Mr. Tall (10 page)

“Not today.”

“Do you think Wayne Lee's still alive?” Rose asked.

“I honestly don't know,” Plutina said. “I'm just sad it'll be turning off cold again before long. I always hate to think about that boy living out on that mountain in the wintertime.” Her shoulders started to shake. She reached into the pocket of her sweater and pulled out a well-used tissue, which she dabbed at the corners of her eyes. “I just hope Charlie's warm.”

“Oh, honey,” Rose said. “Don't cry.”

“His feet are bad to get cold. I used to heat him up a pan of water before we went to bed.”

“I'm sure Charlie's feet are fine.”

“I don't know what's wrong with me,” Plutina said.

“You just miss Charlie, that's all. It'll get better.”

“I don't want it to get better. I want it to get over. I've been living up in this valley a long time.”

Rose opened her mouth and waited, but no wise words of consolation spilled out.

“I wasn't but sixteen years old when Charlie brought me up in here,” Plutina said. “Took me away from my people, but that's the way it's always been when a girl gets married. You know about that. My people are all dead now anyway. We come from over in Weald. My daddy was a town man. He could read good and always knew what time it was. He worked on the railroad.”

“Weald,” Rose said.

“Me and Charlie never could have babies. Did you know that?”

Rose shook her head.

“I had one, but it was born dead.”

“Plutina, I'm sorry.”

“After the doctor left, Charlie took it in an old sheet and buried it up on the mountain somewhere. That's the way people did things back then, but it don't seem right to me when I think about it now. All these years I've thought that baby must be wandering around up there, looking for somebody to take care of it. Charlie never even told me where it was. I couldn't go find it if I needed to.” She took off her glasses and fished another tissue out of her pocket.

“Well, I'm sure Charlie didn't mean anything by it,” Rose said.

Plutina glared up at Rose, her eyes a concentrated blue, smaller and harder than Rose had ever seen them. “You don't know
what
Charlie meant.”

Rose stood reflexively. In the foreground of Fieldin's painting, a young Cherokee woman looked at her beseechingly, as if begging her to do something. Rose pointed at the painting. “You're right,” she said. “I never understood what Fieldin meant, either. That pyramid.”

Plutina blew her nose loudly, but didn't look over her shoulder. “It's a religious picture,” she said. “The people are being led into bondage.”

Late that night, Rose stood at her bedroom mirror and absentmindedly brushed her hair. Fieldin had been dead for years, and she had resolved some time ago not to cry about him anymore. Enough was enough, after all; he hadn't been
that
nice. But Plutina's spot-on interpretation of his work had simply broken her heart. Of course his Cherokee paintings had been religious pictures. She had just been too literal-minded and, later, too lost in her own work—her popular, sentimental, representational
watercolors
—to figure it out. And Fieldin had been too gracious or arrogant or both to explain it to her, or to anyone else. She could not imagine how lonely he must have felt, driving home from some small-town crafts fair, the car packed with the same canvases he'd set off with that morning. He'd tried, for years and years, to say something he felt was important, and she, of all people, had never even
heard
the story he was trying to tell, much less understood it. She had never for a minute known who he was. If she had only been able to piece the clues together, perhaps she could have helped him. Fieldin had told her that his only memory of Vienna was of sitting in a sidewalk café and watching a small cyclone of dead leaves swirl down the street. He had thought they were birds.

“Oh, damn it, Fieldin,” she said. “Why didn't you just say something?”

Rose looked past her shoulder in the mirror to the reflection of the bed they had shared, and willed Fieldin to appear in it. He didn't show, of course—that, at least, was just like him—and the Fieldin she wound up imagining had that awful oxygen tube stuck in his nose. She closed her eyes and listened, but he had stopped breathing all over again. She dropped her brush onto the dresser and walked quickly through the house to the back door, where she cupped her hands against the cool glass of the window and gazed out at the orchard. The light was warm, golden—the gentle light of the approaching harvest moon—but the old trees, stooped again with a harvest of hard, bitter heirloom apples that nobody wanted, looked exhausted by the weight they carried. She found herself staring intently, for no reason she could think of, at the narrow lane of grass between two trees at the far end of the orchard, where it began to slope upward toward the mountain. As she stared, a bulky dark figure stepped out from behind one of the trees and crossed the lane, turning its head toward the house in the instant it took to step across.

