Further Joy (9 page)

The county police call it an ongoing situation, rather than a case. If not versed in the impossible, they're at least practiced in the unsolved. Even folks who hold cops in the lowest regard agree that they've been graceful. The first couple times they swooped out in a fleet of lit cruisers and dusted every surface and put samples in zipper bags and stood around with coffee all day, keeping the reporters behind an orange ribbon. But they've wised up.
Now they send a single deputy to do whatever paperwork is unavoidable. Sometimes the cops wait until the next night to sneak someone over—in part, I imagine, because they have comprehensible problems to battle, and in part because they don't want to be asked if they've made any progress.

I walk out of the corner store where they sell used books and homemade ice cream, and a man sitting on a bench speaks to me. I don't recognize him at first because he's wearing khaki clothes and a floppy hat. It's the investigator, the one sent by the rich Protestants. He asks me about fishing, about where to get gear and bait and a permit, and I tell him we don't believe in permits around here.

“Have you decided anything?” I ask him.

He removes his hat. Now he looks exactly like himself.

“In fact, I have. I've decided nothing noteworthy is afoot, nothing worthy of further investigation. I think I'll report insufficient findings. I'm going to recommend this area be left the hell alone. Close this baby up, as we say.”

I don't know whether to be glad about his answer. There's a part of me that feels slighted. The investigator looks deeply unconcerned.

“So you're going back to Canada and you're going to lie,” I venture.

His face doesn't change but I can tell he likes me. Old people always like me. “I'm going to fib all right, but I'm not going back up there. I'm staying. The natives are going to be even more outnumbered than they are now.”

“You're going to live here, just like that?”

“Well, I'm retiring. When people retire, they head south.”

“Yeah, but there are places more south than this,” I say. “Places that don't have… what we have going on.”

“Exactly,” he says.

We're under a few massive old pecan trees, birds flitting branch to branch above us. It's the middle of the day but it's dim here in the shade.

“Isn't it against all religions to lie?” I say.

“First of all, there's a lot of gray area in my line of work, religion or no. Second of all, yes, it is.”

“If you were Catholic, you could lie and then go to confession and admit it and it's like it never happened.”

The investigator shifts on the bench. He's not going to stand anytime soon. He's probably not going fishing. He's going to be one of us.

“I'm a native,” I tell him.

I watch him nod appreciatively. “I know it. And natives like you speak well of a place.”

“I think confessing sounds fun,” I admit. “You go in that wooden booth and nobody knows it's you.”

“Somebody always knows it's you,” says the investigator. “Someone's always totting your omissions.”

That night my parents head over to one of the towns to see a movie, an old-fashioned date sort of thing. I practice juggling for about an hour in my room, a skill I've been trying to pick up. Then I listen to music in the parlor for a while, a subdued jazz record my father is partial to, but I can't get sleepy. I go to the kitchen for a glass of milk, but instead I find myself rummaging in the drawers for the spare key to my father's studio.

It's a flimsy key, not full size, like a key for a file cabinet or something. I find it in a junk drawer underneath a calculator and a tape measure, and then I slip out the back and walk across our shadowy little yard and fit the key into the doorknob. There's a palm tree growing right in front of the studio, leaning down over the entrance. When I open the door it shushes against the hanging fronds, and there's the shush again when I close it behind me.

I've been in my father's studio many times, but not lately. I know there's a pull cord for the light, and I grope around above me until I find it. With the place lit up, I can see that everything is the same as I remember. The walls are bare white. There's a case of mineral water under the drafting table, pencil shavings scattered around on the concrete floor. The air smells
like things heated, things overused—hot glass and leather and stale coffee.

On the table is the book of all my father's sketches. There must be a thousand of them, in clear plastic sheets. On the page that's showing there's a three-dimensional drawing of a clock tower. One wall of the tower is filled in—with irregular, soft-looking bricks—but the others seem like they're transparent, so you can see that inside the tower, on the floor, is a pile of heavy chain. I look closer and there are cuffs attached to the chain, like to hold a person prisoner in a fairy tale. The clock has numerals but no hands. I turn to the next sketch and it's the same drawing. There are small alterations—the size of the clock face, the shape of the bricks. Next page, the same thing again, but now the tower is stouter and instead of a pile of chain there's only the cuffs, moored directly to the wall.

The studio is shaped like an L. I still my breathing and listen for a car out on the road. When I hear nothing, I go down around the corner, and what I see, arranged on a pallet of plywood, are a dozen identical metal eggs. They're about two feet tall. They're not eggs, though—they're shaped more like tears, or a moon that's begun to melt. They're fashioned of a dull-colored metal. I step closer and see that they all have little holes punched into them, companies of tiny sharp punctures gathered around the tops. The moons, or the tears or whatever, are hollow. I put my hand on one and it moves easily, so I pick it up to assess it in my palms.

There's a candle underneath. Now I see. There's a candle under each one. I put the one I'm holding back where it was and look around for matches, which I find handy on an otherwise empty shelf. Big camping matches.

I get the candles burning, one and then the next and then the next. I pull the cord for the light, and when I come back around the corner I see, there on a screen my father has tacked to the ceiling, a host of wide-open eyes staring down at me, incurious and knowing at once.

If you look under one of the tarps you'll see that the roof of the house is gone—not caved in or blown over or burned to ashes, just gone. The big appliances are left, and some compact heavy objects like cans of beans or a
bowling ball in a leather bag. The buildings look at once frozen and scorched. The walls are blackened as if by heat, the floors cracked as if by cold.

It's dark still, and I'm in the mason's pickup. We're going hunting. It's a Huck Finn day, and this is a little field trip of sorts—my mom's idea. The radio plays music like I've never heard.

