Relief Map (4 page)

Livy still felt a faint sense of ownership when she was near the Insky farm, and this gave her confidence. She led the way as they waded toward the blockade, chatting about the defects of people they knew in school. At a narrow bend in the creek she stepped sideways on a stone, bruised her foot, and almost dropped her shoes. She cursed and wobbled, noisily regaining her balance.

“Shh,” Nelson said. He pointed up at the road, where they could just see a police cruiser through a gap in the bushes, the edge of the Maronne city seal visible on the driver's side door: a mill building hidden coyly behind a foregrounded tree.

Livy quieted, clutching at an overhanging willow for balance. “God, it's so close,” she whispered. She could see the scratches in the paint around the door handle. Another vehicle was approaching from the Lomath side, a truck by the sound of it, invisibly rolling to a stop at the barricade. The driver's side door of the police cruiser opened, and Livy and Nelson ducked in unison, putting their hands in the water to catch their balance, as the police officer stepped out of the car and walked out of their narrow line of sight. Their view of the truck that had approached was blocked by a row of multiflora
rosebushes in full bloom, but the voices came down to them clearly over the burbling of the creek. She searched out Nelson's eyes. She was hardly breathing.

“See your ID?” said the policeman on the road.

She could hear feet shifting on the gravel, and then Ron Cash's voice. He lived in one of the houses up on the hill, a tall white man with a perpetually sunburned bald head and a leg that wouldn't bend at the knee. He was a difficult neighbor, a sore spot. He had a three-wheeler that he rode back and forth on the low road on summer afternoons, the noise of the engine like a zipper splitting open the peaceful air. He hunted deer out of season, blocked the Greens in when he parked, and responded to all criticism with threats. He was a playground aide at the elementary school, a difficult job for someone whose disability was so easy for children to imitate, and Livy still carried a grudge over something he'd done when she was one of the children under his supervision. She'd been out at the farthest ragged edge of the playing fields at Maronne Elementary with a friend named Kim, a small girl with an insane laugh and constantly dirty nails who was her classmate for only that one year. They liked that spot because of the tall grass. Livy had invented a game that she called Prairie Fire, in which they would go right up to the edge of the mowed lawn and stare into the bluestem and Indian grass and Livy would narrate the progress of
an imaginary conflagration roaring toward them from the YMCA at the top of the hill. “Here it comes,” she would say. “Look, there goes that little tree, and the other one next to it, poof! And now it's going faster because of the wind, it jumped over the road!” It was a game of nerves: they would stand and face the wall of fire hand in hand until her description of it reached the very edge of the grass, an arm's length from where they stood, and then they would break hands and run as fast as they could toward the low red-painted school building behind them. The first to touch the wall was the survivor; the unfortunate laggard was burned to death in the fire. Livy always won the game because the fire was hers and she had longer legs, but despite this unfairness Kim loved to play, collapsing against the school wall in a hysterical heap each time, not caring that the ground was muddy there from water dripping over the eaves, chirping “Burnt! Burnt!” when she could catch her breath. Once Livy had looked up from her spot by the wall, still laughing, and Ron Cash was standing there in his school-issued blue windbreaker.

“You girls were holding hands,” he said. “Knock that off.”

It had ruined the game. They were eight or nine, just old enough to understand his insinuation, and they avoided each other for several days afterward.

Ron Cash's voice was high and prone to cracking, and she had always associated this with his knee: a
stiffness in both cases, perhaps caused by the same formative accident. She strained to hear him over the rustling of leaves. “I can't get by?” he said.

She was no longer looking at Nelson, but down at her hands instead, the better to concentrate on keeping still and quiet. She did not want to get caught there, though she supposed they weren't breaking any rules, technically speaking. It would be humiliating, that was all. She wished suddenly that she were not overhearing this conversation.

“I can't get through?” said the high, strained voice again. “You're saying I can't?”

“Nobody can get through now,” the policeman said.

“You can't block me in like this.”

