so clean and precise. Bud used a big old-fashioned cash register: five-dollars was the last anyone had paid. On the steel counter next to the cash register was a big rectangular book with a grainy black cover, the word ACCOUNTS. The book was centered so precisely on the counter it looked like Bud had used a speed square. A sign on the bar explained that between three and six in the afternoon the tables were a dollar a person per hour, and between six and two in the morning, they were two-fifty. In one corner was a silent jukebox, and other than that just the tables.
“And don’t ask for quarters for the jukebox because I didn’t bring any.” Jimmy had taken out his cue and was screwing the joint on the butt.
Seven tables, five feet from the wall and five feet apart; a light with a green accountant’s shade hung over every table. At each end of the room was a rack with ten house cues. A shelf for drinks and ashtrays ran the length of the room, and there were four tall chairs against the wall and ten stools scattered around the room. Cassie wandered around, not quite touching anything, taking in the smell of chalk, beer, cigarettes, while Jimmy used a third, smaller key to unlock the door to the glassed-in room at the end of the hall. Inside the glass room was one table, no stool, no chair. Cassie hovered in the doorway, watched him flip the switch to the light that had formerly hung in their garage.
“Ahhhh,” Jimmy said, resting his stick on the toe of his shoe. “There’s my best girl.” He spread his arms as if making a gift of the whole room to his daughter. “I ever tell you how I came into possession of this table?”
Cassie nodded, she had heard the story many times.
“It’s a vintage Brunswick, this one. Built in 1884, probably in New Orleans; moved with a family to Alabama and eighty years later was back in the Big Easy, where one James Claiborne happened to win it in a game that went on so long God wished me luck and went on to bed.” Jimmy lit a cigarette. He bent and studied the length of the table, looking for wear on the felt. “I hauled it in the back of a borrowed station wagon to the boardinghouse where I was staying—oh, don’t worry, it was a Christian boardinghouse for Christian men. The slate, rails, legs, pockets, rack, sticks, and balls, the whole shebang, I reassembled it in an abandoned tobacco warehouse on Tchoupitoulas, the key to which I happened to find upon my person after another difficult game. In an old hotel, that one. Spooky.” Jimmy rested his cigarette on the small shelf against the wall, not in the ashtray provided but on the shelf. There was a series of dark stripes in the wood, as if he’d placed burning ash there on a number of occasions. He ran his hand along the shining hardwood of the rails. “There was a single missing part, believe it or not, and I found it in a Brunswick repair shop on Frenchmen Street. It’s a civilized town, Cassie, that has a Brunswick repair shop. It’s long gone, just like old Jimmy Claiborne. I’d bet I’m still talked about, though. If I were a betting man.”
He didn’t say the table was walnut, but Cassie knew The legs were ornately carved and the pockets woven leather. It was four feet by eight feet, the measurement Uncle Bud called True. The slate had been flawless when Jimmy won the table, and remained so; Bud changed the felt, made of fine wool from somewhere in the Netherlands. Wood spun and dyed by virgins, Jimmy said. Cassie wished he would go on, she wished he would tell the story of the light, too, which she had studied for hours. The glass was deep red and imprinted with black Chinese characters, and red silk fringe hung like liquid from the bottom of the shade. She wanted to hear Jimmy say the words Colorado and mining town, which she’d long ago written in her notebook.
But he said nothing more. His cigarette sent up a ribbon of smoke against the wall. Cassie watched him rack the balls (they came from Belgium, and he would have no others), knowing she was invisible to him. She watched as she had hour after hour, sitting on a kitchen ladder in the garage. The one ball was the yellow of a sunflower; the two was the same shade as the Indiana sky on a flawless summer day, Cassie had often had the feeling they had been made for her, or that they represented, at the very least, the possibility of something beautiful. At night sometimes, unable to sleep, she would imagine the balls spread out across the green table under the red glass of the lamp: someone had stepped on a box of paints and let them fly. Ruined paints on new grass.
Jimmy stood at the foot of the table and, using a house cue left propped in a comer, took two practice strokes (never one or three), then sent the cue ball crashing into the gathered tribe. All fifteen balls careened around the table, and the four and the thirteen fell. He was practicing straight pool, even though he’d been saying for years that the days of the great straight players were over, and that the money was now on 8-ball for hustlers and 9-ball for professionals. Cassie didn’t know which he was. Jimmy moved around the table quickly, as if on a preordained path. When the table had been at their house, all those years, she had watched Uncle Bud and many other men play against Jimmy, and she knew her father had a strange and specific style related to his restless grace; he bent at the knees instead of at the waist and didn’t sight down the cue as if down the barrel of a gun. In deep concentration, he made his bottom lip so thin it vanished. She would have never told him or anyone, but she had missed this table fiercely, and even after spending her whole life with a man to whom objects gravitated and then were lost—things that came and went like the stray men Jimmy invited to dinner and a game, who would never be seen again—she had not understood what had happened, how the table went missing and ended up here at Bud’s.
