Break the Skin (25 page)

“Thinking.” On the corner, the street signs were twisting in the wind. “It’s quiet here.”

“Did you ever stop to think that you’re trespassing?”

Poke shrugged his shoulders. “The doors were unlocked.”

“You could have come inside the house.”

“I didn’t want to bother you. Looks like you’ve got trouble. Laney, what’ve you been doing with those pieces of paper you’ve been writing on?”

So he’d been peeking in my windows, watching me go from one
corner to another, writing down Lester’s name. I felt ridiculous. “Do you think everything’s your business?”

“It’s something magic, isn’t it?”

“No. I don’t know. Just never mind, Poke. Now, get out. I’ve got to go to work.”

“Can I go with you?”

“It’s going on eleven o’clock. You ought to be in bed.”

“I know it.”

I started the car. “Come on. I’ll drop you off at your house.”

At his grandfather’s driveway, he got out of the car. Then he leaned back in through the open door. “Whatever you’re up to,” he said, “I hope it works.”

It did. Toward morning, I looked up from my register and there he was, Lester. He’d been gone a little over two weeks. “Hey, Laney,” he said, like nothing in the world was wrong.

I was working the express checkout, and there was a woman with a can of hair spray waiting to pay. “I’ve got customers,” I said.

“Okay,” said Lester. “I just wanted you to know I was back. They won’t let me work here anymore.”

He didn’t tell me where he’d gone or why. When I asked, he said he’d had business to take care of.

“Why didn’t you let me know?”

“Well, you see, Laney. That’s where I was an asshole.”

What was I to do with such honesty? There was that grin again. I knew I’d forgive him—already had, in fact—but I tried to be tough like Delilah. I said, “Lester, you son of a bitch,” in a way I knew would tell him everything was going to be all right. It was coming up on Valentine’s Day, and he was back.

“Lord,” Delilah said when I told her. “It worked. That spell worked.” She had such a look on her face, like light was filling her body, and I knew I’d brought that to her. I got such a feeling then, a feeling
that lifted me up and let me believe I was more than I really was. She wrapped her arms around me, and it felt so good. We were together now with no thought of where our road was leading us. Nothing that was in the future mattered—not the GED classes, not college, not what I might do with my singing, none of it—at least not to me. What mattered more than anything was that I’d carried that light to her, that she had a thrill in her voice when she whispered in my ear, “Do you see what this means?” I let her say it. I knew as long as she believed in me, she’d be mine. I swore I’d hold faith in me, too. “Laney,” she said, and she hugged me harder. “You can do magic.”

ONE AFTERNOON LESTER
told me the truth about why he’d disappeared. We were at his house, sitting at the kitchen table, each of us with a cup of tea. He had an upset stomach, so I’d brewed a pot of licorice tea to help soothe it. The steam from his mug curled up over his face, and he said, “It happens sometimes. I forget who I am, and I just take off.”

He could remember getting ready to drive out to New Hope that Saturday evening to pick me up for our date—he could even remember the name of the seventies cover band, Back to Back, we’d talked about seeing at the Executive Inn in Vincennes; that was one of the first things he remembered when he woke up one morning, days later, in a LaQuinta Inn in Gainesville, Texas. Everything else was a blank. “Lots of space out there,” he said. “Open range and sky, enough to swallow a man up and make it like he never existed.”

I set my own mug down on the table and studied him. “You’re joking, right? Really, Lester, do you expect me to buy that?”

He kept stirring his tea, his head bowed over the mug. “It’s the truth, Laney. Sometimes I slip into what the doctors call a fugue.”

A dissociative fugue, he explained, is a state of amnesia where he forgot his name, his identity. Sometimes he came out of it in a few hours
and was fine. Sometimes, if the fugue lasted too long, he packed up and hit the road, imagining there was somewhere else he was supposed to be, some other life he’d slipped away from where people who loved him were waiting for him to return. He could go awhile, as he had those two weeks he was gone, thinking he was in the right place. Then it would be like he was waking up from a dream, and he’d remember who he was and where he belonged. He’d remember the way home.

He took a sip of his tea, and I waited for him to go on.