Afraid that the creature would hear her open the back door, Rose ran through the house on tiptoe, stopping briefly at the hat rack in the hallway, where she jerked out of her bag the small digital camera she carried with her in case she saw something she wanted to paint. She gently opened the front door and ran down the steps and around the side of the house. She crossed the backyard, keeping the nearest tree between her and the spot where she'd seen the figure, and when she reached the orchard she ran up the lane as quickly and quietly as possible. The skunk ape had come for Fieldin, she thought, and now Fieldin had sent it back. She would take a picture of it and post it on the Internet. She would be a world-famous cryptozoologist. She would get the entire mountain declared a skunk-ape preserve. She would be the goddamn Jane Goodall of skunk-ape studies.

She stopped on the downhill side of the tree behind which the figure had disappeared, her thrashing heart wildly alive in her chest, the dewy grass cold on her feet. She peered into the maze of apple-laden limbs and through a narrow opening saw in silhouette the figure's black shoulder and great, shaggy head. It stood absolutely still. She could just detect a musky, unpleasant, urine-tinged odor. Maybe, she thought for the first time, she would have to go with it. Maybe when the skunk ape came you just had to go. She would follow it up the mountain. She would find Fieldin and kiss him on the mouth and say, Fieldin, you dead bastard. Your paintings, I get them now. I'm sorry. She would be a ghost, if she had to. She would walk the darkest hollows on the coldest nights, singing Scotch-Irish lullabies to Plutina's lost baby. She and Charlie would plant gardens in the forest for the deer to eat. She would paint pictures of the children who lived in Argyle, and leave them tacked to the trees in their yards. And, occasionally, just for fun, she would scare the hell out of teenage boys wearing UT sweatshirts.

Through the tree, she made out the almost inaudible sound of breathing, shallow and fast like her own. The poor thing was as excited and scared as she was. In the distance she heard the muffled, percussive
whup whup whup whup
of D'Abruzzio's black helicopter. Too late, Special Agent in Charge, you with your beautiful mustache. She was ready now. It was time to go to the other side. She wanted to know everything. She looked down, plotting her next step, and on the ground saw a small pile of apples, stacked neatly in a pyramid, waiting to be borne away.

J
ESSE JAMES, WHILE
hiding from the law in Nashville in 1875, had lived for a time at the address where Mrs. Virgil Wilson's house now stood. For years, Mrs. Wilson delighted in telling trick-or-treaters about the outlaw, but then one Halloween she noticed that the trick-or-treaters did not seem to know—or care—who Jesse James was. They also wore costumes that she didn't recognize and that had to be explained to her—mass murderers, dead stock-car racers, characters from movies she'd never heard of, teenage singers seemingly remarkable only for their sluttiness—and she realized that she had somehow become the crazy old lady whose tedious stories you had to endure in order to get the disappointing candy that such crazy old ladies invariably offered. For how many years, she asked herself, had she been boring children with her tales of Jesse James, and for how many years had they been laughing at her as they walked away? Every Halloween since then, Mrs. Wilson had sat in her kitchen in the dark, listening to the radio at low volume and pretending she wasn't home.

Still, even though several years had gone by since she'd last opened her door on October 31, Mrs. Wilson found herself wondering whether the stolen girl had ever trick-or-treated at her house. “The stolen girl” was how local television reporters had come to refer to Angela B., age thirteen, who had vanished while walking from her house, at one end of Mrs. Wilson's block, to the school-bus stop, at the other. No matter how hard she tried, Mrs. Wilson could not picture the smiling young face she saw on television (and in store windows and stapled to telephone poles and taped to the back windows of pickup trucks and blown up and plastered on the sides of Metro buses) on her own front porch. Whenever, during station breaks, the announcer posed the question “Have you seen the stolen girl?” Mrs. Wilson blinked at the girl's school picture, then shook her head, because she honestly couldn't say.

She liked to imagine that she had once opened her door and found Angela (she would not have been stolen then, so her name would still have been Angela) standing there, waiting patiently, dressed as—what?—a mouse, perhaps, or a rabbit, something soft and nonthreatening. She imagined that she had given Angela not just one or two miniature chocolate bars, as was her habit, but the whole bag, because Angela was clearly such a nice girl and she listened so attentively while Mrs. Wilson told her about Jesse James. She even asked questions. Mrs. Wilson tried not to imagine anything after the point where Angela said thank you and turned to walk away. The thought of the stolen girl stepping off her porch and disappearing into the darkness inevitably brought tears to her eyes.

