Lilac Mines (12 page)

“Vive?”

“Genevieve. So would your aunt let you stay for another couple of months?”

“Thanks for missing me,” Felix says.

“Honey, you know I miss you. Robbie, he cries for you every night. Neither of us are bathing till you get home.” “Shut up.”

Crane laughs. “Of
course,
we miss you. But Vive wants to know, and she's cool, so, you've just gotta decide.”

Felix decides she needs to find the postcard's origins. Not so she can become famous, but so her dreams will stop filling up with missing girls. Eva dancing in the mouth of the tunnel. A bonneted figure climbing the ruins of the Berlin Wall, braids swinging. She wants Lilac to stop looking like Melissa Gilbert.

She turns down lunch at Gold Nugget Pizza with Tawn, who seems slightly hurt (Tawn is hurt by the oddest things), and returns to the Visitors' Center. She has a half hour before she has to get back to work, so she gets right to the point.

“I found this postcard,” Felix tells Ranger LeVoy. The ranger has ditched her blonde braids for a traffic-cone-orange pageboy. Maybe the blonde wasn't natural either. Felix describes the postcard. She could have brought it, but she didn't want it to get smudged with her backpack's 21
^st
century mess: lipstick, protein bar, ballpoint pen. She wants to keep it safe.

Ranger LeVoy is immediately interested. “Well, very little is known about the Ambroses, but something like this
—if
it's the real thing—might give us some insight. Do you have it with you?” Ranger LeVoy asks eagerly.

“No, it's at home. My aunt's, I mean.”

“Definitely bring it in so I can take a look at it. I'm not an expert, but I could probably gauge the era.”

“It's postmarked 1899,” Felix reminds her.

“I could still help. I was halfway through a Master's in Art History at U.N.L.V., but then I got married and my son sort of showed up by surprise, you know how it is.”

Felix wants to say,
No, I don't.
She's impatient and she can see that Ranger LeVoy is, too.

“Maybe I'll stop by this weekend,” Felix says. She was hoping Ranger LeVoy could provide her with information, but it seems like she wants the same from Felix.

“Or sooner… I could stay open late one night this week. My personal theory, and I'm not supposed to talk anything except facts on the job so keep this a little hush-hush if you don't mind, is that that little gal didn't die at all. I think she eloped. I think she and some boy headed over the mountains to Nevada to get hitched. And what you're saying about the postcard, about this Cal fellow, is right in keeping with that.”

Felix wonders if this is how she seems to Anna Lisa, pressing for information to fortify her own experience. “You know, this week is pretty busy for me,” Felix says. “My aunt really needs my help with some things.” This is a bit of an exaggeration. Anna Lisa asked Felix to tape a TV show for her Thursday night, when she'll be a PTA meeting.

Ranger LeVoy comes around to the front of the counter, so that she is just a few feet from Felix. She is tall, broad-hipped. She smells like pine cones and hand lotion, or maybe pine cone hand lotion.

“Just don't take this too lightly,” says Ranger LeVoy. Her Midwestern accent hardens at the edges. Felix feels like she's being warned not to flirt with the farmer's daughter at the barn dance. “This is our town, you know. The Historical Preservation Committee has a right to anything that contributes to the town's history. Just 'cause it's not some big city doesn't mean we don't care about it. Bring that postcard in as soon as you can.”

Felix takes a step backward. Her platform sandals wobble. She wants to tell Ranger LeVoy that her “theory” sounds like a bad romance novel, that the town has been “hers” only since she ditched Vegas, apparently. But it's not like Felix has much of a claim either. So she paid 10 cents for an old postcard. Is that what ownership is? An accident?

“I'll talk to my aunt,” Felix says. It sounds believable.

“Laura, Leslie, Louise,” says Gary Schipp. “LaVerne. LeAnn, Lois, Lauren—well, there weren't too many Laurens in the 19th century, but you get my point.”

Felix does. She is slumped in an orange plastic chair at the library. Through the window she can see a woman hanging clothes on a wire running from her trailer to a rusty swing set. Thin T-shirts, a stretched-out sundress, a pair of acid-washed jeans.

