Mudwoman (51 page)

She thought
Why doesn’t he pass me! What does he want of me!

The front of the pickup was about eighteen inches from M.R.’s rear fender. Deliberately the driver was matching his speed to M.R.’s reduced speed. Was this—harassment? A kind of game? Did the driver know her, or believe he knew her?

Playful, in the rough careless way of the men of this region.

Or maybe it was a kind of gallantry?—the driver would accompany M.R., a solitary woman, along this poorly maintained route to Star Lake.

M.R. wished to think this. Though she’d begun to perspire with unease. Staring into the rearview mirror. She could make out a figure behind the windshield—not clearly—seemingly an adult man with a blurred face, thick dark hair.

Calmly she drove. She did not increase her speed, to try to escape.

Impossible to escape! You must have faith.

A tangle of underbrush had worked its way around her right-front tire, bringing her almost to a stop. Only by pressing down hard on the gas pedal—frantically hard—could M.R. force the tire to turn.

Her car was limping! But the driver behind her registered no sign of impatience, or derision. Rather there was the sense—M.R. felt, staring into the rearview mirror at the haze of bright-blue—that she was being protected.

A foolish mistake, to have taken this road. The driver of the pickup wants to make certain that nothing happens to my car—to me.

Someone who knows me? Recognizes me?

Someone who knows it is wrong for me to be here?

There came a strong smell of pine needles, wet rotting leaves and wet earth. Ditch-water leaked like pus into the road causing M.R.’s wheels to churn, slide and slip.

The pickup slowed, waiting for M.R.’s vehicle to recover the road.

M.R. saw the driver’s face through the windshield—then, glaring sunlight intervened.

Mudwoman’s bridegroom! He had followed her here.

Slowly and in tandem the vehicles moved along the narrow blacktop road, that had begun to descend to the lake. To her relief M.R. saw mailboxes at the side of the road—narrow lanes leading into the underbrush—and caught glimpses of log cabins, tar paper shanties, corroded-looking house trailers mounted on cement blocks. Cheery signs were affixed to trees:
HAPPY HUNTIN CAMP—“MY BLUE HEAVEN”—DAISY & MAC—7TH HEAVEN—KAMP KOMFORT.

No people were visible. Only just parked vehicles. If M.R. had been in danger she could not have risked abandoning her car in the road, running back one of the lanes crying for help.

Thinking
But he does not want to hurt me. That is not his intention.

Thinking
If that were his intention, he would have hurt me by now.

Entering the village of Star Lake M.R. glanced into the rearview mirror and saw to her surprise—the bright-blue pickup had vanished from the road.

The driver must have turned off, onto a side road. Or, into one of the lanes.

Of course, the driver must live in Star Lake. In one or another of the dwellings in the woods. He had not been following M.R. but only just returning home.

M.R. felt both relief and disappointment. Her heartbeat had quickened with the prospect of—she didn’t know.

STAR LAKE VILLAGE

POP. 475

T
he Gulf station had vanished and in its place was a U-Haul rental and behind the U-Haul rental, down a steep incline amid a carelessly mown field was a small simulated-cedar cabin that looked as if it had been shellacked, shiny as Glo-Coat. Strewn about the driveway were children’s toys, a tricycle and a wagon. Directly in front of the house was a patch of top-heavy tomato plants, battered by the recent storm. M.R. parked at the top of the driveway uncertain what to do for clearly this dwelling wasn’t the squat little tar paper house in which Marit Kraeck had lived in the early 1960s.

And so the
special signs of God
had vanished.

Polyurethane strips over the loose-fitting windows like flayed skin, flapping in the wind. From outside, the little house had looked like its insides were coming out.

The big stained claw-footed bathtub in the smelly bathroom. The game of tickle! M.R. only just remembered.

She smiled, confused. A vein had begun to beat in her forehead, a warning-beat as, on the back stairs of Charters House she’d known perfectly well that it was a mistake to proceed as she’d done—yet, like a dreamer locked in a script not her own, she’d proceeded.

The spike-haired man who’d played with Jewell, and with Jedina, the
game of tickle.

Cherry pie, out of the wax-paper wrapping. Gluey sugary cherry filling, mealy pie-dough and so delicious, M.R.’s mouth began to water. She’d hidden beneath the steps in a sort of—closet? storage area?—her knees pressed against her chest.