“It's not up to me,” said the policeman. “But if you want a problem, you'll get a problem.”

“I have places to go.”

“Get back in your vehicle, sir. Go on.”

Livy was holding on to Nelson's knee, cradling her shoes in her other hand. They looked at each other. Nelson leaned close to her ear and whispered—the barest movement of air—“What is wrong with him?”

“He's an idiot,” Livy whispered. They heard the door slam, and then the truck turned laboriously around and headed away down Prospect Road. They sighted the policeman briefly through the gap in the bushes as he got back into his car.

“Let's get out of here,”
Livy whispered, and Nelson nodded. It was dangerous to overhear humiliation like that. Quavering, wheedling, angry Ron. As soon as they were safely around the bend, they climbed up into the Inskys' pasture and put their shoes on, straightening their stiff backs, relieved to speak in normal tones again.

By eleven thirty, Livy and Nelson were at the store again, having found nothing to satisfy their restlessness at either of their houses, or at the restaurant, or anywhere on the roads. Lomath was half a mile long, anchored at each end by an eighteenth-century textile mill, one of which was now the shooting range and restaurant where Livy worked, the other a large and useless tax burden on a group of carpenters who had bought it collectively decades before in the hope of turning it into apartments. For as long as Livy could remember, the carpenters' mill had contained only two apartments, and the rest of its vast open floor plan was filled with a boggling array of objects placed in storage by anyone willing to pay fifty dollars a year for the privilege: a phalanx of Chevy fenders propped together on the third floor, a mass of bicycle parts on the second, card tables and folding chairs and canoes, boxes and boxes of old
National Lampoons
and
Playboys
cached among winter coats and luggage and rusting tools. The original waterwheel had been amputated from its place over the Black Rock Creek and now lay abandoned in the basement,
jutting out from an earthen pit otherwise filled with the engine block of a 1974 Pinto station wagon. Livy had been warned to stay out of the mill on the grounds that she could get tetanus from the rusty door hinges or hantavirus from the piles of mouse shit in the attic, but she sometimes slipped in through one of the ground-floor windows in the back anyway. She liked to leaf through the old magazines and study the dirty cartoons, the plump Playboy bunnies and tailcoated men and the dowager women who kept them apart, a small cast of characters forever stumbling over each other in elevators and darkened rooms. The bunnies were drawn with pink areolae that startled her every time, even after years of returning to the dusty magazines that she vaguely sensed were corny in a way. Maybe it was because the areolae implied that other cartoon characters, elsewhere, were also naked under their clothes. She had shown the cartoons to Nelson when they were thirteen and had seen the same subtle shift happening behind his eyes, before they both turned to mocking the drawings. They leafed quickly past the actual photos, pretending indifference. At twelve, shortly after seeing the magazines for the first time herself, Livy had secretly written five pages of a play in which women in bathing suits kept losing their tops while being chased around a swimming pool by men in tuxedos. She became ashamed of the pages as soon as she'd written them, hid them under her mattress, and
burned them in the yard with a box of kitchen matches after her parents had gone to bed.

She and Nelson were, as far as she knew, the only people who trespassed in that mill. The other one had been expanded and converted into a button factory in the 1930s, then was shut down in the 1970s, and had been fertile ground for teenage delinquency during the many years of emptiness that preceded the restaurant and shooting range that occupied it now.

Idling around a mill building, open or closed, operating or hastily abandoned, had been the mainstay of shiftless teenagers in Lomath throughout the entire 250 years that the neighborhood had existed. Lomath had only been built in the first place to house the laborers at the two mills. They were Irishmen and Haitians baited there by recruiters at distant shipyards, and they came and went as the price of cotton rose and fell. Because of their transience it was a settlement of renters, resented and neglected by landlords, and the houses were put up small and square, fast and cheap.