It all started, he said, after that wedding party in Iraq. That was what put him over the edge. He kept trying to forget it, the way he’d put his rifle to the heads of those wedding guests and pulled the trigger. He kept trying to get away from the memory of that, but it kept coming back. He lifted his face and looked at me, and I saw that lost look in his eyes that told me what he was saying was true. I felt my heart go out to him. “Laney,” he said. He reached his hand across the table, and I took it and held it until his fingers stopped trembling. “I was afraid to tell you about the fugues,” he said. “I thought you wouldn’t want anything to do with me.”

“You don’t get off that easy.” I took his hand again. “You’re the only man who’s ever loved me. You, Lester Stipp. I’m not letting you go. You remember that.”

HE STAYED THROUGHOUT
the winter, and little by little I stopped worrying that he’d take off again. He’d lost his job at Walmart when he’d been gone those two weeks, but soon he went to work for a house painter. A lot of days, he had the keys to people’s houses. They gave them to him so he could come and work while they were gone to their own jobs. He spent his days alone in strangers’ houses, painting walls and ceilings. Sometimes the phone rang, and he overheard someone leaving a message.

“Call me,” a woman’s voice said in desperation once. “Goddamn it, you call me.”

Sometimes he couldn’t resist poking around a little, opening drawers, looking in closets.

“Lester, you shouldn’t do that,” I told him.

He said he never stole anything. “I just get curious. That’s all. Besides, who’s ever going to know?”

Then it was spring, and sometimes on my way home from work, I stopped at Rose’s to see how she was doing with the baby, which she was due to have in May. One morning, I found her alone in the house. Tweet was jockeying a car to Champaign. Rose was washing the breakfast dishes, the sun shining through the kitchen window above the sink. A radio on the counter was tuned to the local station, and a man’s voice was reading the hospital news—admissions and releases—in a drowsy monotone. Soon he’d read the deaths, with all the information about the visitations and the funerals. All the come and go in Mt. Gilead and vicinity: news of the ill, the well, the dead, followed by the weather and the farm market reports. Such was the morning chronicle of all matters of importance. I knew it was silly, but ever since I’d been a little girl, I’d taken comfort from that voice on the radio. It belonged to Jimmy Bascombe, a humpbacked man with hair dyed black and a string tie—my fifth-grade class had taken a tour of the radio station once, and he’d given everyone a red pencil that had
WMTG, The Voice of Southeastern Illinois
, embossed in gold letters, along its length. Jimmy Bascombe, who kept everyone up to speed and did so with such a calm that I couldn’t help but feel, no matter what bad news he had to deliver, that everything would be all right. I took a breath and let it out with a sigh. Rose smiled at me and said, “Isn’t it nice sometimes when there’s no men around? When it’s just us girls?”

“Oh, I don’t know. I’ve always thought a man is just about the best company there is.” I realized as soon as I spoke that it sounded like I’d always had a man in my life when the truth was I’d only had the one, Lester, and I knew with Rose he was suspect. “You know why Lester took off that one time, don’t you?” Before I could stop myself, I told her
about the fugues, even though I knew it was something Lester wouldn’t want me to tell.

“And you believe that?” Rose wrung out the dishrag with her strong hands. “I told you once, Laney, back when he took off and left. I told you, good riddance.”

Still no sympathy from her. When it came to Lester and what I felt for him, she was hard-hearted.

Jimmy Bascombe was reading the traffic accident report. Bernard Goad of New Hope had run his pickup truck into a ditch on the County Line Road, escaping with only minor injuries. A passenger in the truck, Libby Raymond, suffered a broken arm. The county sheriff issued Goad a ticket for driving too fast for conditions.

“That’s Mr. Goad,” I said. “He drives the mail truck.”

“Sounds to me like he’s driving Libby Raymond,” Rose said, and then laughed.

Too fast for conditions
. Exactly, I thought. Too many people living carelessly. Too many people outside the realm of good sense.

ROSE AND TWEET
came into the Walmart that night when I was working checkout and Delilah was working at the jewelry counter just behind me.

“Hey, Laney,” Rose called to me as she and Tweet pushed their cart past my checkout line, and I gave her a little wave.

They went on down the aisle, past the greeting-card display and the book racks. Tweet was pushing the cart. Rose slipped her arm around his and for just the briefest moment laid her head against his shoulder, and I thought, There they are. There’s Rose and Tweet, in love.