Mrs. Wilson's house was equidistant from the stolen girl's house and the bus stop that the stolen girl hadn't reached, and now seemed marked as the place between Point A and Point B where the unknowable existed and the unthinkable occurred. A black hole, the Bermuda Triangle of East Nashville. Four days after the stolen girl had disappeared, and three days after Mrs. Wilson had told two uniformed police officers what little she could, a Metro detective—a sober black woman whose air of professional detachment made Mrs. Wilson even sadder for the stolen girl than she already was—had sat on Mrs. Wilson's good sofa and asked her if she was sure she hadn't seen anything suspicious. Outside, a TV reporter was broadcasting a live report, which Mrs. Wilson and the detective both glanced at from time to time on Mrs. Wilson's muted television. Later, other police officers searched her garage and car trunk and underneath her house for the stolen girl's body. (One of them wriggled out of the crawl space beneath the porch clutching a beautiful cut-glass doorknob, which he solemnly presented to Mrs. Wilson.) The candlelight prayer vigil and neighborhood march organized by the stolen girl's church stopped in front of her house and sang “Where You Lead Me I Will Follow.” Not knowing what else to do, Mrs. Wilson blinked her porch light on and off in what she hoped was a show of solidarity. For days on end, her view of the street was blocked by the satellite-TV trucks parked at the curb, their tall masts raised, their great dishes pointed heavenward, as if awaiting a word from God.

Although months had now passed since the stolen girl had vanished, Mrs. Wilson combed through her memories every day, hunting for the one small clue that might help to break the case and return the stolen girl to her family. What had she seen that day? Surely she must have seen something. The stolen girl jogging past, her books clutched to her chest, chased by a gang of taunting older boys? A van prowling back and forth, its shadowy driver no doubt a religious zealot of some kind, searching for a girl to steal? But Mrs. Wilson remembered nothing of the sort. Increasingly, what she found swimming to the surface of her mind were memories that she had forced herself to set aside years before. She imagined this process to be not unlike that of a police boat trolling the Cumberland in search of one particular corpse and dragging up another instead.

When Mrs. Wilson was fifteen years old and lived in Jackson, Tennessee, she had loved a boy and become pregnant. Her parents had pulled her out of school, and when she began to show, they sent her away to a home in Kentucky, where she lived with two Mennonite spinsters, as lumpen and sexless as sacks of horse feed, and a dozen other “girls in trouble.” They were housed in a converted antebellum mansion on top of a hill outside Lexington, but there was nothing in any way grand about the place. Its parquet floors had been covered with gray institutional linoleum, which, although it was already spotless, the spinsters forced them to scrub every day. The girls understood that the endless scrubbing was a punishment of sorts, part of the deal that their parents had struck with the operators of the home, something to make the girls “think twice” the next time they considered climbing into the backseat of a car with a boy. When Mrs. Wilson's baby came, she was not allowed to hold it. She glimpsed the child, a girl, only briefly, as they carried it away, still bloody, its mouth a tiny black O of perfect accusation.

Mrs. Wilson watched the news in Nashville and tried to recall the morning that the stolen girl had disappeared, but instead she remembered the violently blue eyes above the mask of the nurse who had leaned over her as she cried for them to bring back her baby. “Now, sweetheart,” the woman had said, “you know you can't take care of a baby.”

A week after the baby was born, Mrs. Wilson returned home. Her family pretended that nothing had changed, but, of course, everything had. During her absence, she had become invisible to the boy she loved. She was too embarrassed to go back to school, and her parents didn't force her. Although she was the daughter of a doctor, and spent those long, empty days working on her tan at the country-club pool, she eventually married a poor boy, Virgil Wilson, who was handsome and kind to her and seemed not to notice that she was damaged goods. When Mrs. Wilson came to know Virgil better, she realized that he had considered her a canny choice, a good deal on his part—used, certainly, high-mileage, even, but overall a much better model than he would have been able to afford new.

They moved together to Nashville, where he worked as an electrician. They bought the house at the address that Jesse James had once called home, and they lived there more or less amicably for the forty-eight years it took Virgil Wilson to smoke himself to death. Their only child, a pleasant but wholly unremarkable boy, now lived in Phoenix, where he spoke Spanish like a Mexican and managed a small office for a large company that installed sprinkler systems in the yards of rich people. Mrs. Wilson's daughter-in-law was a vicious anorexic girl from California; her grandchildren couldn't understand her Tennessee accent over the phone. These were the facts of Mrs. Wilson's life, as she now added them up. If she had only been looking out the front window the morning the stolen girl had last walked by, if she had been able to run from the house and scream for the police and save that girl, how different it all might have seemed!

Mrs. Wilson still followed the case avidly on TV, though the reports were less and less frequent. She already knew, of course, that on the morning of the disappearance the stolen girl had been wearing blue shorts, a white T-shirt, and pink sneakers. One night at five, however, she learned that the stolen girl had also been wearing underwear decorated with a picture of Tigger, from
Winnie-the-Pooh,
and one of only two bras she owned. Her other bra remained neatly folded in her top dresser drawer. She had not packed a bag, nor had she removed from her nightstand the cache of sixty-eight dollars that she had earned babysitting.

