Mislaid (8 page)

Lomax’s home life taught him to value harmony, but school told him that Indians were wild, nonconformist rebels. The Chanco story in fourth-grade Virginia history laid the groundwork, and
Billy Jack
and Wounded Knee put the icing on the cake. He dropped out and bought a Dodge van with his drug-dealing proceeds, informing his parents he was heading west to join the Ghost Dance. He got as far as Bristol, Tennessee. At seventeen he declared his financial emancipation and moved into the van in the yard with the chipmunks. He applied for SSDI (Social Security Disability Income) with a letter from a psychologist at a National Guard recruiting center.

At twenty-one, certified unemployable, Lomax could pass for a middle-aged man. He was starting to lose hair up top, and his pot belly put a strain on his shirts. His meetings with Meg always started with the same ritual greeting: “Yo, Chief!” To which he replied, “What up, Poodlehead?” She would send Karen outside
to play and spread her haul of psychedelics on the table. He would sort the mushrooms into fat and soft (fifty cents apiece) and scraggly and moldy (fifty cents a dozen, a folk aphrodisiac for livestock). She would pour him a glass of Seagram’s gin and they would talk.

Lomax was a talented raconteur. At their first business meeting he described visiting the Mattaponi reservation with the Order of the Arrow and what a drag that was—the chief dressed up like a Sioux in a hawk-feather wig and moose-hide bedroom slippers—until he talked a boy into eating jimson berries. The kid went out-of-body and couldn’t find the piss button. They ended up at the hospital getting him catheterized. The twists and turns in Lomax’s story made Meg laugh. By their sixth meeting he regarded her as an intimate friend. He made her listen to his heart, which was beating about a hundred times a minute.

“And I’m just sitting here!” he said proudly.

“And you get SSDI for being insane? Man, if my heart was fucked up, that’s what I would get disability for.”

“No, man, that’s stupid. Because if your body’s fucked up you can still work, like keypunch or a switchboard operator. But if your mind is wasted, you’re certified unemployable. They won’t even draft your ass.”

Meg said that she had never applied for public assistance in any form, not even the free school lunch, and Lomax nodded.

“I can appreciate that. In my line of work, you like people minding their own business. One girl, she pulled a disappearing act last year, I had to hand it to her. I went down to see her and her place was trashed. Floorboards pried up. Electric sockets hanging out the wall. But I know she’s all right, because she had two Chesapeake Bay retrievers. The one of them had a head on it like a bear. It could bite through your tires. The other one was the most nervous animal I ever saw. They was both laying dead in the mudroom. She could
only
have shot them herself.”

“Wait a second.” Meg looked at him questioningly. “She shoot her own dogs?”

“Nobody else could get close enough to those dogs to shoot them,” he assured her. “She couldn’t take them down to Dominica. There’s a quarantine.”

“She’s in Dominica?”

“I don’t know! She might be in Cuba or Antigua.” He shrugged. “No human soul ever put the time she did into dog food. Every day she made them a pot of stew. If she had to go, it was a mercy she killed them. Sometimes you have to think about the best interests of the animal.”

After Lomax drove away, Meg considered his remarks on the dogs and decided an alarm system might be in order, as well as a way of storing cash and drugs that didn’t involve the bed where she slept.

She took Karen down to the shelter and let her pick. And thus it was that they acquired a six-year-old spayed cockapoo bitch named Cha Cha and eventually several sets of nesting Tupperware suitable for burial in the yard.

It was their eighth meeting before Meg knew there was a girl sitting outside in Lomax’s van the entire time, and only because Karen brought it up. Karen asked whether the girl in the van could come out to play, and he promptly responded, “She’s a little old for that. She’s my girlfriend.”

Karen objected. “I’m not old, and I have a boyfriend!”

“What’s his name?”

“Temple Moody.”

Lomax looked at Meg with one eyebrow raised. “He Canadian?”

“He’s black like us,” Karen said.

“Y’all
black
?”

“So black it’ll blow your mind,” Meg said. “Blackhearted as coal. Versed in the black arts.”

“So you’re a witch, and your boyfriend is a warlock?”

Karen snickered. “Yeah. We got a real voodoo doll made of wax and hair. That’s how Temple could hypnotize ants to join his ant farm.”

“Well, I’ll be doggoned,” Lomax said. “You’re joking, right?”