She had been standing in one spot, watching her father, FOR so long that when she heard another key rattle in the ugly green door, she awoke as if from a dream. Uncle Bud stepped in, gently closing the door behind him. As he passed the glass room where Jimmy played, Bud barely gave him a glance, and there wasn’t the comfort of old friendship in the look, either; Jimmy rarely earned such a thing. Uncle Bud had been Jimmy’s childhood companion, they had a long history. And there WERE a few dark moments in the past two dark years when Bud had stepped into their house in Laura’s name, had roughly set things right.
He was tall and dense, with arms the size of hams, and an enormous head on a thick neck. Bud kept his hair, which was going gray, cut so short he looked like he’d gone missing from some secret branch of the military, and he dressed in T-shirts and blue jeans and motorcycle boots and wore a wide belt with a Harley-Davidson buckle. But he didn’t own a motorcycle. There was a wide gap between his two front teeth and his eyebrows sprouted wild. He had a tattoo of Donald Duck on his forearm, the origin of which he would not discuss, and he had formerly smoked cigarettes but had given them up for cigars; Cassie liked the smell. On the whole Cassie faced the world of men with the wariness of the repeatedly betrayed child—Poppy was the only man she trusted—but long ago she had taken to Bud and felt safe in a room he was in. He kept his distance from her.
“Cassie,” he said, surprised to see her. “What are you doing here?”
She shrugged.
“Well, come help me carry these boxes up front.”
The cases of soda were heavy, but in Bud’s arms and against his stomach, they looked like matchboxes. As she passed the glass room for the third time, Jimmy stuck his head out. “Keep her workin’, Bud. That’s why I had children, although I thought they’d be sons.”
Bud ignored him.
Jimmy came out and sat down at the bar. “Give me a cold something.” He turned to Cassie, winked. “I ever tell you how I came into possession of that table?”
Bud sighed, stopped at the refrigerator door as if he might not open it.
“Okay, okay. I may have mentioned the adventure a time or two. Let me say that I stole so much from that man that night, pretty much everything he held dear, that if we’da kept it up, I woulda left with one of his kidneys.”
Bud relented and got Jimmy the beer.
“I’m back at it,” Jimmy said. “Bud, if she bothers you, send her scootin’.”
Cassie watched him go, accepted the cold Coke that Bud offered her. “You want to play, Cass? I’ve got some bookkeeping to do.”
“I can’t. I’m not allowed.”
“Who says? Jimmy? This is my pool hall, those are my tables, including the one he’s playing on which he keeps insisting is his.” Bud shook his head. “Nothing to be done about him.” He took a tray of balls off the rack and dropped a cube of chalk in the middle. “He never taught you to play?”
Cassie shook her head. “But I’ve watched a lot.”
“I know you have. Jimmy loves an audience. Well, come here, then.”
Bud took down a house cue and examined its tip, then chose another. He said ferrule, scuffer, shaper, mushrooming. He put the cue in Cassie’s hand. She had sometimes snuck Jimmy’s cue out and looked at it, but there was a space that Cassie had never crossed between contraband and the legitimately held thing. She crossed it. The cue felt more formidable than she would have guessed, heavy at the bottom like a weapon and delicate at the top, just a stem. Bud showed her how to rack the balls for 8-ball, 9-ball, straight pool, which she already knew, then taught her the difference between an open and closed bridge, then taught her how to sight and where to hold the cue with her rear arm. He said head spot center spot foot spot comer pocket long string foot string center string head string. Kitchen. Head rail side rail foot rail side rail, and for the next four hours, as they lined up shots and hit them, he said a thousand things that Cassie fought hard to remember. When the tip of the cue strikes the cue ball, the forearm of your rear arm should be at a ninety-degree angle to the floor. Play begins here. This is a foul, and this is a foul, and this is also a foul; one of your feet must remain on the floor at all times. This is a mechanical bridge and there is no shame in using it. Chalk your tip before every shot but not until your opponent has missed because it’s rude not to wait. A slice, a thin slice, an impossible slice. The ghost ball, or phantom ball, the ghost table acting as a mirror. Bank shots and combinations and the massé and jumps. Sharking. Speed of stroke, hold the cue lightly, deadstroke. How to will deadstroke, or if it’s always a gift from God. On the cue ball: the vertical axis, the follow, right English, 3:00, low right, the draw, 6:00, left english, 9:00, high left.
“How old are you?” he asked.
“Ten.”