“I'll grant you,” Gary continues, “it's interesting. It's incredibly, thought-provokingly fascinating. But do you know how much information is in the world? How many thousands of people sent postcards and how many thousands received them? I like Lilac Mines because it's small enough to make history seem manageable. I mean, it's my job—to record and catalog and make information available for people who, for the most part, couldn't care less. The kids at the elementary school take a field trip here once a year, and Trixie Netherby keeps the large print mystery market in business, and at least once a week I kick someone off a porn website.” Gary wags his head, his pseudo-bangs shaking like flapper fringe.

“Say you did find out that Lilac Ambrose wrote that postcard,” Gary says. “Say you had irrefutable proof. Then what? It would get written up in a couple of the local papers, and then the postcard would be locked behind glass at the Visitors' Center or maybe it would get a spot at one of the museums in Columbia. If you really hit the big time, a few parents would force their kids to look at it before they let them pan for gold. Felix, the ugly truth about the Information Age is that information doesn't solve anything. When people figure that out, I'm out of a job. And so what, really? I can't blame them.”

Felix says something feeble like, “But
I
came in here, didn't I?
I
wanted information.” Ranger LeVoy tried to take her postcard, which was bad, but Gary Schipp is trying to take her search, which is worse. She knows Ranger LeVoy's brand of desire: wanting shoes, money; for the popular kids to make room for you at their table. But Gary is at peace with futility in his rickety library, and Felix doesn't know what to do with that.

She browses the New Fiction shelf. She reads book jackets about crusading lawyers and feline detectives. About girls who find love in Paris and girls who learn about their oppressed ancestors. The blurbs are soothing.
To hell with nonfiction.
She returns to the front desk.

“One more thing before I go,” she says, taking Lucas Twentyman's skinny, much-renewed book from her messenger bag. She opens it to the group photo of the miners. “You don't know any of these guys, do you?”

“How old do I look?” he says.

“You know what I mean.”

His eyes gaze at the page, barely taking it in. He's seen the photo a million times. “I'm sure you already know which one Harold Ambrose is.”

“Yeah.”

“But,” he perks up almost imperceptibly, pushing his glasses higher on his nose, “there's a book in the health section called
Mountain Air: A Health History of the Sierras.
Someone's dissertation, as you might imagine. Some Lilac Mines miners get a few pages to shine in there. If you can call lung fibrosis and blue fingernails 'shining.' ”

“Yuck,” Felix says. “But thanks.”

That night she sits on the deck as Anna Lisa watches TV inside. She has to literally crack open the book, its pages are so stiff and unread, though already yellow. She clips a book light to the back cover, and soon a funny lime-green moth begins to romance the bulb. The night is warm, and Felix is barefoot, and if the book weren't full of dreary technical phrases, she might enjoy herself.

There aren't many pictures, but there are a few blurry reprints of obituaries from an era when people died of gruesome, poetic diseases: rubella, scarlet fever, consumption. Maybe the latter is due for a comeback. Everyone she knows is consuming and being consumed.

And so is a man named Ashley Burd. He stares up at her with light, pleading eyes. She almost doesn't recognize him in close-up. But it's him—the man she named Cal. He has the same straight nose forming a T with his flat, uncurious eyebrows. She can't tell for sure, but the grainy obituary photo looks like a crop of the larger group shot of the miners. It is the same and different. He looks weaker all by himself, even with that too-white smile.

She shivers in the warm, starlit night. She thinks of her college internship at
Variety,
where she researched and wrote obituaries for aging stars who hadn't died yet. The trade paper wanted to be ready. At the time Felix told Jia Li, “I'm actually writing about the future. How cool is that?” But all the forgotten movies and sitcom guest spots made her sad.

The caption beneath Ashley Burd's photo says,
Ashley Burd, b. 1867 Oklahoma City, d. 1898 East Beedleborough, Calif. of silicosis. Survived by wife, Clarabelle.
He is not the boy of Lilac's postcard. Here—close up and dead—he doesn't even look like a jerk. He looks like, well, a guy named Ashley. Someone unfortunate enough to live in a time where modern medicine consisted of leeches and morphine. And no matter what story the photo tells, tuberculosis got him a year before he could get Lilac.

Felix throws her head against the back of the lawn chair. Of course. Of
course
her hunch was nothing but superstition and pathology. Nevertheless, disappointment boils beneath her skin. She slams the book, inadvertently sandwiching the moth between its pages, which makes her feel even worse. Now she is helpless
and
she's a murderer of small, innocent things.