I glanced over at the jewelry counter, and I saw Delilah take note of the way Rose clung to Tweet. No one would have thought a thing about it unless they had it on good faith, like I did, that Delilah had once persuaded herself of a life with this man, this Tweet, only to have it vanish
from her.
He was the one
, she’d told me more than once.
I would’ve bet on it
.

If anyone knew about her broken heart, they would’ve noticed right away how Delilah saw Rose and Tweet all lovey-dovey and how she bowed her head and fiddled with the lock on the jewelry counter case even though she didn’t have a customer and had no reason to be so fascinated with that lock. I knew she was trying with all her might to keep her face turned from the sight of Rose strolling arm in arm with Tweet, the father of her baby, the man Rose was going to spend the rest of her life with, and there was Delilah, getting a little older and living in that trailer in Bird Town.

When three a.m. rolled around and the two of us were alone in the break room, I said, as I’d heard her say so many times before, “Another gravedigger. Enough to bury us.”

Delilah was sitting at one of the fold-up tables, eating a taco salad out of a plastic bowl. “Bonedigger, bonedigger,” she sang softly. “Dogs in the moonlight.”

She said it like she was worn out, like she barely had a breath left in her body, and though I didn’t know where she’d come up with that (I’d recall it later from an old record Daddy used to play—a song from Paul Simon’s
Graceland
), I felt Delilah’s pain, raw in my own throat.

I sat down across the table from her. “So you saw them? Rose and—”

“I saw them.”

The radio by the coffeemaker was playing some oldies station, and a Cheap Trick song came on, “I Want You to Want Me,” and I remembered what it’d felt like being with Lester at that concert in Evansville, clinging to him in the dark. It was that feeling—that comfort of having someone to be with you always—that Delilah surely missed and wondered if she’d ever have again.

“I wish there was something I could do for you.”

She put down her fork. She looked me in the eye for what seemed like the longest time. “Maybe there is,” she finally said. “I’ve got an idea. A little surprise for Miss Rose MacAdow.” She leaned in close to me and whispered, “Listen, Laney, here’s what we ought to do.”

The plan, as she explained it, was simple, something to give Rose a scare. It would take a little gasoline. That’s all. A little gas and a match. Set a fire in the grass around her house. Far enough away so the house wouldn’t burn. A ring of fire to let Rose know someone was onto her, knew exactly the sort of evil person she was. No harm in that, was there, Delilah wanted to know. Just a little fire.

“You’re not saying we’re going to hurt her, are you?” I asked.

“Shake her up a little.” Delilah wrapped her arms around my waist and gave me a squeeze. She laid her cheek against mine. “Jerk a knot in her tail, right?”

“I don’t know, Delilah.” I knew she was hurting and out for revenge, but I couldn’t justify doing anything like what she was suggesting. “I wouldn’t want anyone to get hurt.”

My head was pounding, and I put my fingers to my temples.

“It’s not those migraines coming back, is it, Laney?”

“I hope not. It’s probably just spring allergies. Pollen. I bet that’s all it is.”

But shortly before dawn, that little headache became a full-blown migraine, and it was so bad I had to tell Mr. Mank, and he said I should go on home.

I said I didn’t think I could drive. The lights of the store were doing strange things to my vision, and I couldn’t imagine being able to hold my eyes open when I had to look into the headlights of oncoming cars.

“Let me drive her,” Delilah said, and Mr. Mank said that would be all right.

So Delilah drove me to New Hope in her Malibu. I hated that we’d have to wake up Mother so she could ride back to Mt. Gilead with Delilah and fetch the Corolla, but I didn’t know what else to do. I felt the
burden that I was to both of them, and a sudden and fierce anger rose up in me over those migraines. I guess it was at that moment, wrapped up in my pain and my fury, that I chose to believe what Delilah was telling me.

“It’s Rose, isn’t it?” I said to her. “She’s brought the misery back to me.”

POKE SAID HE
wouldn’t call it crazy to think Rose was capable of putting a spell on someone. After all, he’d seen her sticking needles into that poppet doll.

“Could be she’s wishing bad luck for you,” he said. “Could be she’s just mean.”

At times, I wondered whether that was it. She’d stolen Tweet from Delilah like she had a right. She’d made me feel miserable that time when Lester was gone. Maybe, like Delilah said, she was selfish and couldn’t stand to see anyone else happy.