American Elsewhere (10 page)

“Do you often play checkers by yourself?” Mona asks.

He looks up, surprised. “By myself?” he asks. Then he smiles and laughs, as if this is a grand joke. “Ah, I see. By myself… very good.”

Mona chooses to change the subject. “Any idea how the probate courts work around here?”

Parson sets his coffee aside to think. “I am not sure about probate courts. There is only one court, though, and only one court officer—Mrs. Benjamin.”

“There’s only one officer? How does that work?”

“Very well, apparently,” says Parson. “There is not exactly much to do in the courts here. I believe it is overstaffed with just one person, really.”

“And where is this Mrs. Benjamin?”

“In the courthouse. Her office occupies the majority of the basement. You need only find a set of stairs there—any stairs will do—and go down them. Inevitably, you will find her.”

“Where’s the courthouse at?” Mona asks, slipping on her sunglasses.

“It’s in the center of the park, which is in the center of the town. Go inward. If you find yourself on the border of town—and it would not take very long—then you have missed it.”

“You can’t give me any street directions?”

“I could,” says Parson, “but they would not be as good.”

“Fine,” says Mona, and thanks him.

“Are you hungry?” asks Parson earnestly, as if her allowing herself to be hungry would be an abominable crime. “I can spare you another complimentary breakfast, if so, even though you have already eaten yours.”

As Mona has kicked the habit of morning beers, she politely declines. “When’s checkout time?”

Parson appears to debate getting up and going to his desk and rifling through his cards and papers again, but instead he just shrugs. “Whenever you check out, I suppose.”

“Is it okay if I leave my stuff here until I figure out how long I’ll be staying? I don’t expect that they’ll let me have the house too easy.”

But Parson has glanced at his board of checkers again and spied some brilliant move hidden among the pattern of marbles. With an impatient wave he returns to the game and the unoccupied seat across from him, and does not notice when Mona leaves.

As Mona drives across Wink all the sprinklers start to come on, not instantly, but in a slow, graceful procession, like water jets in a huge fountain, starting at the corner of one block and moving down to the next. In the morning light the streams of water take on a white glow, and when they begin waving back and forth, each one a little more delayed than the last, Mona feels like she’s watching a synchronized-swimming performance. It isn’t until she’s near the end of the block that she realizes the idea of watering a lawn here is strange: they’re in the high desert mountains, with barren scrub less than half a mile away. It feels impossible that she should find so many soft, verdant lawns lining the streets, and Mona glances up at the mountains and the mesa to confirm they’re still there.

All around her the town is coming to life. An old woman wobbles out on her porch with a watering can to fuss with a splendid bougainvillea that appears to need no attention at all. Fathers climb into their sedans and trucks and—rarely—their luxury cars and slowly cruise out onto the cement streets. Eventually Mona realizes she does not think of them as just men: they are all
fathers
, they have to be, for why else would they wear such bland but imposing suits and plaid shirts, and choose such stolid, unassuming hairstyles? For God’s sake, one of them is even smoking a pipe.

On one street a clutch of aproned mothers herd their children out
onto their driveways and into cars, each child swinging a tiny tin lunchbox. Mona slows a little as she passes them. Though she wants to ignore it, the perfection of the scene is powerfully striking.

No
, she thinks.
Not today. I won’t go there today.

She speeds up.

She passes the diner, whose enormous, curving neon sign says
CHLOE’S
. It’s evidently a hot spot, with parking spaces rapidly disappearing even as Mona watches. But what she finds most curious about it is what is happening in the back alley. She slows again to watch: there are two women there, each in pale pink waitress uniforms with their hair up and little white caps nestled in the exact center. One is much older and more mature, holding herself with the posture of a confident, seasoned veteran. She stands to the side and watches the other, a girl not even out of her teens. The girl is walking down the alley in a measured stride with a waiting tray balanced in one hand. The veteran watches keenly and barks out an order, and the girl makes an abrupt turn and paces from one side of the alley to the other. On the tray, Mona sees, are five pie pans, but they do not contain pies, but marbles. One pan shifts a little bit—just a centimeter to the left or so—and the marbles clatter around in the pan. The girl blanches but recovers, ferrying the tray of marbles back across the alley with a grim face and more care than a surgeon.
Practice
, Mona thinks, and she smiles as she passes them.