The Marko house was a millworker house, built simply but too solid to fall down, and beside their driveway there were traces of two other, similar houses that had succumbed to fire fifty or a hundred years before. Livy's mother had planted flower beds around the foundations, and she still regularly found bits of charred wood
when she turned the earth. Clarence Green claimed that when his own father was young, one of the houses had been occupied by a couple who murdered their child. Livy's parents dismissed this as a lurid rumor, but Livy was inclined to believe it. Lomath was unincorporated, unidentified on most road maps, hidden from the highway and from larger Maronne by its ring of high ridges; she imagined that people there had always felt that no one was watching them.

At the store, Livy and Nelson found Livy's parents talking to Jocelyn, meeting her dark theorizing with polite expressions. The two teenagers nodded hello and went outside to the steps, where other neighbors were chatting and arguing. Clarence and Aurelia Green appeared. “The wires don't go through up there, not by the bypass,” Clarence was saying. He was about fifty, black, with short gray hair and a gentle set to his shoulders, and since he worked for the electric company his opinion on the power outage was valuable. “It has to be something they're doing with the whole grid.”

“But why are the cops here at the same time?” said Lena Spellar. Her lashless blue eyes looked pinker than usual around the edges. Lena was a hospice nurse, and she sometimes attended continuing-education seminars with Livy's mother, Mariel, who always spoke of the hospice specialization with particular respect. Livy's mother
was an intensive care nurse at the hospital, and she said that seeing a patient recover was the single redeeming satisfaction of the profession and she was in awe of any nurse who would willingly forgo it. Livy had always felt hushed around Lena for this reason. She was unobtrusive in public, a chlorinated blonde who spoke little. Dominic, the bigger of the two arc welders, was her son. He was in Livy's grade, and Livy sometimes found herself thinking of him the same way as his mother, so that his sullen, self-contained progress down the halls at school carried the dignity and mystery of close contact with the dying.

“Maybe it's a coincidence,” said Clarence. “It could still be a coincidence.”

“It's ridiculous,” said Paula Carden, a cousin of Clarence's, a foster mother by profession. She kept pausing to push her hair back off her forehead; in the heat, her curls slipped loose from the teeth of her headband, which made her look girlish. “I'm trying to cook all the meat in my freezer before it goes bad.”

“Jumping the gun, don't you think?” Clarence said.

“No sense waiting.”

“It's always the end of the world with you,” Clarence said, rolling his eyes.

By noon a dozen or so neighbors were gathered in front of the store, passing their few pieces of information back and forth. It was clear by then that no cars would be
passing, so the adults stood in the middle of the intersection and let their children run around as they pleased.

“It feels like a snow day,” Nelson said.

“How do you mean?” Livy said.

“Just kind of exceptional. Everybody stopping what they're supposed to be doing.” He nodded toward Dominic Spellar, who was leaning against the wall of the store with Brian Carroll. They had changed out of their welding clothes; Brian was wearing a basketball jersey that was too big for him. “Look, Dominic doesn't look worried.”

Livy laughed. “Looks like he's putting all his energy into it, too.” Dominic was enormous, broad-shouldered for a high school student and well over six feet tall, and he pressed this advantage constantly with a low, mumbling voice and a way of standing over people that made them worry they might trip over his feet.

“And Brian is feeding off his aura,” Livy added. Brian was shoring up his nonchalance with a cigarette, propped against the wall with his bony elbows out. He was the less intimidating of the two cousins, but also less predictable, faster-moving.

A few other teenagers were also pretending to be casual, but the adults were frank about their agitation, clumped together and talking loudly. The talk among them was repetitive, looping, studded with accusations.

“What's he look like?”

“I haven't
seen the picture.”

“A white guy.”

“Middle-aged white guy.”

“What's he doing here?”

“
Is
he here?”

“Wouldn't one of us know if he was?”

“Maybe one of us
does
.”

Noreen, an elderly woman with bobbed hair who was an aunt of Clarence and Paula's, and godmother to many children in the valley, had been provided with a folding chair and was sitting next to Jocelyn on the step. “I have a doctor's appointment,” she said. “Don't they know people have places to go?”