Relief Map (5 page)

“My cell phone's not working,” Clarence said. “But it usually doesn't work down here, so who knows? I just use my house phone when I'm at home.”

“They could knock out the phones easily,” Ron said. “The whole system is digital. They could switch off that tower like a light.” There was a cell phone tower at the top of a hill half a mile away.

“No, no, my cell works,” said Lena. “I called my mother. She said nobody's saying anything on the news yet.” She opened her phone, rubbed the screen with her thumb, closed it again.

Livy's mother disengaged from her conversation with Jocelyn and came over to sit with Livy and Nelson
on the step. She was laughing quietly, shaking her head. “Sometimes I don't know why we moved here,” she said. “And then I remember what people were like the last place we lived. Guess it's the same all over.”

“What's Jocelyn saying?” Livy asked.

“Jocelyn is the classic death-wisher. Jocelyn would be tickled to just see everything blow up.”

“You think so?” Livy said. Nelson was listening intently. He had told Livy that he was amazed at the way her parents talked to her, mainly because of how much they cursed and how freely they slandered other adults.

“Oh yes, I do. And Ron,” her mother said in a lower voice, watching the man gesturing a few feet away, tracing out shapes in the air, counting something off on his fingers. He had snared Livy's father in a conversation now, and Greg was standing back a couple of feet with his arms crossed, as if trying to stay out of range of Ron's overly expressive hands. “What a crackpot that guy is. He thinks the parks department is holding up his fishing license because of his political beliefs.”

“What are his political beliefs?” Nelson ventured.

Livy's mother burst out laughing. “I encourage you to go ask him. He'll tell you all about it.” But then she settled her features and looked away, and Livy understood the subject to be closed. This usually happened when people talked about Ron Cash—a statement of
some unpleasant truth and then an embarrassed lapse into silence. This was because the Cashes were a tragic family. In fact, the word
tragic
was permanently linked with them in Livy's inner lexicon, because she had been only six when their son died, and it was the first time she had heard the word used out loud. Eric Cash had lived to be five. They used to bring him down to swim in the creek sometimes, so Livy had known him in a way, a pale kid always more closely watched than the others, bathed in an aura of nervous attention. He had been sick all his life, and died one summer in a hospital in Paoli.

The Cashes had always been aggressive neighbors with loud habits. But the death of their son created a strange bubble of silence around them. For a year or two after Eric died, people couldn't bear to speak ill of Ron no matter what he did, especially people who had children. They tolerated him, and showered his silent wife with strained attempts at friendliness. So Ron went unchecked. He made himself the king of a tiny kingdom, burning his trash instead of dragging it down to the road, setting up target practice in his backyard despite ordinances that forbade firing a weapon within three hundred yards of a dwelling. He burgeoned, also, with ideas, grand ordering ideas in which he and his wife were the focus of nefarious organizations and occult patterns, the narrowest point of a funnel of trouble, and no one argued with these ideas to
his face, because wasn't he right, in a way? If you had suffered like that, shouldn't you feel free to consider yourself the center of a malevolent universe? Livy's mother was less tolerant than many, because she was half Jewish and his rants sometimes touched on the Jews. But even so, she often held her tongue.

Maurice Carden came jogging across the bridge and stopped at the edge of the little crowd, out of breath.

“They're going door to door on White Horse Road,” he said. “I just saw them.”

“Whose house?” said Clarence.

“All of them. They're at the Christmases' place already, I just saw them go in.”

“They need a warrant,” Ron said, shaking his head. He was rubbing his stiff knee with one hand, wincing.

“Maybe they have one,” Clarence said.

A woman in sweatpants detached from the crowd and hurried toward the bridge. A few others who lived on White Horse Road followed her.

“Are they coming over here?” Noreen said.

“Probably,” Maurice said.

The talk continued, but it was quieter now, and people's eyes kept drifting toward the bridge. Nelson dropped handfuls of fine gravel down the neck of his empty soda bottle. Livy perceived that he was leaning a little closer to her mother now, perhaps unconsciously,
as if he were borrowing her in the absence of his own. The faint crackle of a walkie-talkie drifted down to them from White Horse Road.

When the police emerged from the trees at the far end of the bridge, the conversations in front of the store ceased entirely. There were five or six police officers there, in short-sleeved Maronne uniforms, on foot. They chatted with each other as they approached, talked into radios, peered over the sides of the bridge. Livy glanced at the neighbors standing in the intersection and was startled to see how they looked with their attention so united, so powerfully focused in one direction. For a moment they looked fierce, despite the men wearing bifocals and the women holding their hair off the backs of their sweaty necks.

“We're looking for this man,” said the policeman in front as he reached the intersection. He held the large photo up in front of him. “Anybody seen him?”

“We don't know who that is,” Noreen said.

“We have good reason to believe he's in the immediate area,” said the policeman, holding the photo a little higher. The people leaning against the guardrail shouted questions.

“Who is he?”

“Is he dangerous?”

“Name is Ree-vaz Den-nee,” said the policeman, reading from the back of the photo.

“Where's he from?”

“
Europe, they said.”

“He could be from lots of places. Lebanese people are white-looking sometimes,” Jocelyn said, leaning toward Livy confidentially. “I used to live in Beckford.”

Livy's mother snorted quietly. Jocelyn and Ron were launching into a taxonomy of whiteness, listing groups that were and groups that were not as if this would have to lead them eventually to the suspect's specific nationality, like a game of Guess Who? with all the tiles flipped down. Black neighbors nearby, Paula and Noreen in particular, rolled their eyes. The policeman lowered the photo slightly, unsure that he had their attention. “We're acting under direction from the federal level,” he said.

