Want Not (26 page)

John Rye hissed, “Don’t you touch that.”

“Easy, cowboy,” the deputy replied.

“I said put it down.”

Flaunting the banjo electric guitar–style, the deputy took three steps toward John Rye and, grinning, said, “You gwine go all Rambo on me?”

John Rye said nothing.

“Are ye?” the deputy said.

John Rye felt his molars grating together.

The deputy leaned in close enough for John Rye to smell the midmorning’s Slim Jim on his breath. “We gwine find her,” Micah heard him whisper. “We know what you done.”

But they didn’t: find her, or come close to establishing her fate.

“So what’d they ever decide?” Talmadge had asked Micah. This was early on, when they were riding back from Burning Man to San Francisco in the back of Lola’s camper van. At this point Talmadge was still unsure of the dynamic—unsure who this girl was who’d rescued him, clothed him, fed him, and was presently captivating him with her mad sad sylvan history; unsure also who the other girl was, the butchy surly one driving up front; and furthermore unsure what his role might be in this inscrutable threesome, if any. Fate had handed him something new and alluringly weird; best to roll with it.

“Missing person,” she’d explained. “No note, no signs of suicide, no signs of anything. Like she’d ascended to Heaven, man—body and soul and everything.”

This dissatisfied Talmadge, who despite his Catholic upbringing had little patience for open mysteries. “What do
you
think?”

The question seemed to knock her off balance, as if, improbably, she’d never quite formulated her own hypothesis. “At first,” she said, haltingly, “I thought—I mean, I guessed I hoped—she’d just gotten lost. Like I’d gotten lost a lot, you know? Somewhere out by the gum swamp, where it’s easy to get all turned around and shit. That’s what I’d tell my daddy at night—that Mama’d gotten lost, that she’d come back, and he used to put his hand on my cheek and say, ‘Then God’s gonna lead her back home.’ But after a while I guess I knew that wasn’t true. After that I used to—I dunno, I guess I wanted to believe she’d died some peaceful death, got snakebit in some beautiful holler or something, died with a smile thinking bout us even though, I mean, who dies with a smile? I was just a kid, man.”

“What about now?”

“Now?” She sighed. The imbalance Talmadge had noted earlier began to make sense: She didn’t much like her hypothesis. “Now I think she must’ve just . . .
gone,
you know? Hitched a ride somewhere, I don’t know where. Just started all over again. Changed her name, changed everything. Maybe she had more inside of her than anyone knew.” Another sigh, a wag of her head. “More conflict, I mean. More . . . look, Daddy couldna been easy, he wasn’t easy as a daddy, so . . . she just—left.”

For a long while Talmadge was silent, hushed by his proximity to genuine human tragedy—something he’d never personally experienced, unless you counted Dick Bertrand ditching Talmadge’s mother after twenty-three years of marriage and all the resultant domestic mayhem that had engendered, all of which, while genuinely painful to him, Talmadge understood as middle-class farce: tragedy wearing a pair of pleated khaki trousers and sipping a gin and tonic on the lawn. Still, he bristled at the openness of the case. People didn’t just
vanish.
Not with Facebook and everything. “What about your dad?” he pressed her. “What’s he think?”

“That,” she said, pausing to inhale, “is where things got ugly.”

At first, she explained, John Rye blamed himself. For leaving Janie alone all those weeks, overloaded with chores and crunched by fear and loneliness; how terribly it must’ve ached, he realized, to be feeding those snuffling pigs every morning, casting scratch grain to the chickens, all the while friendless and ignorant of the whereabouts of her child and husband, and then, worse, holing herself up in that cabin come nightfall, staring at Micah’s empty bed or maybe curling herself atop it as if to make sure the straw mattress didn’t exhale its telltale dent. He’d seen Janie wrecked by the loss of one child; to lose Micah, even temporarily . . . she couldn’t have withstood it, he now realized. It must’ve been too much. This line of thinking led to wider self-recrimination, as he expanded the circumference of his guilt: for neglecting Janie’s role as the not-seer of divine orders, as the disciple to his prophet, for having demanded double faith from her—faith in his sacred flaming vision, but also faith in
him,
as the messenger, the reporter, the interpreter of that vision, in him as holy vessel. Had he deserved such faith? And had he—had he really—(these doubts came to him in the predawn darkness, as he’d watch Micah asleep with Tusker, watch their ribs rise in syncopated rhythm)—had he really actually
seen
what he’d thought he’d seen? What if he’d misread the message? What if it hadn’t been God?