Mona has not yet considered living here in Wink. She’s inherited a house but not a life, and she has determinedly avoided having a life for several years, choosing instead barren roads and empty motel rooms. Yet now, somewhere in one of the closets in the back of her mind, she imagines what it would be like to live in this tiny town, where carrying pies is a serious, studied art and the sprinklers put on a balletic performance every morning.

She warms to the idea. The world has been so big to her for the past years that it is very inviting to imagine it so small.

No wonder her mother was happy here. Though the town is odd, it seems it would be difficult to be
un
happy here. It is like a place Mona dreamed about once, but she can’t remember when or what exactly
she dreamed about. There is something to these clean streets and swaying pines that sends a stir of echoes fluttering up in her mind.

Her tour of the town is not entirely peaceful, she notices. Everywhere she goes, people watch her. She can’t blame them: she cannot imagine anything more out of place than the Charger, with its bright red paint and guttering engine, not to mention its driver, who is looking back at them from behind silvered glasses and years of careful cynicism. But they are not just surprised, nor are they mistrustful: it is as if they are waiting for something, like this bright red muscle car and its strange driver are just a loose end someone will soon take care of.

The park at the center of town is quite large, constructed in a perfect circle with the clean white stone courthouse in one half. But it is the structure in the other half that attracts Mona’s attention: at first she thinks it is just a huge white ball the size of a small building, but as she pulls into the courthouse parking lot she sees its curves are actually angled, formed of tiny triangles. It looks like a smaller version of that enormous, spherical structure she always glimpsed in the ads for Walt Disney World as a kid. There is no sign indicating why this space-age-looking sculpture sits in this picturesque little park. It is as if it’s rolled here from down out of the mountains, and no one’s bothered to move it.

Mona immediately stops when she walks through the front doors of the courthouse, for the interior is in such extreme contrast to the exterior that it takes her brain a moment to process it. On the outside it is a happy little white building, yet its interior, or at least its lobby, is musty and dim. She takes off her sunglasses, but it makes no difference: the floors are a dark, sick yellow marble, and the walls are neglected imitation wood. Somewhere an air-conditioning unit clunks asthmatically, and there is a dusty breeze rippling through the close air.

An obese security guard at the front desk looks up from his book when she enters. She watches as his eyes perform a motion very familiar
to her: they widen a little, then leap down to her feet and slowly trail up her body, taking in every detail. It is disappointingly predictable, a ritual that must be completed before she can begin a conversation with nearly any man (and the occasional woman). With his eyes still fixed on her, the guard mindlessly turns a page in his book—
The Secret Joys of Lake Champlain
—but says nothing.

“I’m here to see Mrs. Benjamin,” says Mona.

The guard continues staring at her with his little eyes. Then he nods his head. Mona is not sure what this gesture means, but she walks ahead into the dark hallway. She glances back and sees the guard is leaning forward in his seat, head craned out to stare at her. Even while he is in this position one of his hands turns another page in his book, though his attention is nowhere near the text.

The hall ends in a series of strange decorations. First is a large, colorful mural that is familiar to Mona, though she can’t say where she saw it: it shows a green atomic model of an element encased in a ray of gold light. Beside this optimistic sight is a display case with many taxidermied specimens of local fauna. The little songbirds are fixed in the same position as the hawks—wings raised up and head ducked forward, a raptor beginning its dive-bomb—as if the taxidermist knew only one pose for birds. Next to the display case is a door with a framed picture hanging from the exact center. Its frame is curling and gilded, like something in a museum, though it needs dusting. Under the glass is a piece of parchment with a single word written on it in careful calligraphy. It reads
STAIRS
.

Mona looks back again. The guard is still in the same pose, leaning forward and watching her with unabashed fascination. She hears a little
flit
and though she cannot see she knows he’s turned another page. Then she opens the door and starts down the stairs.