“You need to get an Introduction to Physics textbook. No one in Hopwood county is going to teach you physics at this age. Also you’ll need to know something about geometry. Your fool father will say he’s good at this game because he thinks in geometry, but he’s lying. He never even learned geometry, they didn’t go that far in reform school. And this game is about physics, so do that, get a book.”
Cassie nodded. She wished she had her notebook.
“And grow. You’re too short to see what’s happening on the table.”
“Okay.”
“Cassie,” Jimmy said, standing at the bar with his cue taken apart and stowed back in the case, “I’m leaving. Put this stuff away and tell Uncle Bud thank you for the lesson.”
“You’re out of here early,” Bud said, crossing his arms across his wide chest. “I thought you’d still be here when the late crowd arrived.”
“You were wrong.” Jimmy pulled his keys out of his pocket. “Get in the car, Cass.”
“You go on, Jimmy. I’ll take her home.”
“Or I’ll call Edwin,” Cassie said, shocked as she heard herself say it.
“Get in the car, Cassie.”
Bud took a step toward Jimmy. “I’ve got an idea, how about you head on wherever you were going, which was surely not home where you belong, and I’ll take care of getting Cassie back. Sound good?”
The muscles in Jimmy’s face tightened and relaxed; Cassie had seen this many times, he did it when he was furious, as lions yawn before they attack. His whole body was tense. But he said, smiling at the end, “Whatever. Save me the trip.” He walked over and kissed Cassie on top of her head. “Don’t let Bud talk you into playing for money.” He strolled out the front door, unlocked now, even by leaving through a door you didn’t enter through is very bad luck, Cassie almost said something.
“All right, come here now,” Bud said, setting up the three ball in front of a side pocket. “I want you to take this shot a hundred times, I’m going to stand here and count. If you make it fifty times you can come back tomorrow.”
It was an easy shot in some ways; she was shooting from the side of the table, and she didn’t have to reach. The three was eighteen inches from the pocket at what Bud said was about a thirty-degree angle. But Cassie had seen right away that this was a game in which mysterious forces seemed to be at work, which meant that sometimes things might go well and that was a surprise, and sometimes everything went wrong and that was also a surprise. Bud said there were an infinite number of variables to consider, and Cassie didn’t understand what that meant but remembered the phrase so she could ask Belle. He said take the best shot available to you, and if there isn’t one, go safe. If you practice a shot many times, you add it to a repertoire until you own the table. He said don’t go for the slice beyond ninety degrees, because when you do, you’re pushing hard against the spectrum of possible outcomes.
Other people began to trickle in, a middle-aged couple who looked like they’d just woken up and eaten fried eggs. A thin bald man playing alone. Cassie barely registered them. She made the shot sixty-two times, told Bud he could go about his business, then lined the balls up and started all over, and she did that right up until Edwin Meyer touched her on the arm and told her it was time to go home.
They got in Edwin’s car, a clean, modest Dodge that smelled like nothing but an unfolded map, and headed home. Edwin was younger than Jimmy but had started school at four and skipped two grades, so they ended up in the same class. Unlike Uncle Bud’s, Edwin’s life had diverged early from Jimmy’s, when Poppy wanted Jimmy to work at the hardware store and he refused. Edwin took the after-school job and stayed right there, no ladder to move up, just more responsibility to take on, longer hours to work, until Poppy decided to retire and sell, and Edwin bought the place. He’d been at Public Hardware twenty years now, Cassie guessed, and he was so much entwined with the building and the smell of nails in wooden bins, the creaking of the old floor, that if the store didn’t exist, Edwin wouldn’t, either. He’d go trinner and thinner until finally he couldn’t be seen, couldn’t be remembered. Cassie forgot him all the time. Laura said he felt responsibility for them all, as if, when he purchased Poppy’s business he also purchased his failings; Jimmy was clearly a failing. Someone, Edwin was fond of saying, had to keep everything in working order. He had no family of his own.
“Are you—you were there a long time—all right?” Edwin was wearing the clothes he favored for work: polyester trousers in a horrible shade of tan or green and a seersucker dress shirt from Sears. His thin dark hair lay flat against his head, Laura said he had a Lovely Face. Laura called him Sweet Reason. Cassie told Belle one night she thought Edwin loved Laura, and that’s why he was always calling on them for Chinese checkers and hot tea, but Belle said Cassie was wrong. She said he came for other reasons, and he was Pure.
“I’m fine, yeah.”
“A pool hall,” Edwin said, shaking his head. “I would have been in all kinds of trouble if I’d been caught in a pool hall at your age.”
Cassie looked out the window. Roseville was closing the shutters and rolling up the streets, as Jimmy would say. “What kind of music is this?”
Edwin turned the volume up. “It’s a polka. A German polka. My parents were German, you know, very firm. Firm, hardworking people.”