She stands up and stomps around the deck's perimeter. She'd wanted an enemy. How is she supposed to save Lilac without one? How dark the world beyond the deck is, full of animals watching and waiting to pounce. Felix opens the sliding glass door and barges into the living room, where Anna Lisa is still glued to the local news.

“Why even bother?” Felix growls. “It's just car chases and negative representations of ethnic neighborhoods.”

Anna Lisa looks up, surprised. “Good evening to you, too, Lion Tamer.” She adds, “I don't care to pay for cable, and I'm old and set in my ways, if you want to know. It would be pretty exciting to see
anything
about Lilac Mines on the news, honestly. Maybe instead of that 'Reno Casino of the Week' segment. Would you mind closing the door? Otherwise, mosquitoes'll get in.”

Felix gives it a good slam. “Lion Tamer, my ass.”

“Listen to this,” says Meg, with a naughty grin. She lets go of the record player's arm. The needle touches down:

Madame Bucks was quite deluxe,

servants by the score,

good ones at each door,

butlers and maids galore.

But one day Dan, her kitchen man,

gave his notice he's through.

She cried, “Oh, no, Dan, don't go—

it'll grieve me if you do.”

It's an old-fashioned voice, from when Al's parents were teenagers. That Depression scratch. But she can't picture Gerald and Eudora Hill listening to this kind of music. The woman singing is clearly a Negro. Her voice is deep, etched.

“Where'd you get it?” Al asks.

“Imogen. She said when she was a girl her parents would only let her listen to gospel, and that made her love Bessie even more.”

“Who's Bessie?”

“Smith,” says Meg. “Singing.”

…turnip tops, love the way he warms my chops.

I can't do without my kitchen man.

His jelly roll is nice and hot,

never fails to hit the spot.

Meg leans into the music, eyes closed, as if it could catch her. She's wearing a soft black sweater that sheds hairs wherever she goes. Al finds the trail of Meg comforting. They are in Meg's living room. The house is tiny, a converted miner's residence with one bedroom, and a bathroom tacked on in the back. The plumbing will freeze in a month or so, Meg warns, and the oven's pilot light swoons like a girl in a corset, but it is luxurious compared to the church, where Al has been spending less and less time. She likes to sit on the toilet and look out the window at the naked gray branches on the trees.

“Are you listening?” Meg prompts. Her cheeks glow like Saturday night, even though it's Thursday. “She's scandalous. 'His frankfurters are oh so sweet?' ‘Oh how that boy can open clams?' ”

Al blushes. It's hard to make out all the lyrics on the scratchy record. “I hadn't thought of it that way. I just thought she was singing about her servant.”

“Well, even that would be pretty amazing. Think about it: a colored
woman
with a servant, a man who works in the kitchen.”

“I didn't think about that either. But maybe the lady with the servant isn't colored. Maybe just the singer is.” Servants only exist in fiction for Al. A Negro employer seems no more outlandish than a Southern belle in hoop skirts. The only people who've worked for the Hills are other Hills. “Where would she sing a song like this?” Al wonders out loud. She wants to give the lines a space to be scandalous in.

“Harlem, probably,” Meg says absently. She's moving around the living room, bringing everything in her path into her dance. She picks up an abandoned feather duster and pretends to smoke it, Marlene Dietrich style. “Imogen says folks in Harlem did things 40 years ago that would
still
shock people here.”

It's been almost a week since Al has seen Imogen or Jody or Sylvie or any of the people from the bar. No particular reason. But she has sensed a slight cooling.
Must be nice not to use an outhouse,
Jody said.
You can come over any time,
Al assured her,
I'm sure Meg wouldn't mind.
Meg is generous and borderless. If Meg had had a sister, she never would have divided their room with a strip of tape the way Al and Suzy did.

Al feels a fist clench inside whenever she thinks of Suzy. Or her parents. Thanksgiving is coming soon, and Al pictures them eating turkey legs wrapped in thin waffles, a family tradition from some other continent, her mother giving humble and guilt-edged thanks:
I am thankful my girls are safe, even if one of them won't talk to me.

“ ‘When I eat his donuts, all I leave is the hole,' “ Meg and Bessie drawl. Al tries to listen to their secret language. “ ‘Any time he wants to, he can use my sugar bowl.' ”

A few days later, Al will encounter Bessie Smith for the second time. In the morning, Meg drops her off at the Clarkson Sawmill for her first day of work. Shallan shopped for an anniversary present for her foreman to give his wife, and he owed her a favor. She got two out of him: a job for Jody, and one for Al.