He has a place set up, he tells me, not far into the brush—a hideout. You're supposed to ramble around the live oaks lugging a pop-up blind, he says, but today we're going to let the gobblers come to us. “And if they don't,” he says, “it's just not our day.” He pulls halfway off the dirt road and stops. It doesn't seem like there's enough room for another car to pass. He grabs a shotgun off the rack and I carry the pack. The mason has unevenly cropped hair and he's wearing a tracksuit that does not look new.

We round a thicket at the base of a beech tree and there's the hideout. The mason pulls aside a flap and we crouch in and get settled. You can see a lot from the mason's hideout and nothing can see you. It's roofless, and roomier inside than it looked from the outside. “Thing about shooting a turkey is then you have to clean a turkey and cook a turkey,” he says. He turns his head and coughs. “I don't have much energy for chores lately, or much appetite.”

He handles the gun and shows me how it works, and I'm impressed. There's nothing extra to the gun. It's beautiful, a little monument to its own function. The mason says we probably won't have much luck with the turkeys, but he'll let me practice on some targets later with a different gun. He likes to shoot at textbooks with that one, he tells me. He takes out a little wooden device that reminds me of the pitch pipe I use when I sing at church and he makes turkey noises with it, just a soft clucking for a while, then a series of shrill yelps. I listen hard for a response, for a garbling out in the bracken and the briars, but the mason seems more interested in his instrument than in any quarry it might draw. In the pickup I'd been waiting for the sun, and now somehow I miss it rise. There it is off to the left, an overripe grapefruit pulling clear of the scrub.

The mason keeps sipping off his thermos but his eyes look sharp. Maybe he's not going to say anything about what's been going on—the chosen, the incidents—and he doesn't have to. It's in the air we're breathing. We're due, everyone knows. We're close to due.

The mason plunges his hand into the sack of shotgun shells and absently kneads them, like he's petting a dog. He's ready to talk, ready to lecture. He tells me the history of his pickup truck, which he bought off a man who used to collect debts up in Georgia. The pickup has been in shoot-outs. It has been rolled in a chase, and clipped on the back end by a train. He tells me about Georgia, how there are spots up there hotter and flatter than Florida. The mason is a native here, like I am. He says in the old days a sweet potato that grew right out of this yellow dirt tasted better than anything at those Italian restaurants. His mother was prettier than any of these women around here now.

“Your mom's the pick of the current litter,” he tells me, “but she wouldn't have been fit to carry my mother's lipstick around for her.”

There's a laugh in his throat, but he clears it. He does something rough but precise to the knuckles of his left hand, producing a roll of cracks, and his demeanor changes. He peers out sternly into the broad, mostly quiet woods. His voice goes even and he explains that recently a tree his greatgrandfather planted died on his watch. Among the biggest sycamores he's ever seen. It just quit living. He'd had to chainsaw the thing down and limb it and cut it into pieces small enough to carry and burn it. Not a leaf on the thing. A couple days' work. He wants to know why a tree would up and die like that, but he knows he won't get an answer. He lost an infield of shade easy, but worse he lost something grand and noble that his forebears had given start to. He'd sat by his nightfire, sweating, feeling watched by black quiet eyes. He doesn't care about getting taken; something has to take you in time. What he doesn't like is feeling monitored. He doesn't deserve it. He looks at me, maybe wondering if I have anything to say about it, but I don't.

The mason brings out a sleeve of smoked nuts and shares them with me. There's no water, but I manage to get down a few handfuls. “So,” he says.
“What we got right here, where we're sitting: this is a sanctuary inside the sanctuary. For natives only. Nobody can find you here. And I mean nobody. And you, little friend, can use this place whenever you want.”

I thank him and he nods in an upbeat way. It's almost regular daytime now. I can see everything. I can see every stitch in the canvas of the hideout, and a black and pink bug bumbling around on a pinecone. A ray of sun is finding its way through the foliage and glinting off the barrel of the shotgun, the heat beginning to thrum in the treetops.

The sisters live together now, the ones who run the restaurants. They told my mom they don't want to be left behind if one of them is chosen.

Before they get the tarps up the houses look like hungry baby birds. Mouths agape to the sky, like despite everything being taken away they still expect something to be given. That's how they look to me.

PALATKA

P
auline awoke to Mal's voice outside her window. Mal was the seventeen-year-old girl who lived by herself in the next apartment. She was always talking on her outdated cordless phone, always helping some far-off person navigate a problem. Pauline went out to their shared back balcony in her bare feet and snuggled into a camping chair. Mal, standing with her weight all on one hip, grasping a big cup of iced tea, winked at her. She was as skinny as a rail; her fingernails were painted in stripes, and her elbows were raw. Pauline never saw her come home with groceries. The girl had a look in her eye sockets like she didn't get enough red meat, or enough green vegetables. Pauline felt a mothering urge toward Mal. She had never gone through a wild phase herself, and so Mal's carelessness fascinated her—her carelessness about things such as nutrition and education, but more so her general carelessness with herself. She didn't seem to realize that a cute young girl shouldn't treat her body and soul like they were rented.

Mal hung up the phone and chugged enough of her tea that she had to recover her breath afterward. She hoisted herself onto the banister. Pauline asked what the call was about and Mal said she had a friend who, when she
met up in person with a guy from online, always felt too guilty to bail if she didn't like the looks of him.

“She feels bad about wasting the guy's time, after they got gussied up and used gas in their tank. And she's like, what if that happened to me? I said, nobody's going to be walking out on you because of the way you look. She's like, yeah, they walk out later for other reasons.”