American Elsewhere (11 page)

“The original owner was Laura Alvarez.”

“I do not recall any Alvarezes, either,” she says, with an inflection that implies—
and I would
. A thought strikes her, and she peers up at Mona and asks, “Can you please step back a little?”

“I’m sorry?”

“Can you step back? Into the light? So I can see you better.”

Mona obliges her, and Mrs. Benjamin peers at her through her tiny spectacles. Through their lenses the old woman’s eyes appear very far back in her head, like they are too small for their sockets, and she looks at Mona as if searching for something in her face, some familiarity or flaw that would tell her far more about Mona than any crumbling old paperwork.

“Are you really sure about this, my dear?” she asks finally. “You don’t seem like someone who should be here… perhaps you ought to go home.”

“Excuse me?” says Mona, indignant.

“I see,” says Mrs. Benjamin mildly. “Well. If you are sure, then you are sure. Your paperwork seems to all be in order. It shouldn’t be an issue. Let me check a few things.” She stands, smiles at Mona, and hobbles off into the cabinets.

“I am so sorry for my rudeness,” says Mrs. Benjamin’s voice from the back. “You surprised me. We have not had any new arrivals here for years. I should’ve introduced myself—my name is Mrs. Benjamin.”

“Yeah, I kind of figured,” says Mona. “You do all the court work here?”

“I do. There’s not a lot of activity. So I mostly do crosswords, but please don’t tell anyone.” She laughs. Mona suspects it’s a well-worn joke she enjoys trotting out.

“You seem to, uh… have quite a few deer heads in here.”

“Oh, yes. Storage, you see. They used to have them all throughout the courthouse. I am not sure why, but dead things were the primary decoration in Wink for many years. Now I’m stuck with them down here. But they do make me feel a little less lonely on slow days.”

Mona glances into the frozen amber stare of one ratty old buck’s head. She has no idea how anyone could take comfort from such a thing.

There is the sound of old, creaky drawers being pulled. “Larchmont… I believe I know the house, actually,” says Mrs. Benjamin. “It is abandoned.”

“I’ve heard.”

“For a while it wasn’t. After its initial abandonment, possession was ceded to the town. Someone scooped it up and it was rented out to a family who lived there for a short time.”

“But you don’t have
any
record of a previous owner?”

“My records go back to 1978, and indicate it was abandoned,” says Mrs. Benjamin. “But then my predecessor was
not
the most organized of people. It was swiftly abandoned again, though.”

“Why?”

“Oh. There was a mishap.”

“What, is it haunted or something?”

A goose cry of laughter sounds from the cabinets. “Haunted?” says Mrs. Benjamin, delighted. “Oh, no, no. It was one of the buildings struck by lightning. Hit the little girl, who was bathing in the tub at the time.”

“My God,” says Mona. “Was she all right?”

“No,” says Mrs. Benjamin primly. She hobbles back out of the cabinet passageways. “Here we are. This will only take a moment for me to get everything filled out and filed. I have the number of the locksmith. You should be able to move into the house this afternoon, if you’d like.”

“That fast? I thought there’d be more of a turnaround time.”

“Well, I suppose there normally would be, as it needs to be
approved by various officials of several different agencies… but luckily for you, these are all me. And I approve. Isn’t that nice of me?” She takes out a tackle box full of rubber stamps and begins applying them to Mona’s paperwork with a surprising ferocity.

“What happened to the house after it got struck by lightning? Is it all right?”

“Oh, it’s fine,” says Mrs. Benjamin. “Unlike some of the others. But it was never rented out again after, I know that. It was eventually abandoned again.”

“Pardon me, but did you say other buildings were hit by lightning?”

“Yes.”

“Like… in the same
storm
?”

Mrs. Benjamin looks up at her. “Oh, has no one told you about the lightning storm yet?”

“I just got in last night,” she says again.

“It was a historic event for the town,” says Mrs. Benjamin, with the relish of a gossip revisiting an old tragedy. “Many buildings were struck and burned down. Some pessimistic people believe we never recovered. I don’t agree with that, but it certainly was something. Why, it hit one of the trees in the park and split it in half. It even hit the dome, but, well, the dome being the dome, no damage was done.”