Wrapped in something like a towel, or a bedsheet . . .

He’d bathed her with such care—the spike-haired man. But maybe he had not been her father.

Strange how M.R. never thought of her father—never thought of the very concept
father
—as if such were a distant galaxy, beyond her power of imagining as beyond her power of comprehension.

“He might still be alive. And living here.”

Awkwardly she’d been standing in the driveway clutching her car keys. A figure appeared behind a screen door in the cedar-cabin.

The voice was female, friendly-seeming yet wary.

“H’lo? You looking for someone?”

“Yes! Thank you. I’m looking for . . .”

M.R. could not think what name to provide. Her face was unpleasantly damp, her hair had come loose from the scarf in which, early that morning, she’d tied it. (For M.R.’s stylishly cut hair had grown out ragged in Carthage, she dared not cut it with a scissors as Konrad snipped at his hair.) For the long drive home she was wearing rumpled shorts, a parrot green Carthage Veterans Co-op T-shirt in need of laundering. She wondered if she resembled a madwoman, or a drunken woman, or a woman who has had a bad shock, who has been assaulted.

The woman behind the screen door was waiting for a reply. A smaller figure had joined her, a child.

With difficulty, like hauling a pail of water out of a deep well, M.R. said, “ . . . a family named ‘Kraeck.’ ”

“ ‘Krae-chek’? I don’t think I know anyone named ‘Krae-chek.’ ”

“Maybe—I’m not pronouncing it correctly. It might just have one syllable—‘Kraeck.’ ”

The woman called to someone inside. There came a shouted reply M.R. couldn’t hear clearly.

“You can try around town. Out by the lake, there’s lots of older places—people who live year-round, or been coming back thirty, even forty years. We’re here year-round but only for about five years. ‘Krae-chek’—‘Krick’—isn’t any name I know.”

M.R. thanked the woman. The shiny cedar-cabin, children’s toys in the driveway, raggedly-mowed grass and the steep driveway—only the steep driveway was known to M.R. but as a dirt driveway, not gravel.

M.R. returned to her car and drove through the village of Star Lake to the lakefront, past larger cabins and cottages and the Star Lake Inn & Marina. On the lake, a braying of outboard motors. Angry noises like maddened hornets. It was a shock to her, beautiful Star Lake should be
silent.

And a shock to her, nothing looked familiar. Yet very likely, neither Jewell nor Jedina had ever seen the lake, living in a ramshackle house a mile away.

At a gas station adjacent to a convenience store M.R. stopped to have her car tank filled. The attendant was a burly boy of about eighteen with rabbity teeth, sleepy-lidded eyes. His brawny forearms were discolored with grease, he wore a mechanic’s cap reversed on his head. Sensing in M.R. a woman in some indefinable distress, old enough to be his mother yet not his responsibility, he listened to her stammering query with a shrug—“Maybe yeh, there’s some ‘Kray-chek’ somewhere, but nobody I know. Nobody around here.”

In the convenience store M.R. bought a can of lukewarm soda. She asked the young-woman clerk if she knew of a family—or anyone—named “Kraeck” and the woman said, frowning, “This is—who? A man?”

“Yes. It could be a man.”

“How old?”

“He’d be in his seventies, maybe.”

A glaze-look came into the woman’s face: she was in her early thirties.

“Can’t help you, ma’am. Maybe you could try. . . .”

M.R. thanked the woman and left the store. She was gripped by the possibility—the probability—of her biological father still alive and living in this area. If she could locate someone who’d known her mother in the 1960s . . . But that was more than forty years ago.

Star Lake, approximately sixteen miles in circumference, was one of the less developed of the Adirondack lakes, far less affluent than Lake Placid, Tupper Lake, Saranac. The village was at the southernmost point of the lake that appeared, on maps, to be less “star-shaped” than shaped like a vertical, upright flame. Its rough shore was mostly wilderness but there was a road of some kind that circled the lake and the mad thought came to M.R. in perfect calmness—she could drive around Star Lake stopping at each cabin, each cottage, each trailer, to ask about her father. (And yet—what had been her father’s name? Not Kraeck.) She felt a touch of vertigo, excitement. Forever she could drive around Star Lake in the southern Adirondacks in search of her lost father for there is no end to the circumference of any geometrical figure.