“Okay.”
“This is my favorite kind of music, although I don’t ordinarily say so. My parents had a Victrola, a real one, and a collection of seventy-eights. Big records. They used to put on a polka record on Saturday nights, just like tonight, and we would dance, it’s very joyful music, as you can hear.”
“Okay.”
“And my father became a different man. All week long he”— Edwin paused, drove—” counted the grains of salt we were allowed to put on our potatoes. He counted for my mother so she wouldn’t cheat. So Saturdays were great. For me.”
They drove out to the edge of town, turned on 300 West, headed for the King’s Crossing. “Do you know anything about bicycle chains?” Cassie asked, embarrassed.
“I surely do. I’m thinking about your bike, what sort of chain you need.” He thought. “It’s too old and slow and meant for a boy,” he said, as he turned the car around and headed back to the hardware store.
“Not if it’s a bother,” Cassie said.
“We’ll take care of it.” Edwin leaned in toward the steering wheel, smiled. “A project.”
They finished late. Cassie rode the bike down to the crossroads and back, and told Edwin it felt like new.
“I don’t think it was ever new, Cassie.”
“It’s better, though.” She thanked him, and he tipped an imaginary hat and got in his car and drove away, the faint strains of a German polka following him.
The house was quiet: Cassie found Belle at the table, reading her book and making notes. Her reports were so exhaustive, Laura said, that no one would ever need to read the things themselves. Belle drained a book.
Laura was standing at the kitchen sink, staring out into the dark yard where the finches fed, as if it were daylight and as if there were finches. The dinner dishes were done, and Cassie realized she hadn’t eaten. She fixed a peanut-butter sandwich, poured herself a glass of milk, and sat down on the floor next to her mother, leaning up against the cabinet door. Behind the door were cleaning solvents and toilet-bowl chemicals and various ammonias and bleaches, some still bearing the neon-green MR. YUCK! stickers from years before. Poppy had put the stickers on.
“Look how dirty your hands are,” Laura said, “up against that perfectly white bread.”
Cassie looked. “Yep.”
“It’s sort of pretty, isn’t it, the contrast.”
Belle made a sound from the table, a small disgusted explosion.
“Is that—Are your fingers blue?” Laura’s innocent, beleagured tone. “Were you playing pool?”
Cassie shrugged, looked away from Laura, whom she could feel continuing to stare at her for some seconds. Then there was the snap of the cigarette case opening, and the grinding of the wheel on the fighter, and Laura had looked back out the window, Cassie knew. Leaning against the cabinet door reminded her of a dream she’d had lately, a Replacement Dream, she was thinking of calling it. The Original Dream had been of flying way up in the air, above rooftops and treetops; once she had seen the details of a weathervane on top of an old bam. Once she had crash-landed in a pond and scared herself so badly she’d jumped out of bed. She had those dreams for a long time, she just spread her arms and fell forward (or backward, on one memorable occasion) and let the wind take her, nothing to it. And then she had a dream in which flying required a code word, and Cassie didn’t have it. The only way she could get it was to turn her head and look over her left shoulder as a flying horse crossed the path of the moon, and somehow she managed it, and then she was up in the air and the feeling in her gut was stronger than when she was just sailing over barns like Peter Pan. That went on a while, the searching for the code or the key; once it was in a refrigerator in a dark basement, and the refrigerator was filled with vials of something. But the Original Dream was completely gone, Cassie could sense it, because now she was dreaming that she had to enter a windowless room of her own house, or at least she was told repeatedly it was her own house, and kneel in front of what might be a filing cabinet or a kitchen cabinet just like this one, open the door, and roll into it backward as if she were doing a backward somersault, and then she was propelled into what the Other People in the dream called flying, except where was the sky, where was the air? She seemed to remain in the cabinet with this strange, tossed-about, sick feeling in her gut that was like the flying feeling, only much stronger. And no flying.
Laura cleared her throat, said, “I know you’re the only one who remembers, Cassie, besides me, and that’s what’s wrong with you.”
Cassie put her milk glass down slowly and rested the sandwich on top of the glass and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. Belle’s pencil stopped for a moment, then continued.
“He was so sweet,” Laura said, “he was the sweetest, funniest man. I was engaged to someone else, you know, at home, before I came here.”
Cassie didn’t move, but of course she knew, she’d known for years.