When Mona reaches the bottom it’s so dark it takes her eyes a moment to adjust. It looks almost like a forest, many trunks with spindly branches at the top and a thin white light filtering through from above…

It is not a forest, she sees: she is looking at dozens and dozens of
immense wooden filing cabinets all along the walls. Piled on the tops of the cabinets are mounted heads, mostly deer, lying on their backs with their horns rising up in spiked tangles. There are so many horns that they look almost like tree branches, and now that her eyes have adjusted she sees that there are many types of horns, some the traditional twelve-point, some curling rams’ horns, so there must be many species.

Mona walks forward into the labyrinth of filing cabinets. As she moves she finds there is another scent in the air, buried below the aroma of old paper and formaldehyde, something like rotten pine. She rounds a corner and sees there is a big wooden table ahead, and unlike the rest of the furniture in this place it has a surface that is clear, except for four things: a box labeled
OUT
, a box labeled
IN
(both empty), a small desk light, and a cup of tea sitting on a saucer. Hanging from the front of the desk is a sign so similar to the one on the stairway door she’s sure it was made by the same person. This one reads
M. BENJAMIN!

Mona walks to the front of the desk. The tea stinks horribly: it is a thick, muddy, piney concoction that has left a dark brown residue on the sides of the cup. It does not look like something the human digestive system could make any sense of.

“Hello?” she calls.

There is a flurry of noise from among the cabinets behind the desk. “Hello?” says a voice, surprised. Then a woman emerges from some hidden passageway in the back. Though she is quite elderly, seventy at least, she is still enormous, over six feet tall, with wide shoulders and big hands. Yet she is dressed in the most matronly way possible: her hair is an immense, gray-blond cloud, and her dress suffers from an abundance of purple fabric and gray polka dots. A string of thick pearls rings her skinny neck. She blinks quickly as she totters out of the shadows to the desk. “Oh,” she says when she sees Mona. “Hello.” With a long, soft grunt, she sits down, face politely puzzled.

“I’m here about a house, ma’am,” Mona says.

“Which house?” asks the woman, and she fixes a set of spectacles to her nose.

“Uh, this one on Larchmont here. I inherited it.”

“Inherited it?” asks the woman. “Oh. And… are you a current resident?”

“No, ma’am, I’m not, but I have all the paperwork here, or at least, you know, a hell of a lot of it,” says Mona. She produces her folder with all the documentation and begins to hand the pages out to the woman, who is presumably Mrs. Benjamin.

Mona expects her to begin sorting through them officiously, like any world-weary bureaucrat, but Mrs. Benjamin simply holds one paper—the copy of the will—and stares helplessly at the rest of the pile. “Oh,” she says. Then, hopefully, “Are you sure?”

“Pardon?”

“Are you sure you inherited a house here? I must admit, it’s not very common. Most properties bequeathed are usually bequeathed to people already living here.”

“I’m just going by what the paper says,” says Mona. “I had a couple of courts say it was all legit back in Texas, and I’d hate to have come all this way for nothing. I understand the will expires in less than a week, too.”

“I see,” says Mrs. Benjamin. Finally she begins to pick through the paperwork. “And you would be Mrs. Bright?”

“Miss. Yes.”

Mona expects her to ask for identification, but she says, “Wait. I remember you… weren’t you in the red car yesterday? At the funeral?”

“Uh, yes. That was me.”

“Ah,” says Mrs. Benjamin. “You were the source of a bit of gossip, my dear.”

“Sorry.”

“Oh, these things happen,” says Mrs. Benjamin carelessly. “Honestly, it helped lighten the mood a little.”

“Who passed away, if I might ask?”

“Mr. Weringer.” She looks at Mona like this should mean something. When Mona does not react, she asks, “Did you know him?”

“I just got in last night, ma’am.”

“I see. Well, he was… a very well-respected member of the town. We’ve been all in a tizzy ever since.”

“How’d he die?”

But Mrs. Benjamin has turned her attention to the papers, squinting at the faint, staggered writing. “I don’t recall any Brights ever living here…”