Mislaid (7 page)

She asked Meg in despair why a pony would disappear. Where did it go? Could mountain lions or timber rattlers have gotten it?

“It was probably some little girl’s Christmas present,” Meg said.

Karen had written to Santa asking for a banana split. She could find no words to express how Meg’s information made her feel. She trembled, aching with longing for something sweeter than sugar: money.

M
eg’s financial situation was delicate. Her expenses were
low. She had a thousand dollars of capital left in her emergency fund. If something worse than that came up, she’d cross that bridge when she got to it. She had no rent, no utility bills, and a daughter who could survive on a noodle a day. Karen ate dutifully, not with feeling. But sooner or later she was going to get her growth spurt and start liking food. And there was the little matter of clothing. The county had a thrift shop. Like thrift shops everywhere, it specialized in the leavings of the elderly dead. People always had acquaintances who needed children’s things and seldom donated them. Well-off children wore late-model hand-me-downs, but to get in on the action, Meg would have had to join a church. And although she was prepared to accept that the world was adopting stodginess as a fashion trend—that girls were putting away their mules and feather earrings and donning prim sweater sets like Lee’s mother—she could not face praising Jesus in song to put Karen in Pendleton kilts. You have to respect your boundaries.

Still, they needed clothes. Even polo shirts are born and die, in delicate pastels that show every stain. She needed an income.

Waitressing was out of the question. Waitresses are high-profile public figures. It doesn’t get any more visible than that. She might as well put her byline in the paper.

Cashier likewise, along with receptionist. Too public.

All jobs in the public eye: inadmissible.

As for invisible jobs, Meg pondered what they might be. Her mother, never a women’s libber, had steered her away from vocational education toward more disinterested studies in the liberal arts. Meg had met several working women in her years with Lee. She suspected that provost and sculptor, like latter-day Brontë, were not roles she could aspire to right off the bat.

Even the discreet and anonymous position of housemaid was a hard racket to break into. You need references. Someone has to tell everybody how discreet and anonymous you are. It was a conundrum. Plus, she was known around the county as black. She suspected herself of presenting a fatal attraction qua negress. Light-skinned, slim, unattached. If the men didn’t come to hate her, their wives would. The men would hate her for saying no, and their wives would never believe she hadn’t said yes.

She realized with some regret she had joined a race with which she’d had just about no contact at all. She had seen black people every day of her life. She wasn’t afraid of them. More like the reverse. But they might as well have been those Indonesian shadow puppets made of parchment. Her parents hadn’t had the option of sending her to an integrated school. If you integrated your school back then, the Commonwealth would shut it down. And although Stillwater had started admitting black girls a few years before she left, none had applied for admission—at least not that anybody knew of. Of course an applicant could be black and not know it. Possibly Stillwater had been integrated from the
start. That was the standard defense of whites-only institutions: We’re not the DAR. We don’t check pedigrees.

Once Meg even caught herself saying “nigger.” Some kid had shown up at school in a rabbit fur coat (her father was an auto mechanic notorious for payday splurges). Karen admired the coat and had been allowed to pet it. Meg shook her head. She said, “Typical nigger-rich, buying your daughter a fur coat when you can’t afford to take her to the dentist!— Oh, gosh, Karen, I didn’t mean to say that. I’m really sorry. Here, hit me on the arm. Make a fist.”

She went on to explain at length that she had merely meant the father was not good with numbers, and that this quality had once been called shiftlessness. Such a man works hard, but he never gets ahead, because whenever he gets some money, he puts a down payment on something he can’t afford, and it is soon repossessed. This unfortunate custom had given rise to the concept, etc.

“I think a fur coat is rich,” Karen objected.

“Rabbit is not rich, and fur is tacky anywhere south of Vermont. Rabbit is poor tacky. Rich tacky would be fox. A girl your age could wear dyed sheared beaver, maybe, if she lived on the shores of Lake Baikal.”

Karen frowned.

Meg felt more strongly than usual that many thoughts life had taught her to articulate were not her own, while many of her thoughts went unexpressed for lack of a suitable audience.

For this and other reasons, she concluded that although she desperately needed someone to talk to, she also needed a career where you work alone and don’t get roped into chatting with people on any subject whatsoever.