The next night at ten, a beautiful young woman with perfectly unnatural red hair delivered a report that she, Mrs. Wilson, had watched the young woman tape over and over earlier in the day, apparently trying to get it just right. “For several months in the late eighteen hundreds,” the woman said now, staring seriously out of Mrs. Wilson's television set into Mrs. Wilson's living room, “unbeknownst to his neighbors, the outlaw Jesse James lived with his wife and children in the house you see behind me. Now this quiet street bears an even darker secret: what happened to Angela B.?” At this point, the camera zoomed in on Mrs. Wilson's house, and Mrs. Wilson was alarmed to see herself on her own television, peering like a ghost from behind her living-room curtains. “If the people on this street know what happened to the East Nashville seventh grader,” the young woman said, off camera, “they're not talking.” Mrs. Wilson was aghast. The report was, of course, just filler for a slow news night, but that little bitch had never even asked her if she knew anything! And the actual house that Jesse James had lived in had burned down years before Mrs. Wilson was even born! She made a note to herself to call the station the next morning and complain.

Mrs. Wilson went to bed angry and woke in the middle of the night to find a door that she had never seen before ajar in the wall opposite her bed. She stuck her feet in her scuffs, put on the housecoat that lay at the foot of the bed, and crossed the room. She pushed the door open with the palm of her hand and almost giggled as it creaked melodramatically. Below her, an old wooden staircase disappeared into a dug-out basement. She didn't find it odd to discover a basement in a house that she had lived in for more than half a century, and for this reason alone she decided that she had to be dreaming.

She stepped tentatively onto the top step. It bent slightly under her weight, and she groped around for a light switch, which she did not find. The stairs, though, didn't seem entirely dark, so she took another step down, then a third and a fourth. Soon the staircase opened up entirely on her left (the stairs didn't have a handrail), and, afraid to look down into the space below, she kept to the right-hand side of the steps, brushing the earthen wall gently with her fingertips as she descended. Studying the wall, she made out spade marks left by the man who had dug the old basement God knows when. The air grew cooler. It smelled moldy, unbreathed, perhaps unfit for breathing, and it began, as Mrs. Wilson traveled slowly downward, to take on a faintly rotten odor. She heard her grandmother's voice saying, “Copperheads, Julie, you can smell 'em. They smell like rotting Irish potatoes.” And, for the first time, Mrs. Wilson understood that this basement was not a good place, that she would discover nothing here that would make her happy.

At the bottom of the steps, she found herself in a long, narrow room with a dirt floor. Dim daylight made its way in through a row of three filthy transom windows, set in the walls, just below the exposed floor joists of the house. At the center of the room crouched a massive black furnace, which Mrs. Wilson instantly recognized as the coal furnace from the home in Kentucky where she'd spent the final months of her pregnancy. Painted in white letters on the firebox door was the word “Hyde”—the name of the company that had manufactured the furnace—and she remembered sitting on the floor next to it with a sad, long-faced girl from Alabama, sharing a single contraband cigarette. She remembered that the girl from Alabama had pointed at the name on the furnace and said, “That right there is what we're doing.” The girl from Alabama lost her baby not long after, Mrs. Wilson recalled, and she never heard from her again. Mrs. Wilson wondered how in the world the furnace from Kentucky had ended up underneath her house, and how much she would have to pay to have it cut up and hauled out. She cautiously approached the furnace, turned the handle, and tugged open the heavy door. As she leaned over to look inside, a voice from behind the furnace said, “It don't work anymore. It ain't hooked up to nothing.”

Mrs. Wilson walked around the furnace, where a man sat on a box in the corner in the thin light below one of the narrow windows. He had black hair and a full black beard. A dark bruise appeared to stain his left cheek. His suit reeked of mildew, but tied carefully around his throat was an old-fashioned string tie. Mrs. Wilson understood, without quite knowing how, that the man had been sitting on that box, below that opaque window, for untold years. At his feet lay a moldering pile of something vaguely organic that Mrs. Wilson was able to recognize as a saddle only by its two rusted stirrups.

After a time of staring at the man, her mouth opened in recognition. The man nodded. But when she pointed at him and said, “You're—” he raised his hand and cut her off.

“Don't say my name,” he said.

“I won't.”

“You have my doorknob.”

Mrs. Wilson pointed above her head. “It's still in the house.”

Jesse James nodded, as if this were a satisfactory answer.

“What do you know about me?” she asked.

He, too, pointed upward. “Everything,” he said. “I can hear you.”

She looked up at the exposed joists and above the joists at the thin flooring. A stray nail poked through the boards in a spiky nest of splinters.