“He had money. He had old family money, which doesn’t mean anything here, there’s no such thing. And I had my whole life planned out, how things would be after I’d married him, what our children would be named and where I’d sit in church and what my relationship to his mother would be, his brothers. And all that money, like Christmas every day. I even knew which chair on the veranda would be mine during the carnival season. I didn’t know, I was nineteen years old, I didn’t know that the heart can make grave mistakes and that who you end up married to is largely a matter of accident and then you’re stuck with it forever, and I know there are people who are not stuck forever and I envy them. They have something, there’s a switch in them or a special gene, I don’t understand it. But from the very beginning with your father, I felt that every decision we made, every move we made, was wrapped in a kind of holy light, no doubt because I had been driven mad by Catholic school and I felt guilty for the things I’d done with him which are not the issue and I’m not going to mention them. Two weeks, that was how long we had together. And then he left New Orleans in a stolen truck with a pool table in the back. And I. Cassie. If you ever engage in something you perceive or misperceive as holy, you will not let it go and you will not defile it. And so I packed one suitcase and jumped on a bus and followed him here, it took twenty-six hours, and all that time I was feverish with fear and it seemed such a long time but in fact was nothing. Because time is relative, isn’t it, Belle, and now I’ve been sick with following him for thirteen years and that bus trip passed in the blink of an eye.”
Cassie turned her head and looked at she, the tight posture Belle had developed from sitting so long at the table with a pencil in her hand, her head tilted to the right. Belle glanced up, and the look she gave her sister was complicated, it seemed part cold anger and part fish on a hook. If someone else were here, Poppy or Edwin, Laura would stop. But Cassie couldn’t make her stop.
“And when I got here, you know. But what I want to tell you is something I’ve been remembering all day today, it was something that happened after all the drama—well, all the initial drama— had cleared up, and Jimmy and I went to the justice of the peace and got married, I cried all through the ceremony, I didn’t even know why I was crying.” Laura stared at the yard as if the answer were there somehow, a scene she’d missed in an old tale. “I bet a lot of women would say the same, if they were honest. We were married at the courthouse in Hopwood by a little man who looked just like Elvis would have if he’d lived to be eighty, and if he’d somehow gotten shrunk by a ray gun. And this little judge or clerk or whatever he was couldn’t read our names, he called us Larry and Sally. And when he said Do you Larry, your dad said so officiously, / Do, and I was laughing and crying at the same time, and we were married under those names. We might not be legally married for all I know. And we went to a motel at the edge of Hopwood and spent one night there and I know the whole idea of your parents’ wedding night must be psychologically shocking, but in truth we spent the whole night laughing, Jimmy detailing his many exploits to me, remember we didn’t know each other. And then the next morning he said he had to go take care of a few things and he left me there, and I slept awhile, and then walked around the parking lot, and watched the cars on the highway, and the whole day passed. There wasn’t a telephone in the room and I didn’t know where to call anyway, and that’s when it started, I was sitting on the curb in the parking lot and I started saying to myself, I married him, I married him, I married him, and I knew I couldn’t call my mother because she’d said I was dead to her. I’d left her to clean up the mess of my broken engagement, and remember she still had to work for his family, and all of her hopes for the future had been tied up in my marrying him. And Jimmy didn’t come back all that day or that night, and then I got really scared, because I didn’t know if he’d paid for the room or if I was going to get kicked out and I didn’t have any money, not a dime, and I was from the South and the people in the Midwest are so cold, they’re so judgmental and superior, they act as if we aren’t all human making human mistakes, but in fact they are human and you are something lower in the hierarchy and you disgust them. I’m exaggerating but if you knew how people in Louisiana would react to an abandoned pregnant bride as opposed to how people in Indiana would you’d see I’m not far off the mark. I walked around in a daze saying I married him, I married him, and I had no money and no food. I finally took the change Jimmy left on the dresser, and got something out of a vending machine. But the more important thing is that I didn’t call my mother or Buena Vista because it was already too late, no one could help me, I had crossed over. All I could do was wait for him and hope he would return and save me, because no one could do it but him. There’s probably a name for this illness, I don’t know, I had entered some other atmosphere. I married him. And he showed up the next day and of course I cried and hit him and screamed and threw things, and then he gathered me up and we came here to Poppy’s house, and Belle was born and I knew he was still seeing Barbara, everyone knew it and he didn’t really try to hide it, and then you were born, Cassie, and he was still seeing her, and there was a single time I might have left him but it passed. Everything before that time and everything after it was the same and it is still the same, I want you to understand this, because later you’re going to look back I’m afraid and think I had no pride or I was filled with selfhatred, that’s probably all true but it isn’t the whole story.”
Laura lit another cigarette and blew the smoke out through her nose, and Cassie looked down at the blue chalk on her fingertips. She scrubbed her hands against her jeans, but it was embedded in her nails and even in the whorls of her fingerprints and wouldn’t come off.