“Is that that… ball thing out front?”

“Yes, in the park. It is a”—she thinks—“a
geodesic
dome. A model of what they thought future architecture would look like. They constructed it long ago, back when the town was first built, I think. They were dead wrong, of course.” Mrs. Benjamin takes a breath. “My God, I’ve just about used up all the air in here, haven’t I? And heaven knows there wasn’t much to start with.” She glances at Mona, sensing an audience, and asks, “Are you interested in the town’s history much, dear?”

At first Mona wants to say no, she isn’t. Small-town history is the same all over. Yet this is not just any town: this is her mother’s hometown. She feels an unexpected duty to hear more of this place, to give
its history context and color in her head, and perhaps doing so would color in a bit of her mother, too. She might even learn why her mother was here, and why she left. “You know what, I think I’d enjoy that,” she says.

“Excellent. You must come around tomorrow and have lunch with me and the rest of the girls. It’ll serve as a good greeting from all of us. Now, don’t get the wrong impression—they are not all old hens like me. Some of them are sprightly young things, like yourself. And I assure you, I keep my house in much better order than I do my office. I’ll be curious to hear what you think of my tea.”

Mona glances down at the cup of stinking brown swill. She is speechless at the idea of drinking it.

“Do you know what the secret ingredient is?” asks Mrs. Benjamin, and her eyes grow wide and her voice a little soft. Somewhere a clunking air conditioner gets louder, building to a moan.

“No,” says Mona.

“It’s resin,” says Mrs. Benjamin. “The blood or pitch of a pine. You find it while walking in the woods, usually. All the trees will be hale and hearty, but then you’ll see one that will have a ragged wound, or some unsightly bulge. The tree will look a little bent, perhaps, or its leaves will have an orange tint to them. That is because the tree is
dying
, you see. It is bleeding out. The bulges are what I prefer, their resin is white or yellow and is quite viscous. It looks almost like butter. It gives such a good taste to the tea. Of course, it is pretty solid stuff. They use it to make torches, after all. You have to dissolve it in a little bit of wood alcohol… it’s the only way to get it down.” She smiles, and Mona sees her teeth are small and amber-brown, just like the eyes of the goats and deer around her, and they glisten queerly in the faint light of the basement. “Perhaps I’ll make you some. It makes the rest of the day go so much better.”

“I guess I can see that,” says Mona, who suddenly wants nothing more than to get away from this strange place filled with cabinets and dead things and the perfume of wood alcohol and pitch.

“Well, I won’t hold you up,” she says. “I am sure you want to see
the house. Run along, and I’ll look forward to hearing all about it later.”

“All right,” says Mona. She begins backing away, papers clutched tightly in her hands.

“Good day,” says Mrs. Benjamin, and she laughs quietly, as if enjoying some private joke, and she returns to her work, muttering and humming to herself in several clashing octaves.

The careful striae of small towns. Invisible boundaries, reflecting pay grade, church attendance, model of home. Blue-collar neighborhoods with open garages packed to bursting; houses deeply set in wooded copses, accessible only by winding driveways—the upper crust, surely; then packed, denuded, Puritanical homes, white and harsh and cauterized. The value of the cars (all American) fluctuates wildly from street to street. Crowds of children at play burst out of hedges, then disappear like flocks of pigeons wheeling over cityscapes. In all yards and at all corners, people wave constantly, at everything and everyone, hello hello and how d’ye do, and how d’ye do again.

And there, just on the corner ahead, below a big, leaning spruce, is a low adobe home she’s seen before, though last time it was rendered in the yellow hues and dusky shadows of instant film taken decades ago.

Mona pulls up in front of her mother’s house. The sense of déjà vu is overpowering. She sits in the car for a while, just staring at it. She knows she has never been here, but she can’t help but feel as if she has, as if Earl and Laura once swung by this house on a summer vacation when Mona was still terribly young, and she now has only echoes of the memory.

Once, she knows, a woman in a tight blue dress greeted her friends on that front walk, and then they had a pleasant afternoon in the backyard, with cocktails and gossip and, maybe later in the evening, a little too much candor. Perhaps she or a friend commented,
“Mountains are pink—time to drink!” and laughed and thoughtlessly scrawled it on the back of a photo and forgot about it, leaving it to be tossed in with some meaningless papers from work and travel hundreds of miles to the bleak oil flats of West Texas.