She looked glumly at the typewriter and poured herself a drink.

Her writing was going well enough. She told herself she was honing her craft and would soon be making money. But it was like honing a primitive stone tool, not a forged blade. Life with Lee had taught her to be laconic. She could quip. So her plays all ended on page two.

Typically they were murder mysteries with no mystery. A woman sneaks across the stage and plunges a knife into the neck of a sleeping man. He says a few choice last words and dies. She expresses her ambivalence as the police come to haul her away.

Meg’s first paycheck materialized as she drove to the grocery store early one morning. She saw a cardboard box on the shoulder. She stopped, because a box like that nearly always contains kittens. Not worth money, but tell that to Karen. Karen worshipped kittens as gods.

Except this box was full of pornographic magazines from England. Dry, clean, and in excellent condition. What mysterious denizen of the county had felt called upon to make an obviously cherished collection vanish anonymously? Frightened of being observed at the wayside Dumpsters, hitting the brakes for a second or two to unload years of costly, intimate personal history . . . or had his wife done it? The girls were chunky, posing in what appeared to be their own backyards, private parts concealed by fluffy fur and sometimes adorned with ribbons. They were lavish, glossy mags on heavy paper. No amateurs, no swingers, no contact information, just girls next door, apparently the first to return after the neutron bomb was dropped on Folkestone, because how else could they romp naked in middle-class gardens with low hedges and sea views?

Meg felt on some level it was the strangest thing she had ever seen: innocent porn. No wonder it had to go. A wife who discovered
it could no longer feel superior to the whores in her husband’s freak books. She would see that in England, for reasons unknown, a woman can simultaneously be cute as a bug’s ear, a serious rose gardener, and a nymphomaniac. The false dichotomies promulgated by Tammy Wynette et al. would vanish like morning fog, leaving her alone with her self-doubt.

Or were they the possessions of an old man, trying to manipulate how he would be remembered? His heirs, trying the same thing? Was he rich, poor, addicted to
Masterpiece Theatre,
raised in the Church of England, in love with flowers, an Englishman?

There was no way of knowing. The cover price was high, suggesting a wealthy man, but pornography is a classic payday splurge for the shiftless.

The magazines didn’t turn her on. One woman standing over another with a whip, absentmindedly fingering its thick, braided handle: that image, seen for a fraction of a second while leafing through a coffee-table book in the Lambda Rising Bookstore in Georgetown before she fled blushing, was burned into her memory, and she seldom had an orgasm in which it was not implicated. These girls, with their apple cheeks and dahlias, were by contrast disquietingly perverse. But they had to be worth money to someone.

She weighed her options. The county did in fact have a junk shop. It lay in the crook of an unfinished half-moon road, just off the new four-lane highway. She got twenty dollars for thirty-eight magazines, but the shop owner leered in such a way that it was clear to her she would never again sell pornography to a filthy-minded good old boy. Since that demographic sort of dominates most aspects of the pornography market, her days in the secondhand sex industry were over almost before they began.

But the scavenging bug had bitten her. Her next find was a dead raccoon. She took it straight to the bait shop and sold it to
the bearded white guy behind the counter for six dollars. He said in good repair they could go as high as ten.

Roadkill in good repair: not an easy assignment, even at first light. She started swinging by the county dump several times a week.

Like Dante’s
Inferno,
the dump had circles. The outer circle was where people unloaded discrete and possibly salvageable objects such as planks and furniture. In the next circle, plastic sacks hit the ground and were pushed into piles with a front loader, and somewhere back of that were the looming brown mountains of decay and the overweight turkey buzzards that couldn’t fly.

It was to these mountains that items were taken directly when no one was supposed to know they were in the dump, for instance human bits and parts from funeral homes. It was also said that a certain white man who had treated people badly had driven his pickup deep into the dump to unload construction trash, and while he was still in his cab a black man at the controls of a lordly Caterpillar had unceremoniously covered him with dirt and shoved his truck, still running, into the mountains of the dump, burying him alive. Whether he was crushed or asphyxiated or fell unconscious from the fumes or rotted from the inside out due to the radioactivity of his load depended on whom you asked. The truck had never been found, nor looked for, because people were scared of the radiation.