“I stayed and I stay, Cassie, because of that holy light. To this very day I pass the grocery store where he and I went for a cold root beer the day I first got here, the day I got off the bus, and even though he told me he was engaged to someone else, I look at that grocery store and see the holy light. The courthouse in Hopwood is holy, the little wizened Elvis clerk is one of the saints. And after you girls were born, you can’t imagine how that increased. Everything you wore, every piece of furniture you touched, it’s all sacred, this house and yard where you took your first steps, even—I swear this is true—the faucets in the bathtub, because I turned them on and off so many times giving you baths, and he gave you baths, those are our faucets and they’re filled with holy light. Do you see what I’m saying, I could leave him, I could leave this house and try to find a way to start again but there is no place to go because I took my vows and what is done can’t be undone. I can’t very well take you away from Poppy, he has nothing else left, and so I’d have to stay in Roseville and Roseville is sacred because my marriage and my children are sacred, and so I’d be living in the shadow of my own life and every day seeing the light in the grocery store and in a park bench where I sat with him once and in the gas station where we stopped to get gas on a family trip to Clifty Falls when you were babies; it’s tender, this feeling I’m talking about, it’s a feeling you can’t put any pressure on because it hurts too much. If I could go back to the time I had the strength to leave I would, I’d do it and accept the consequences, but I can’t go back.”
The clock ticked in the sudden silence, Belle’s pencil scratched out a description or a question or a revelation.
“I’m trying to say it really really irritates me, Cassie, the way you favor him and wait for him and suffer his cruelties, but I understand it perfectly well. I do. If he said to me any day, any hour, that he was coming home, I’d let him come, I’d welcome him home, and so there might be days ahead, they might have already happened, when I act like I hate you because of him, but in fact it’s the other way around.”
Cassie stood, stretched her legs. They’d fallen asleep, sitting on the hard floor. She threw the rest of her sandwich away, then stepped in front of Laura and washed out her milk glass, placing it carefully on the towel. “Good-night,” she said, to no one in particular.
‘“Night,” Belle said.
“Good-night, sweetheart,” Laura said, without looking at her.
In her bed, Cassie lay on her back and looked out the west-facing window; she thought she would never sleep. Her shoulders ached and she wondered if maybe she should get up and try to remember some of the things Uncle Bud had said so she would write them down, but it was no use. They were tangled up now in Laura’s story. When Laura was growing up, Cassie knew, she’d had a religion, she’d gone to Catholic school, and her whole life had been Catholic. Cassie had found a cigar box in the attic years before, filled with cards, prayer cards and funeral cards, Laura must have collected them when she was a girl. There were pictures of Mary, shepherds, guardian angels, guiding children over a rickety bridge. And some of Jesus. Cassie had stolen one of him, for reasons she didn’t understand. He was looking out, looking at her, and his robes were wide open and the inside of his chest exposed. Belle found it in Cassie’s drawer one afternoon, putting laundry away, and had carried it into the kitchen, saying, “Look what I found: the Radioactive Heart of Jesus.” Belle had laughed, she had no use for Catholicism, thinking the Greeks far superior. And Laura had laughed for reasons of her own. But Cassie had snatched the card away and, unable to remember why she’d wanted it at all, buried it in the backyard in a sandwich bag.
Laura had had all those cards and a rosary and a lace cap she wore in church—Cassie couldn’t quite put a structure on what she was thinking—but her daughters had done without. Jimmy had the gods he believed in and no others, and no one could put a name to them or quite work out their powers; sometimes they were kind and sometimes they kicked his ass, is what Jimmy said. But Laura. She had traveled a long distance, a long, long way. Cassie stretched out her legs and raised her arms above her head, comer pockets, then lowered her arms like a snow angel: side rails. And when Laura found herself alone in that motel room, no mother father sister Christ crucified or Blessed Virgin Mary, she had been … Cassie raised and lowered her arms, she felt like the bed was rocking her … Laura hadn’t been completely alone, had she? Belle had been there, just a seed. But Laura hadn’t mentioned that, and Belle, too, had kept her peace. Cassie slept.
In the morning she got up very early and went downstairs, trying hard not to wake anyone. She made lunch, left a note on the kitchen table, got her bike out of the garage, and tested the chain. It was still good. She rode down the King’s Crossing to 300 West, turned right, and headed in to Roseville, then through town to Railroad Street. At Uncle Bud’s she parked her bicycle in the shade and sat down on the rear steps and waited for him to come and open the back door. She took an apple and a sandwich out of her backpack, along with a chocolate milk; she finished them before the sun was fully up. All that day she waited, and when Uncle Bud arrived at three o’clock, she asked him if he’d be willing to give her a set of keys. She told him she was a person he could trust.