Meg managed to keep a straight face, and Lomax suddenly felt insecure. He suspected that as an Indian he was supposed to know something about magic and spirits, but his grasp of the world was congruent with the grasp of his two hands. Now at least he had an explanation for Meg’s interest in herbal medicines.

He went back to the van and told his intermittently dozing girlfriend about it as he drove her home to their trailer 120 miles away in the woods near Danville.

“I wish I were a witch, but I’m the wrong generation,” Flea (short for Felicia) said. “Witches are born every seventh generation, and my grandmother was already a witch.”

“You’re saying Poodlehead and her daughter can’t both be witches. But if her boyfriend was a sixth-generation warlock?”

Flea paused to think and said, “You’re so smart.”

“We could both be witches and not know it. Hell, I don’t know what my ancestors were doing seven generations ago.”

“Can you cast a magic spell?”

He sucked on the roach clip smoldering in the ashtray, cleared his throat, and sang, “Hey-a ho-yah ho-yah, hey-a ho-yah ho-yah, ohm anautcha sheila, ohm anautcha rama.”

“Isn’t it Shiva, not Sheila?” Flea asked.

Flea was a dropout, like Meg, with intellectual ambitions that outstripped her resources. But on a smaller scale. Like Lee, she was a sexual outlaw who had left home young. But not to go to boarding school. She had ditched sixth grade to move in with Lomax.

It was no fault of his. She had long legs. Her girlfriends were older, and she pitched her voice low. She wore makeup and tight pants and styled her hair. In a dry county, there are no bartenders to turn away jailbait for a man’s protection. There was only a low stone retaining wall by a river, where everybody went to party. When they met, it was dark. The morning after, he got a surprise.

He saw himself as her protector. As long as she was with him, she wasn’t hanging out at the wall, waiting for whomever. He could make an honest woman of her. He proposed marriage.

Her father said Lomax was a rat. Flea puffed on a cigarette and said he was just jealous. Her parents drank. She could repeat many things that made her seem worldly and mature. There was no privacy in her childhood home. Every conflict was open for all to see, so she knew love was wrapping paper and a battle for supremacy. Her clique of eighth graders taught her feminist pride, as they understood it: it meant knowing how to wait for a better offer. Lomax brought order and stability to her life and allowed her to be a child again. With every day she spent riding around in his van, she became more innocent and ladylike. She never had to beg or flirt. She just asked for what she wanted—a Darvon, say, or Mountain Dew and pork rinds—and he would figure out a fast way to get it. No effort was needed to catch his eye. He was always watching her, more often than he looked in the rearview mirror.

Sometimes he needed her to do difficult things, but here her experiences compared favorably to those of her friends who were thirteen and unattached and still going to the wall. Among her friends his social status was in a class by itself. They called him “the Candy Man” and envied her openly.

Even after she turned twelve, her father refused to consent to her preengagement, so they could not be married. Still she lived
as an adult, her lover’s all-round helpmeet. She was older than Byrdie by about six weeks. To look at, she was a leggy, wispy, lovely girl. But almost nobody ever saw her. She was under orders to stay in the van, where she killed time listening to the radio.

Sometimes watching Karen fall asleep at night, Meg suspected her of weaving romantic fairy tales to herself about her father and brother. She might well remember them, or the lake, or her paternal grandparents’ house at Christmas. Every time one of Meg’s stories featured a lost royal child, fairy changeling, or disenfranchised heiress (she especially liked retailing what she remembered of
Mistress Masham’s Repose
), she watched Karen’s face closely. There was no glimmer of recognition. But during ugly-duckling-style stories—the kind where someone underappreciated turns out to be a princess, if only by marriage after the story is basically over—Karen would sit up straighter and appear dissatisfied, setting her mouth in a horizontal line. Confronted for the first time with Cinderella, she protested her working conditions and said the midnight rule was unfair.

It disheartened Meg to think that Karen might regard her minimal roster of chores and homework as equivalent to the labors of Cinderella. In reality, it was much stranger than that. The mind of a child! Children have no hearts (cf.
Peter Pan,
another story Meg could reproduce fairly accurately), and their minds are rickety towers of surreal detritus. Of course Karen remembered Lee and Byrdie. Once there was a house, a boat; once there was a big, mean boy. There were men, wading pools in sunlight, termites, stamp hinges, and coffee-table books of illustrations by Maxfield Parrish. There was a push-button gear shift, high up on a dashboard. There were little white buttons on Lee’s pink shirt where she lay in a haze of Pernod fumes while he slept it off. It
was all there. But as memories. Not photographs. Not stories. There were no anecdotes, no mentions of “your brother.” She had no way of connecting the dots.