The mill consists of several large wooden buildings just north of town. Al leans out the passenger side window as Meg brakes. Below them dozens of little miners' houses occupy a sparse patch of the mountain.

“Amazing view, huh?” Al says, thinking of their night in the mine.

“The houses look like a herd of cows,” Meg frowns, “who've eaten up all the grass. I gotta get to work, darling. I'm going to be late.”

Al closes the car door and heads for the office. The foreman is a short, muscular man who shakes Al's hand firmly.

“Alice Hill,” he says, “Shallan O'Toole spoke highly of you.”

“It's Anna Lisa, actually, but, well, that's nice to hear.”

“Oh, she said ‘Al' and I assumed… Anyhow, you're a small girl, so I think we'll start you off as a sweeper.”

Al squirms under his gaze. She's wearing a plaid flannel shirt and blue jeans and gloves with the fingers cut off.

“We've got a few ladies working at the mill now. A couple of them have been around since the War, and the younger ones… well, it's a changing world, I guess. But I won't kid you, it's a man's job, and you'll have to work like a man. Rigby Clarkson will show you around.”

“Thank you, sir.” Al swallows. Shallan warned her about Rig, the middle son of the Clarkson family, who has been demoted several times as a result of his drinking.

The foreman hands her off to Rig, a shaggy-haired man of indeterminable age. He's thin but potbellied. He has ruddy skin with soft-lidded, weary blue eyes.

He hands Al a broom, looks her over with blatant disgust. “You must be O'Toole's friend,” he says with a huff. “My pop owns this place, so you don't want to go messing around on my watch.” He leads the way with big, swaggering steps, like he has studied cowboy movies very closely.

Soon they're in a large, open room. Al sneezes. Men in work clothes and heavy boots stand around a wide trough, catching pale planks of wood as they shoot out of a gauntlet of saw blades. They inspect the planks and corral them toward one of three forks, hand-labeled “Large,” “Small,” and “Defective.” Al holds her breath as she watches a tall man heave a two-by-four toward the “Defective” path. She can't tell what's wrong with it, and is momentarily glad that this isn't her job.

Through the haze, she scans for Shallan or Jody. They'd be dressed like the men. But she doesn't see them.

“It's way too dusty in here,” says Rig. “It's tough on the eyes and lungs, but we're used to it. You might need these, though.” He hands Al a pair of goggles and laughs when she puts them on. “Start in that corner over there.”

Al works her way from corner to corner, mumbling apologies when she gets too close to one of the men swinging planks like baseball bats. She sneezes the whole time. When she's filled three sacks with sawdust, Rig directs her to a trash bin behind the building. The bags are light as balloons—nothing like a two-by-four—but Al's back pinches when she tries to stand up straight.

Next she sweeps what Rig calls “the log building,” where the workers push downed pines through a murky stream toward spinning saw blades. She realizes this is the other side of the gauntlet, that the two buildings are attached. She's working backwards. If she kept going, she'd be in the quiet forest, where the trees are still full of birds.

“
Al,
” someone hisses. She looks up from the dusty floor and sees Shallan. Bits of red-brown hair peek out from beneath a blue knit cap. Flakes of bark polkadot her tan work shirt. She nods like
good work, man.

Al smiles and ducks her head. She sweeps faster. Then she spots Jody, a few paces down the line from Shallan. Jody's face is red with effort as she leans into a log the width of a car tire. Al sweeps and watches. Every few minutes, someone calls out to Jody or slaps her on the back. Al can't make out the words over the buzz and clamor of the log building. Jody is working hard, but she's a natural, it's obvious.

When Al has more or less cleared the log room of dust, she finds Rig.

“What's next?” she asks as brightly as she can.

“ ‘What's next?' ” Rig mimics. “Lemme show you something.” He leads her back to the first room that she swept. A thick layer of peach-colored sawdust has gathered like snowfall. “Keep brooming, girl,” he says, and rejoins the men on the line.

What was it her mother used to mutter over a sink full of dishes about a woman's work never being done? Al shakes out her arms and legs and returns to the corner where she started.

She hopes Meg has made something wonderful for dinner. Steak, maybe. Meatloaf? Jody and Shallan were going to get beers, but Al's back hurts too much, so she is walking—slowly—to Meg's small, glowing house.