THE FLOOD, 1985 (#ulink_62a518d7-2a56-5cb5-ab02-37bf5abc0d11)
Cassie had gathered up Laura’s library books from around the house and matched them against the receipt she’d been given when she checked them out. They were all present and accounted for. She put them in the truck. Belle had given her the grocery list, and she’d put that in her back pocket and gone to Uncle Bud’s to practice for three hours, then over to his ramshackle house on a back street in Roseville. He needed help hanging the kitchen cabinets he’d gotten at an auction. By late afternoon she was headed out of town toward the library in Hopwood.
In the library parking lot she’d gone through the books, removing Laura’s bookmarks, the scraps of paper on which she sometimes made notes, and had come across a whole piece of paper folded in half. This:
1. We dream of rational creatures transcending the stain. Gauze and feathertip, the spill of clean scent like a trumpet bell, a bargain in the confectioner’s marketIn truth they judge and bruise.
2 Rather than kick it we tried to lift the dead horse He stood for a moment and we prayed he would fall away from us. I remember the place on his belly where the fur was rubbed thin and how when he landed his head hit last and the remaining air in his lungs rutted the grass. O, for a falconer’s voice, To lure this tassel-gentle back again!
It had been handwritten by Laura, with no date and no title, on a light green sheet torn from a stenographer’s pad with the orphaned scraps of paper clinging to the top. Cassie had never held with leaving such scraps, and now, reading the poem, or whatever it was—an idea, a group of sentences—she plucked them off one by one and dropped them on the floor of the truck. Laura and Belle talked about poetry all the time, but Cassie had no particular feelings about it. There was a way in which the obscuring of communication was painful, but the opposite was also true. She had no interest in anyone presenting her with the bleak, unvarnished truth. If Belle were here, Cassie thought, she would try to figure it out a word at a time, and she’d stick with it until she could make some judgment. Belle would take this tack in part because she had nothing better to do, and because the process of analysis struck her as pleasurable. Cassie shook her head at the notion. Belle enjoyed analysis, with the result that she was back at the house with Laura; and Cassie, at sixteen, was the only person in the house with a driver’s license and a vehicle, and the beginnings of tendinitis in her right elbow. She rubbed her elbow, then went inside the library to face the kindness of the librarians. The librarians were always kind.
She had memorized the poem, or whatever it was, and was repeating it to herself as she turned on to 732 East, the Percy Creek Pike. It was a long straight road all the way to the reservoir, and she would travel it for miles, so she sped up. Who were they who judged and bruised? Which rational creatures could transcend the stain, and the stain of what? And when had Laura ever been on a horse? And when had she seen a horse fall? Cassie passed the squat cinder-block building out of which a man with a wooden leg (which he kept displayed at all times; he actually rolled up his pant leg to do so) used to sell produce in the summer. The building had been unused for years. Next to the front door, in emphatic black lettering, someone had painted No CAR WASHING!, as if that were the world’s gravest temptation. Then there was nothing on either side of the road, just trees and fields. Cassie squinted. Far in the distance she could see something in the middle of the road. Heat shimmered upward. Beware the mee-rahj, as Jimmy used to say; a lot of the world looks like one thing but is really something else. When she was fourteen, she and Bud had traveled to Georgia for a big game, a serious money game, with the man who was at that time unbeatable, Lewis Lee. Cassie had played him all night in a cowboy bar (no cowboys in evidence), her fortunes rising and falling, until finally Lewis pulled it out and remained unbeatable, and Cassie and Bud turned around and headed home. She had been driving for hours in the dead of night when she saw a deer standing in the middle of the road (had it been a horse?), standing only a few feet away, standing and staring in that impassive way of the massive thing. Cassie had slammed on the brakes and thrown Bud, even wearing a seat belt, so far forward he had bruised his sternum nd been mad at her for a week. She kept asking, Should I have hit it? And he would say, There was No Damn Deer, and she would say, Yes, but should I have hit it?
She slowed. The thing in the middle of the road was about the size of a three-year-old boy and was picking at the stringy remains of something, raising and lowering its head. It was mostly in her lane. A turkey buzzard. She was getting closer to it, and she would be damned if she would swerve. She thought she’d go ahead and speed up, she’d go ahead and get thick into events with this bird. She didn’t care what they did or how foul they were, they could ravage all the carcasses of her county. But they weren’t going to boss her around in terms of driving. She was twenty feet from the bird and it didn’t move, and she was ten feet from it, a hot day and both her windows down, and just as she moved over—she did move at the last minute—the buzzard decided to take flight, and took flight. It spread its wings like an enormous black kite, and as Cassie passed it, the wind moving through the cab of the truck pulled the bird in through her window. For a single moment its lizard-skinned claws, its breast and face, were on her, one claw caught her forearm and tore it. She slammed on her brakes, and the bird tumbled out. It took flight with an awkward turn and then a terrible, fluid ease.