“We're asking is he
dangerous
or not,” Clarence said again.

“I have a doctor's appointment,” Noreen called out, getting up from her chair.

“We can't open up the area until we've resolved it,” said the policeman.

“She has an appointment!” Ron said. “This is an older woman, sir!”

“We're talking about an international issue, sir. We can't let anybody through. We don't have that kind of latitude.”

A
young-looking policeman came closer and tried to pass around another copy of the photo; there was a long pause before anyone would take it from his hand.
Revaz Deni
was printed at the bottom. When it was passed to Livy, she looked at the name, trying to summon any association at all—a country, a language—but nothing came to her.

“Maybe it's a joke,” Nelson muttered. “An incredibly elaborate joke.”

“We're going to have to ask you to return to your homes,” said the policeman in front.

“How long is this going to be?” said Jocelyn. “What about the power? And the phones?”

“We really can't answer that at this time. The best thing for everybody right now is to go home. In all seriousness, folks.”

Talk started up again, but the crowd began to disperse. Nelson's mother came around the corner, tremulous in a heavy beaded necklace and slacks, and picked her way through the crowd, obviously looking for her son. Livy watched her approach, not stirring herself to alert Nelson. Mrs. Tela never came down to the store, even if she was out of coffee or eggs. She would send Nelson or his sister Janine instead, and it was always with a dubious sigh and a fistful of crumpled singles, as if she weren't really confident that money could be
exchanged for goods there in the conventional manner. The fact that she was here now showed how alarmed she must be over the police, enough to come down from her little house on the hillside to fetch her younger child. Mrs. Tela was the only snob Livy knew, which made her interesting. Livy knew that the store was grimy and low-rent; it was impossible not to notice the strips of flypaper, the missing acoustic tiles in the ceiling, the way the inventory never covered the shelf space. But Mrs. Tela was the only person she knew who seemed annoyed about it, as if it undermined the tenor of her life. She didn't like Nelson hanging around the intersection or the steps in front, believing (and here Livy had to admit that she wasn't entirely wrong) that it was a magnet for reprobates, a place where trouble was spontaneously generated. Livy watched her nod a few hellos and then catch sight of Nelson. “There you are,” she said.

Nelson looked startled, and then stood up with a sigh, brushing the dust off the back of his pants. “See you later,” he said to Livy.

The searches took up the whole afternoon. Livy's parents told her to stay in the house, and her nervous energy propelled her up to her room and then through the hinged
skylight onto the roof. It was too steep to be comfortable but she stayed there for a long time with her feet braced against the shingles, twisting apart maple seeds that had landed there, picking at the scabs on her legs. When she had destroyed all the loose vegetation within reach she went down into her bedroom for a bottle of nail polish and climbed up to sit on the chimney. Painting her nails was a default activity, something she did when her mind was disorderly and she had time to kill, which was a common condition for her in the summer. She had taught herself to do it, since she had no sisters and her mother owned no cosmetics. Cosmetics were among the many ordinary things her parents had no patience for. Greg and Mariel Marko belonged to no clubs, leagues, teams, or religious groups, and there was a long and diverse list of books they would not read, foods they would not eat, clothing they would not wear, TV shows they would not watch, and music they would not listen to. Livy had absorbed the logic of this list at such a young age that she could apply it at will, but it would have been very difficult, at sixteen, to explain it to someone else. In broad terms, the items on this list of prohibitions were all either violent, extravagant, very popular, or filled with chemicals, and sometimes some combination of the four.

Her parents had a collection of old-world skills between them: they could frame out a house, raise
chickens and goats, make butter and cheese and yogurt. Her mother could knit, sew, bake bread, repair fences, overpower the morbidity of a broody hen. They knew how to do these things because they had gone back to the land before Livy was born. They'd lived in a cabin they built together, forgoing running water and electricity, basking in a total lack of other people to bother them. They'd owned a cow named Angeline; there were pictures of her in the family photo album. They had lived more or less without jobs, and this was a point that caught Livy's attention now that she was old enough to have a job herself. Jobs were awful; bosses were awful. They talked to you like you were stupid. She came home from her shifts at the restaurant sometimes and complained over dinner about these facts, and her parents were completely in agreement. Other people
were
awful: they did talk to you like you were stupid, and a lot of the time they were actually the ones who were stupid, and there was no way around this situation that Livy's parents could suggest except a total withdrawal from the world. They'd had to come back from the land, of course, after a few years. Her father said, frankly, that it had gotten too hard and they were tired. They'd had a winter of record-breaking cold, and they couldn't keep enough dry wood in the cabin to stay warm, and they'd decided to move back to the
eastern side of the state and have a baby. That was when they moved to Lomath, and a year later Livy was born.

They had transmitted to her, in addition to a dislike of jobs, a kind of bodily discomfort in the presence of the police, which Livy had never fully considered the strangeness of until now. She remembered that once, years ago when she was eight or nine years old, a black-and-white police cruiser came down the long driveway that the Markos shared with the neighbors, creeping along with gravel popping under the tires, and made a slow three-point turn in the little muddy lot in front of the mill. Livy had stood with her mother just where their own private driveway joined the shared one, watching the cruiser go by, waiting until it was finally gone. Why were they out there? What were they expecting would happen? She couldn't remember. A sense of anxiety adhered to the memory. It seemed odd now, inexplicable, looking back. Her parents were cranks, but they were also middle-aged people with jobs. They liked to imagine that they were a threat to the social order; maybe that was all.