Or so the story went. There was no question of his having vanished in the usual way. He would never run out on his family like that.

Meg first heard the story on her return visit to the junk shop with a chair from the first circle of the dump. The shop owner said he leaned toward the carbon monoxide theory as being more “mercified.” Meg said she didn’t believe anything about it, because the police would surely investigate the death of a white man and arrest eight or ten black people just to get started.

“Not if the sheriff wants reelection they don’t,” the shop owner said. “This is the New South. Niggers have impunity.” Nodding sagely, he drained the day’s eleventh can of Georgia Iced Tea (Busch).

Trash picking did not bring Meg much money. But enough for peanut butter and store-brand Cheerios with a brittle crunch like powdered glass, plus Karen’s favorite nondessert food in the world, BLT. Mayonnaise is an irresponsible splurge when you don’t have a fridge, but there are small sizes available, especially in places where people live hand to mouth and “large economy size” is regarded as a long-term investment that would tie up needed capital. The bait shop sold mayonnaise in jars barely bigger than a film canister. Polishing off a package of bacon at one sitting was no problem for Karen.

“If you are what you eat, I’m bacon,” she announced blissfully one day. Meg imagined her mother hearing this, and felt grateful they were not in touch.

Someone driving by saw a man get out of a van in front of Meg’s house and mentioned it at Mrs. Sutton’s Restaurant. Soon it was common knowledge that she had a white boyfriend.

White in Virginia in those days was a fairly narrow category. It didn’t include anyone with dark hair, such as . . . such as . . . such as people with dark hair, who on good days were called “Spanish.” But it made room for the red cheeks, green eyes, and thinning rat-tail braid of Lomax Hunter, a Mattaponi Indian.

They met not long after Meg started collecting night crawlers. Leaving Karen asleep on the backseat of the car, she would wander around with a miner’s headlamp, staring at the ground. There weren’t many places with good lawns, just a few churches and cemeteries, but when it worked it was a license to print
money. A dozen night crawlers was worth fifty cents at the bait shop, and on a dark night after a rain you could pick up a dozen in three minutes, which makes ten dollars an hour. You have to be sneaky, because other people will horn in on your night crawler grounds. Meg was not up for turf battles, especially not nocturnal single combat with strange men. When she scented competition, she drove away. Gradually Karen was getting too old to pass out automatically if you laid her down, and too big to hide under a towel. Big enough to be conspicuous, so you wouldn’t want to leave her alone unconscious in the places frequented by the drifters who gather night crawlers. So that ultimately night crawlers were a glorious, lucrative interlude, nothing more—the first of many fitful, sporadic, hand-to-mouth seasons of wealth, adequate to cement in Karen’s mind an indestructible association between worms and Pepperidge Farm cakes.

Put off by the competition for worms, Meg thought it over and decided to hunt for ginseng instead. Ginseng grows in the woods in daylight, where a child can help you look for it. Even sassafras will bring in money, they say. There’s all kinds of valuable stuff growing in the woods.

The bearded man who ran the bait shop said he would miss her gentle touch with the worms, as many of his suppliers grasped the worms too tightly and injured them. He put Meg in touch with a hippie who dealt in herbal medicines.

As it turned out, this hippie was not in the ginseng and sassafras business. But he said he could give her fifty cents per psilocybin mushroom.

“We got more cow patties than lawns,” Meg said. “Fifty cents a shroom beats four cents a worm any day of the week.”

“You got that right,” Lomax replied. “Drugs is where the money’s at.”

Lomax was a middle-class Indian. Rather than on the Mattaponi reservation, he grew up in a tract house in Spotsylvania County. Both his college-educated parents had office jobs pushing paper in the highway department. A social outcast at work, Lomax’s father had become an avid chipmunk watcher. The house’s large, flat backyard was the scene of unceasing warfare among the solitary ground squirrels, except in mating season, when they pursued momentary alliances that provided for nonstop action and inaction. He had founded a chipmunk conservation group and authored its bylaws.

Stoned, even at age ten, Lomax found the chipmunks easier to take. His mother sympathized. Of her three children, Lomax was her favorite. He never caused her any trouble. No sports, no extracurricular activities, always willing to talk to her husband about his hobby.