The lamp in the main room is on, but Meg isn't here.

From the bedroom, a ghost howls. That's Al's first thought. The noise is a sharp, disturbed
wahoooOOooo.
Al lunges through the doorway.

Meg does not look up. She is facedown. Her dawn-pink skirt is rumpled, her stockings lie next to her bare legs like molted snakeskin. Is she sick? A record spins on the player next to her. It's plugged in the socket that normally supports the lamp on her dresser.

This house is so haunted with dead men…

It's Bessie again. Another happy-and-sad tune. Al puts her hand on Meg's back, and Meg rolls over.

“What happened?” Al demands.

“What do you mean?” Meg's eye makeup runs in ghoulish rays down her cheeks.

“This.” Al gestures; she's not sure to what. “I mean—”

“Maybe you should go,” says Meg.

“Are you sick?”

“No.”

“Were you crying?”

“So what if I was?” Meg snaps. “A girl can have a mood in her own house. I'm fine now.”

“But what were you upset about?” When things go wrong for Suzy, she becomes the littlest of little sisters, collapsing into Al as if leading her in a dance. Meg moves stiffly away, and Al is left caressing the green and yellow patchwork quilt.

He moans when I'm sleeping, he wakes me at 2 a.m.

He makes me swear I'll have no other man but him.

“Just… sometimes I just am. Could you spend the night at the church tonight, do you think?”

“Was it work? Was Mr. Twentyman mean to you?” The knot in Al's back screams like the ghost on the record.

“No, it's nothing. It's not a
thing.”

“Is it me? Did I do something wrong?” Meg's presence in Al's life is so improbable. It stands to reason that she could slip away just as inexplicably.

Meg glares at her. “No, okay? Can we stop playing twenty questions?” Meg is curled like a snail at the corner of the bed. She turns so that she's leaning on one wall, facing the other. Away from Al.

“It's just that… my back hurts pretty bad and I don't know if I can make the walk,” Al says. She kneads a square of green cloth freckled with blue flowers.

“Fine,” Meg shoos her, “just go out there.” She lowers her head to her knees and Al observes the delicate top vertebrae of her neck—arched and knobby, as if injured. The singing, swaying Meg is gone. Tonight Bessie frets alone:
I'm scared to see him, I'm scared to leave.
Does this song have another meaning too, again closed off to Al?

She backs out of the living room and sits down slowly on the couch. She wants to go to the church with its chorus of answers. The women there would help her. They would sit with hips touching on one of the pews, spooning burnt macaroni and cheese into their mouths. Meg's little house can look so perfect sometimes, like one you might see on a suburban block with a white fence and a sprinkler glittering the yard, but Al feels far away from everything now.

Winter inches along. Suzy mails Christmas presents from their parents. When Al tears off the brown paper and sees the duckling-yellow cardigan, trimmed with sequined flower buds, she starts to cry. Her parents have no idea who she is. She can't begin to answer the pleading letter that accompanies the package. She's relieved when the everyday numbness of January sets in.

One chilly morning in early March, Al makes her monthly, prearranged phone call to Suzy from the phone in Meg's kitchen. She's glad Meg is at the post office. When Al talks to Suzy, she becomes a string of tight-lipped answers, denying everything around her. It's hard enough to deny the stove, the blue-bordered ceramic dishes, the half-eaten ham on the counter. No way can she deny a living girl, her ankles wrapped around her chair in anticipation, her cigarette smoke meandering into Al's lungs.

“I can't take it here anymore,” Suzy says. “Every date I go on, it's like I've been out with that boy before, even if I haven't. We already know each other too well, even if we just met that week. I dated his cousin, or he's been to the store and bought lasagna noodles from Daddy. I've got to get out. I mean it this time.”

This is Suzy's usual refrain. Al is sure that one of her dates will work out. Some farm boy will transcend their shared past and look like the newest, most exotic creature Suzy has ever seen. They'll get married and present grandchildren to Gerald and Eudora like baskets of fruit.

“I have it all planned out,” Suzy continues. “I'm going to go live with Aunt Randi in Los Angeles.”

Al stops slouching in the doorway and stands at attention. Would Suzy really strand their parents? Al has been counting on her to guide them gently into their old age. This is what's allowed her to stay in Lilac Mines.