Cassie parked the truck at the side of the road and got out, doubling over in the heat. That, Cassie decided, was what a nightmare would smell like; the unbelievably dense odor of decay, layer after layer, no end to it. Her forearm was bleeding, and she could still smell the bird on her clothes, and in her hair. She gasped, kept her head down. Beneath her the pavement shimmered.
“Where are the groceries?” Belle asked.
“I didn’t get to the grocery store,” Cassie said from the mudroom, taking off her work boots, her jeans.
“Why not? Oh my God, what is that smell, don’t even think you’re coming in here. What happened, what is that smell? Where are the groceries?”
“Get me some clean clothes, Belle.”
“You smell like. Not a morgue, not a cemetery, not a funeral home. None of those places smell. A slaughterhouse, no, I don’t know. A war crime. That’s what you smell like.” Belle picked at a scab on the back of her hand, under which there was an imaginary blackberry thorn that she had been trying to remove for a couple of years. She was wearing Laura’s shoes; every time she took a step, her feet slid out.
Cassie remembered the poem in the pocket of her jeans, removed it, and put the jeans in the washing machine. “I could use some clean clothes here, Belle.”
“Did you, have you, did you roll in something?”
“And a towel. I’ll shower in the basement.”
“Please don’t go down there, Cassie, those stairs don’t have any backs on them, and I don’t like the way that bare bulb is, the way that bulb is. And I remember that shower, it’s just a nozzle sticking out of the wall, and you just stand there in the middle of the room, no stall or anything, there could be all sorts of, I think you should come on in.”
“In my room, Belle, clean clothes and underwear, a towel.”
“What is that, what’s on your arm? What happened to your arm?”
“I had a run-in with a buzzard.”
“Oh God. You’re going to get septus, septu-something, I can’t remember the rest, like a cat scratch, how did it happen, a buzzard? Did you say a buzzard, like a vulture, you mean?” For a long time Belle’s hair had been blond, but lately it had turned toward brown and was dry, she tucked it compulsively behind her ears. She was thin, thinner than Laura, her grocery lists always said: yogurt, celery, ice. Laura added: cigarettes, butane fluid, corn flakes. One of the scabs on Belle’s upper arm was bleeding, and a piece of toilet paper was stuck to it.
“It was squatting in the road like a three-year-old boy.”
Belle swallowed, picked now at her left arm. “A three-year-old boy?”
“Or a midget dressed all in black.”
Belle said nothing, looked away.
“It was picking at the strings of a rabbit.”
“A rabbit?”
“I passed it too close with my windows down, I thought it would fly away before I reached it.”
“So you were in a bit of a contest. With the vulture.”
“Sort of.”
“And you lost.”
“It would appear.” Cassie stood in the mudroom in her boxer shorts and sports bra, her arm throbbing. She remembered the grocery list, retrieved it from the jeans. Put them back in the washer.
“Should I get Laura?”
“No, you should get the things I asked for, along with some iodine and a bandage. I need to get this washed out and medicine on it.
“Should I call Poppy or Edwin Meyer?”
“No. You should think about the iodine, it’s in the upstairs bathroom, and a bandage, and some clothes and a towel for me.”
Belle nodded, then looked down and studied one of the imaginary thorns under her skin. “A little boy, you say? Or a dwarf?” She would write these phrases, Belle would, on slips of paper and save them.
“That’s right. I’ll shower, then go to the grocery store, then I’m going to Emmy’s. And bring me my cowboy boots, they’re next to my bedroom door. The ones with the two holes over the left ankle.”
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Haven Kimmel
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Классическая проза
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: From the internationally bestselling author of ‘The Solace of Leaving Early’, a funny, heartwrenching and unforgettable novel following the fortunes of a feisty young female pool hustler.Cassie Claiborne, at ten, was surely too young to be the head of her disparate family. But who else was going to do it? Growing up in Indiana with her distant, heartbroken mother, Laura, her fragile, eccentric sister Belle, and her beloved grandfather Poppy, Cassie got sick of waiting for her father to come home from his everlasting gambling and drinking binges and took matters into her own hands. Taught by her father to play pool, Cassie was a natural and was soon hustling experienced pool players – and winning.We follow Cassie from a complex little girl to a rebellious and impetuous young woman as she tries to create a world for her mother and sister. Overwhelmed but compelled by her family’s love, Cassie feels herself drawn back to the past by the stories of her mother′s youth, and she leaves her town for New Orleans, hoping that there she can find a truth to soothe her wounded soul and to allow herself the happiness she has been denied.Funny, heartbreaking, full of the eccentricity of small-town life and the overwrought drama of the close-knit family, ‘Something Rising (Light and Swift)’ is the story of a very unique young woman who knows that ′the worst thing that can happen to you is that you will find what you seek′. It tells of grief and love and growing up and leaving home in a way that is desperately sad but ultimately uplifting.