Thinking
I am breaking into pieces now. I must save myself.

“No more. Enough. I have a father.”

She threw the can of lukewarm soda into a trash bin. She returned to her car and drove through Star Lake in the direction of Route 41 east, that would bring her to I-81 within a half hour.

T
hinking
You don’t have to understand why anything that has happened to you has happened nor do you even have to understand what it is that has happened. You have only to live with the remains.

A
t Lookout Point on I-81 she stopped to use a restroom.

Lookout Point was an elevated peninsula of rocky land above the Black Snake River valley east of Sparta. Looking north M.R. could identify Mount Marcy, Mount Moriah, Thunder Bay Mountain—Adirondack peaks dissolving into mist. It was a striking view—you wanted to stare, and stare. You did not ever want to look away.

Below, nearer the highway was a small picnic area, weatherworn picnic tables and grills and trash bins overflowing with litter and on the trail leading to the lookout point litter had been blown into the underbrush in a filigree like dirty lace.

Somehow it was late—nearly 3
P.M.
M.R. had lost precious time in Star Lake. Yet for a long time she leaned over the lookout point railing, shivering. Her hair whipped in the damp cool wind. The sky was mottled, marbled—patches of sunshine like struck matches, appearing and disappearing, a sudden flare of light that abruptly vanished. Already, the air was autumnal, the sun had shifted in the sky.

She felt a stir of half-pleasurable melancholy, yet of anticipation—she had made the right decision to leave Carthage. She did have faith in Andre Litovik who would come to her as he’d promised. She must resolve not to retreat from him, to be so diffident in the face of the man’s powerful personality. She must tell him bluntly, frankly—she would choose
him
. It was not just a matter, as it had been for so many years, of his choosing
her.

“Ma’am! Hi there.”

The voice was low, unnervingly near, and familiar.

M.R. looked around, startled. She’d believed herself alone at the rest stop except for a family—young parents, two young children—in the picnic area below. She was sure she’d seen no other vehicles. But here stood a tall lanky dirty-skinned boy of some indeterminate age—mid-twenties?—or older—slouched less than ten feet behind her on the trail.
Ma’am! Hi there
had been a sly sort of murmur like a caress across the back and shoulders of the solitary woman.

So quietly the boy had come up behind her, it was as if he’d emerged out of the steep rocky path.

His hair was stiff with grease and looked dyed—an unnatural caramel color. His bloodshot eyes were alert with ironic merriment. He wore a faded black T-shirt from which the sleeves had been torn and on the front of the T-shirt was a faded cartoon figure—a “superhero.” His well-worn jeans resembled the stylish designer jeans favored by University undergraduates, bleached at the knees, strategically torn and patched. On his feet were the rotted remains of what appeared to be expensive jogging shoes. On his left wrist, an American eagle tattoo that looked as if its inks had smudged.

A university dropout, M.R. thought. But of another era.

She saw in his eyes a glimmering light of recognition. But she had never seen the boy before in her life, she was certain.

“Yah howdy, ma’am . . .”

With an air of mildly distracted dignity M.R. tried to ignore the insolent greeting. She knew that it was a good idea not to lock eyes with the dirty-skinned boy as one is instructed not to lock eyes with threatening wild creatures.

“Excuse me, please.”

M.R. turned to walk back down the path to the picnic area. But the dirty-skinned boy didn’t step aside to let her pass.

“Ma’am? Din’t-ya hear me?”

Now it was difficult not to look at him. Though still, M.R. tried to keep her gaze from locking with his.

She was thinking: the young family was below, at a picnic table. She was not alone on this trail and not in any real danger.

“Ma’am, you got a car? Maybe can I ride with you?”

“I don’t think so. . . .”

“Where you headed so anxious-like, ma’am?”

His face was a young-old face. The skin appeared to be not dirty so much as discolored, stained. M.R. wondered if he was wearing—makeup? Or had lightly layered his face with mud, as his arms, with mud, to stave off insects? She felt dazed, disoriented. There was something very wrong here, she knew.

The boy’s smile was mock-respectful, sincere.

“I can drive, ma’am. You look like you’d benefit from some chauffeur-like. I can help, you’re driving some distance and alone and are gettin like anxious, being alone. And I work with cars, ma’am, I know engines. I know the fuckin’ insides of things.”