He’d known a gun-team leader back in Vietnam. Corny college kid from Indiana, everyone called him Early. Early went out on patrol with his squad one day, but some dipshit grunts up on a hill, noting movement in the bush, opened up on them with mortars without knowing what-all/who-all they were shooting at. Friendly fire: They took the whole squad out. Owing to V.C. snipers, John Rye’s squad couldn’t get down into the valley until the next day, when they found Early, lying face-up in a ditch, mangled but smiling. “Jesus?” he’d asked, all beatific-like, as if the Son of Man Himself—decked in fatigues with a Lucky Strike tucked behind his ear—had come to fetch him at the head of a heavenly infantry squad. “Not yet, asshole,” one of the corpsmen joked, but Early said again, with tender recognition, “Jesus,” looking straight into the gas mask of the corpsman, who flipped Early over before John Rye could warn him not to . . . then, boom. Early’d been booby-trapped. The explosion shattered the corpsman’s gas mask, blinding him instantly. For several long minutes, despite his whole side having been blown out, Early kept calling to Jesus like a happy kid playing Marco Polo in a pool, until finally another corpsman, trying to pluck the glass out of the blinded corpsman’s shredded eye sockets, shouted, “Will someone please tell this motherfucker that Jesus is busy and will call him back later?” Remembering this now, John Rye drew an ugly crooked line in his head between himself and Early: Jesus hadn’t been there in that free-fire zone. And maybe Jesus hadn’t been there beside that fiery Ford Fairlane on Thorngrove Pike. Maybe it had all been a trick of the mind, optical adrenaline, some sort of merciful psychic response to the trauma he’d witnessed: the brain overlaying random postcard images of serenely verdant earth to screen the sight of all that trapped burning humanity. An eleven-year trick of the mind that had sent him fleeing into the woods and had cost him the only woman he’d ever truly loved.

At this juncture, John Rye could have repented or relented—same difference. Surrendered to his doubts, come down from the ridge, started fresh back in Knoxville. He didn’t. Instead he dug in, burning those weedy doubts out of his mind—it’d been God all right, he decided, and who was to say Jesus hadn’t been there that day in La Drang Valley, invisible but to Early’s doomed eyes?—and finally acquitting himself, after that long mental trial, for Janie’s disappearance. The latter he accomplished by widening the circle of blame further—diffusing it, letting it bleed over his property lines to the outer world. Janie, he told himself, had been happy
until.
Janie had been fine
until.
Until
the State of Tennessee had invaded,
until
Micah had been swiped from them, until John Rye had had to go off on his terrible chase to bring her back home where she belonged.
They’d
done it, not him.
They’d
run Janie off. Or maybe, he got to thinking, they’d done worse—paranoia trailed his grief, and late at night, as he pieced and re-pieced the evidence together, other, darker theories blossomed. He thought of that bucktoothed deputy, fingering Janie’s banjo, that Slim Jim on his breath smelling like moldered lust. And, too, he thought of the deputies who’d come to take Micah, with their service pistols drawn, and the way they’d eyed Janie as she’d clung to her daughter . . . he’d seen that kind of look before, on GIs sweeping through rice-paddy villages on Search & Destroy missions, surveying the skin-curves of the daughters and the mama-sans, knowing their M16s gave them the privilege to take anything they wanted, sometimes taking all they wanted back behind a hooch while the rest of the squad waited smoking cigarettes, one of them shouting after a while, “Jesus, Randall, get a move on already! You don’t gotta make her come too.”

Homemade corn whiskey fertilized these theories. The whiskey he got from a neighbor, Motee Lusk, who’d come calling during the search to offer the use of his coondogs and been impressed by John Rye’s primitive setup. Motee, who was seventy and lived on disability, had an ideological beef against government in any form, and after a while was spending long afternoons at the cabin appending exclamation marks to every one of John Rye’s theories while contributing ever-darker scenarios of his own. “They mighta got rid of her just to chase you out,” he offered. “Been coal-company men crawling up and down this here valley. Me and you sittin square on what they want.”

During these slanted, boozy hours Micah was all but forgotten. “You gwine cook that girl supper?” Motee would sometimes say at twilight, jogging John Rye back into the present. “Fry her up some bacon, how bout.”

By this time John Rye had said to hell with the re-custody agreement and all its stipulations, had burned the paperwork in the fireplace—this came as a relief to Micah, who had zero desire to ever return to a school—and told his daughter he’d shoot that goddamn social worker if she dared show herself on their ridge. Motee loaned him a battered AK-47 which the two men would occasionally take turns firing down the ridge—drunkenly, and without much aim. Micah made the discovery of her first menstrual period during one of these firing bouts and for several terrified minutes feared she’d been struck by a ricocheting bullet.