Her memories were far less vivid than her dreams. Once in a dream she met her father. He lived in a red-and-gold castle on a miniature golf course. He was the monarch King Vitaman. It would have shocked Meg to know how seldom Karen thought about him. Deep down, she didn’t think she needed a father. Maybe at one time she had one, past tense. But she didn’t have one, present tense, and that was plain as day.

The virgin birth had suggested manifold alternatives to her. Karen received no religious instruction from Meg, but as an outcast she spoke frequently with Amber Schmidt. Schmidt told her about the Blessed Virgin Mary and said it could happen to anybody. As a girl you could never be the Second Coming, but you might be His mother.

Garbage in being garbage out, Karen had a vivid nightmare. God came to her in the form of a leatherback sea turtle like one she had seen at a beach house in Duck, North Carolina, when some poets put it in Lee’s bathtub. God’s penis looked like elbow macaroni. She ran across the room to her mother’s bed and yowled, “Mom!” Meg seemed nonplussed, so she improvised: “I had a bad dream mean boys were chasing me on bikes!”

“Come here, darling baby,” Meg said gently. She pulled Karen under the blanket. She stroked her sweaty face and tangled hair and said, “Sleep, my love. I will never let anybody hurt you.” Holding her child in her arms, clueless Meg pondered the opportunity costs of childhood in a world without sidewalks. Having grown up at a school with athletic facilities, she knew how to swim, hit a tennis ball, ride a bicycle, and even—unusual for a rural Virginian—roller-skate. Her poor daughter, always having to choose between the road and the woods.

And the black box in her arms whimpered itself to sleep with longing to be a normal person who is chosen, not a special person who is discovered. To be the kind of duck who gets included by wild swans because she’s unobtrusive.

Possibly she felt special enough already as a blond black midget and did not wish additional attention. A recent visit to Schmidt’s house had gone poorly. She had ridden the pariah’s all-white school bus to a little subdivision of mobile homes in a wheat field. They barely had time to put on a record and open up
Tiger Beat
when Schmidt’s father entered with a razor strop to whip his daughter for letting a nigger in the house. When Meg picked Karen up, they were playing two-square in the road. Every car that passed had to slow down, and if the driver was a man under about twenty-four, Schmidt would make eye contact and hold her hair up off her neck. Karen was glad to leave, but she got a scolding from Meg for playing in traffic.

Lee applied himself to being a caring father by acquainting Byrdie with the finer things in life. His grandfather had a hunt near Berryville and often invited him to take part. There Lee rode a fit yet docile stallion named Idle Vice (a pun on “edelweiss”). This was, to Lee, an animal in whom no feeling person could help but take delight. Lee set Byrdie on him at the first opportunity, expecting euphoria.

Byrdie said the horse was stupid. He said the dogs were slobbery and too numerous. Fuchsia coats with cordovan boots embarrassed him. The bloody stump of the fox’s tail made him sick. He refused riding lessons. He would not go cubbing. He would not go hilltopping. He would not go basseting, or even aim his .22 at a squirrel. He spent hunt days reading a book under a tree. Horses in Byrdie’s mind were free to bound over obstacles, on
their backs effeminate slaves to equine virility or aging little girls, but only at races where a person might bet on them.

Lee and Cary took him to a steeplechase near Warrenton. They tailgated at the finish line and waited. The day was mostly halftime shows of various kinds. Lee waxed enthusiastic about a fellow who rode an Arabian in flowing multicolored robes. He invoked Pegasus and Helicon. Cary mentioned Lawrence of Arabia.

The show rider appeared to Byrdie much like a belly dancer on a goat. He walked purposefully to the concession stand and ordered three beers. He figured if you order one beer they might think it was for you, but if you order three, they think your dad sent you so he wouldn’t have to interrupt an important conversation. He sat down behind a horse trailer with his three flimsy Solo cups and sipped, struggling at first against the awful taste. Soon the tide turned. He chugged the rest and began staggering around feeling better than he’d ever felt in his short life.