It all feels so impossible. It was one thing to learn via papers and photos that her mother had once been happy and whole, but it is quite another to actually see the real, definite place where she lived her life.

Mona feels like the victim of a crime. It is
wrong
for her mother to have been someone else once. It is not
just
that Mona was stuck with the frail, decaying husk she became.

But finally she climbs out, legs wobbling and eyes watering, and she sits down on the front step like a latchkey kid and waits for the locksmith to come.

She gets enough control over herself to take stock of the house while she waits. Parson was right—the house is in very good shape. There isn’t a weed in the yard, the grass is watered, and unless she’s wrong the house even has a new layer of adobe.

When the locksmith comes she asks him about it. “It was probably your neighbors,” he says. “I’m sure they didn’t go in, they just kept the place tidy.”

“Well, that’s kind of them. Do you know which neighbor? I’d like to thank them. I’m willing to bet this adobe stuff isn’t cheap.” She looks at the neighboring houses. There are no visible cars, and all the garages are shut. There’s only one old man, who sits in his front yard in a lawn chair and watches her with open curiosity.

Mona memorizes his address and makes note of his shoes and his watch.
Stop it
, she thinks.
He’s just an old man. And you, Miss Bright, are not a fucking cop anymore.

“Oh, no,” says the locksmith. “We just take care of things here. Or someone does.” He looks at the red Charger, and she can see he recognizes it from the funeral. He begins to look a little worried. “You’re new here, right?”

She nods.

He hesitates, as though he is about to say something against his better judgment. “You know not to go out at night, right?”

“I think I was told the mountains can be dangerous… is that it?”

“Sort of,” he says, discomfited.

“Is there a curfew?”

“No, nothing official like that. It’s kind of a rule. It’s probably okay here, where it’s so close to downtown. But I wouldn’t go too far. People get lost real easy. It’s hard to see where you’re going in the night.” He looks across the street and at the tall pines behind the houses, as if he’s already making sure everything around him is safe, even though it is hardly mid-afternoon. He’s so eager to leave he gets all the locks changed within a half hour and even undercharges her. He practically sprints to his truck. Mona watches him go, and then opens the front door to her house.

The interior has been done in what Mona thinks of as a ranch style, or maybe a lodge or cabin style, with lots of knotty natural-wood surfaces. The rooms are low and wide with cedar or ponderosa crossbeams, Mona can’t tell which. There isn’t a stick of furniture in here, except in one corner, where there’s a single wooden chair and, interestingly enough, an aquamarine rotary phone that’s plugged into the wall. She walks to it and sees it is covered in ages’ worth of dust. She grimaces and picks up the receiver, her hand immediately smearing with gray, and holds it close to her ear. To her surprise, there’s a dial tone.

She hangs it up and walks throughout the house, wiping her hand on her shorts. There is a wide foyer that ends in a set of rustic wooden stairs leading to a second-floor balcony. She can see light spots on the wooden floor where furniture stood for years on end. The same faint patches appear in spots on the wall where pictures once hung. It’s like she’s in a room of reverse shadows.

She walks through the hallway to the living room and kitchen in the back. Everything is done in Mid-Century Modern, with butcher-block countertops and huge, bulky sinks. The oven has only one dial, and she’s pretty sure that if she uses the microwave, which is the size of a couch, she’ll be sterile for the rest of her life.

So this was Momma’s kitchen
, she thinks. Mona herself hasn’t had a real one in years. But she chose that, of course, preferring wandering purgatory over a real life, so burned was she by her last attempt. She is not sure she wants to try again here. Thinking about it makes her stomach hurt.

She walks through a set of French doors to the backyard. Unlike the front, it hasn’t been maintained at all. There’s no grass on the ground, but dull orange gravel, and ivy has taken over, strangling what might have once been a small tree and bowing down the back of the fence. Beyond the fence are pink crags striped with crimson. Mona tilts her head, thinking. They’re the same crags she saw in the background of the photo of afternoon cocktails, unchanged after decades.