In time Motee’s nephew and grandsons started hanging around, ostensibly to hunt but mostly to pass a quart jar of white dog down the porch. “You respect this here man,” Motee told them. “He been privy to the voice of God.” Respecting Micah, however, wasn’t listed in the rules. John Rye either didn’t see or ignored the doggy looks the boys directed at Micah, too preoccupied by his status as the leader of what they’d come to call the Unicoi Holy Freedom League, the boys mumbling “I hear that” to every anti-government rant and scriptural snippet John Rye could muster, their eyes fixed upon Micah, nevertheless, as she’d dump slop for the pigs or stand chopping at the earth with a hoe. It wasn’t long before she’d outgrown her mother’s old bras, and the boys took openmouthed notice of the loose swing of her breasts and the way her nipples embossed her dress-front.

Micah was not without her own curiosities, and one day, at fourteen, she led the youngest, gentlest, and gawkiest of the Lusk boys, Johnny, down to a deep hole in the stream where she often went swimming. Sharing a sixteen-by-twenty-four-foot cabin with her father, she’d noted the way a man’s nether regions could expand and contract; getting out of bed in the morning, to head to the outhouse, her father’s bedclothes were often strangely tentpoled at the middle. After daring Johnny Lusk to skinny dip, she asked him what made a man’s thingamajig get big.

After he’d shown her she floated nude on her back in the cold spring water, watching the backlit oak leaves flitting and swaying greenly above her, feeling strangely nonplussed.

“Is that what sex is?” she asked Johnny, who’d retreated to the shore to put his clothes back on, itchy to leave.

“That’s right,” he told her, chewing on a blade of grass, not looking at her.

“I can’t say I like it all that much.”

“I ain’t sure you’re supposed to,” he said.

If John Rye possessed any inkling about what his daughter was doing with the Lusk boys (after Johnny came Nate and T.J., though never Wade despite his insistent pleas) down at the swimming hole (and by the side of Wisner Creek, in the bed and the cab of T.J.’s pickup, and in the trailer Nate shared with his mama and three sisters), he never let on. Harlotry, he would’ve called it, in full Old Testament rage. By this time, however, Micah sensed she’d become less a person than a symbol to him: a spectral memory, like Janie, that he used for stoking his own resentment and that of his disciples. A martyr to his jumbled cause. Railing against the government, the authorities, all the enemies of liberty, he would often cite the abduction of his wife
and
daughter, as if Micah wasn’t standing there behind him with a plate of hot fried chicken for him to eat, rolling her eyes. No doubt puberty was also a factor. He
had
lost his little girl—as irrevocably, in some sense, as he’d lost Janie. This new woman-child who’d taken her place bewildered and frequently unsettled him, and though a distant gleam of tenderness still lit their relationship—without irritation Micah cooked for him, swept and cleaned the cabin, fetched him rags wrung with cold springwater when it felt as if the morning light had cracked his head open like an egg—he found it ever harder to talk with her except about the livestock, weather, or snake-sightings. Wordless hours crept by after nightfall, during which they seemed like different species of birds forced to share a nest. Consequently Micah spent more and more evenings at the Lusks’ trailers, zooming back and forth on Motee’s four-wheeler, while John Rye read scripture aloud in the empty cabin by the glow of a lamp powered by a generator Motee had generously donated to make refrigerated beer available to the members of the Unicoi Holy Freedom League.

T.J.’s trailer was where Micah met Leah. Leah was nineteen, from Marin County, California, trippy and lithe and so resolutely blonde that you had to look discourteously close to confirm the presence of eyebrows. Her venture capitalist father had made millions backing internet browser technology in its protean days; Leah disdained the family wealth—a barcode tattoo on her neck was a rebuke to the “commodification” of humanity—though not earnestly enough to forswear her trust fund. For several weeks she’d been hiking the Appalachian Trail solo, aiming to thru-hike all the way to Maine before winter. At a gas station near the trailhead she’d met T.J. and Wade, who, after elbowing each other about the wedgie-like cling of her denim short shorts, invited her back to the trailer to help them drain their brand-new case of Bud Light. Leah didn’t drink, but, having vowed to embrace every possible life experience along the trail, took them up on the offer anyway. Wade rode in the truck bed on the drive back, his amazed and paled face so close to the rear window that T.J. kept slamming the brakes to squash him into the glass.