Rumors from the Lost World (8 page)

He made muscles with both arms. “It's time for my entrance,” he said. “Leo, get yourself composed and come on
down,
join the rest of the animals. I'll see you get exactly what you deserve.” Levoski sat very still for a few minutes, working up his nerve, telling himself there was something he had to do, right now, and then he labored down a different set of stairs to the kitchen. Marge was sitting alone in fluorescent glare. “Paul went AWOL,” he told her. “I meant to let you know.” She stared blankly at him. “You hear what I said? AWOL. Absent without leave. He deserted. They think. Nobody knows where the hell he is, to tell the truth. The boy was a lot of things, but he was never a coward.”

“Leon, I want to go home.”

“All right.” He took her hand.

“I want to go home,” she repeated. “Take me home.”

“This is a place where a Governor lived,” T. J. Raines yelled from another part of the house, “and now it's mine, because I'm
rich.”
His voice turned to the pitch of a barker at a sideshow. “And tonight, tonight we're going to
do
it!”

Great clouds wheeled across the moon. As they pulled into their drive, it cast a fluttering afterglow on the gunmetal stoop. After he unlocked the door and poured drinks for them both, Levoski tried to get hold of some secret. The water of Lake Michigan would be drawn up into clouds. Clouds turn into rain, snow. The same snow on his lawn, soiled by auto exhaust and pages from a newspaper, becomes clear water. It can find its way to Paul on the other side of the world.

Marge sipped her vodka. “Leon, let's get up early and go to Mass. We can light a candle for Paul. We can count our blessings.”

Levoski tapped his glass against the picture window. “Yeah, sure. Anything you say.” He stared into the street, trying to place her voice. He knew it from somewhere, it was very familiar. So was the neighborhood, duplexes mostly well-tended but only a step removed from nearby apartment complexes, landscaped but weather-cracked, bleak like the projects. A wreath on one door, a plaster-of-Paris Jesus in a picture window.

He saw someone on the sidewalk. Frayed jeans, logging shirt, boots a size or so too large. “Paul!” he shouted, and flung open the door. But Paul had a crewcut, short brisdes, and his pale angry face looked like the moon, whereas the features of the dark silent stranger two doors down were hidden by thick water-greased hair. The stranger paused for a moment, even tilted his head, then the screech of a car sent him on his way.

In bed, smelling of dust and whiskey, Levoski held hands with Marge until her steady breathing told him she was asleep. He jostled out of bed. The floor creaked like bones in a dark museum. He knew he would be up most of the night. And there was that patchwork job he vowed he would finish. Working in the cold without sleep would feel like purgatory.

I
n Alabama all roads lead to Tuscaloosa. Believe it or not,” the girl's mother says. Perhaps it's that path of least resistance that takes them to 1-59, that attracts her mother to the trailer park. To her, it's the average American life. “We'll stay for a month,” she says.

Nothing lasts forever, but it takes longer than that to leave. One month of rent, two months of living in with some guy, then something happens. Her mother sniffs it out, and after a week of socking away some money for the road, they force their way past the crucifix tacked to the door. The guy was so religious he wanted to baptize the girl. She told him she wasn't going to no church, especially not on his account, smarting off exactly the way her mother warned her against. “That's okay, honey,” he said, his voice nothing but throat. “We don't have to go to any church. I can do it right here in the tub.”

Finally their old Chevy squeals from its weedy nest in the trailer park like a motorbike. The guy shakes a fist, fools with his tractor cap until it covers the lines in his forehead, and squints into their dust. “To hell with crap,” her mother says. “I'm giving up crap forever. Turn on the radio and
go
, honey, that's our motto. Right, sweetheart? You listening, honey?”

At the cemetery plot, where her mother takes the girl to keep a promise, her daddy's grave is marked with some plastic yellow daisies in a mayonnaise jar. They put them there the day they crunched into town. The flowers are very old, but they haven't lost their color. The girl wipes the petals free of dust with the hem of her long shirt.

An Elvis look-alike is standing one grave over, with his back to them as though waiting for a bus. Her mother flounces her evil eye his way, cracking open her jaw, breathing through her nose like a retard, making the noise a dragon might make until the girl smiles. “Even down to the boots,” her mother whispers. “What's he doing here? Why's he waiting on us? You think he's got much cash?” She glances quickly at any gravestone in the vicinity large enough to hide a body behind. In any graveyard, she once told the girl, even the one where her daddy is buried,
especially
that one maybe, she expects the Voodoo Queen or someone alive and grassy to rise from the mud.

The Elvis look-alike seems unaware of them, scratches his scalp and shifts his weight. He's wearing skinny-toed cowboy boots the color of a snake. Her mother is having her fit in slow-motion, leaning over the grave, staring past the dates as though she can't figure them out. “They not gonna change,” the girl says. “It ain't a cash register.”

“You can say that again,” her mother says. “Your daddy was anything but a money machine. He was sure good at laying down and waiting for me to take care of him though, wasn't he? I don't have to go on about
that
, do I?” She leaps like a disco queen to the raised mound where the girl's daddy is sleeping and knocks over the flowers in the process. For a minute the girl cringes, thinking her mother is going into one of her danceplays. The girl's lived with them for years, they can happen anytime, at a pizza place, a motel, a backalley bar, a playground. Her mother pretends she's like listening to the world and letting the world make her move, throwing her arms about, collapsing in a fit, like the Lord's touched her or something even worse.

Instead, she hitches up her skirt and circles the mound as though wrestling with her husband's ghost, then moseys close to the little Elvis. “Boo,” she says.

He jumps a mile and a quarter. “Good God, woman, you queer or something? You like to raise the dead?”

She gives him her devil-smile. “Looks to me like the dead's already up and about.”

“Sneak up like that in a place like this? Good grief.” He don't sound nothing like Elvis when he talks. His voice is high and greasy and quakes a little like it needs to be oiled. He rattles his head, still taking in the sight of the girl's mother in a lowcut T-shirt. His Elvis hair falls into prince charming bangs, straight across his eyes. It's all spruced up and blue so the girl thinks of a blue moon, but he's almost a kid, more her age than her mother's. It turns out his own mother lives in the ground, his words, right next door to the girl's daddy. What a riot, the little Elvis says, all of us being so close together like that. He begins jawboning with the mother, the two of them swaying in rhythm like saplings.

Her daddy's a whole lot nicer now that he's dead. The girl can tell him anything and he listens. His grave still looks fresh, each letter chiseled neatly into the stone, and the grass is clipped. It's like a national park. All the neighbors are quiet and everything, and it's all paid for. The only thing your daddy's benefits covered was final expenses, her mother likes to say, at least
he
gets to rest easy now. Even with her mother chattering to the little Elvis, working him up, the girl can hear herself think here, tell her daddy things, stories he never had time for when he was drinking. He was always more interested in what she felt like under her dress than in what she might have to say. When her mother found out about it—the girl never told, the whole thing was all too complicated—she left him like she did the others and he always told the girl, mostly over the phone, how it dried him up. “I love you both,” was the last thing he said. She admits she liked him more when he wasn't around, except for the times he took her to the airport. He was a liar and all like that, but even so, they were kindred spirits.

The little Elvis comes with them for tacos, something the girl thought might happen. All the way to the taco joint, the girl sits in back and listens. Her mother sucks up while they pass through one of those pretty neighborhoods. It depresses the girl, all the houses with their big yards and enough space for a ghost to live in. The little Elvis, retard that he is, finally gets the picture, that her mother thinks he's the real thing and all like that, and his fingers crawl along the backrest. The girl's father used to do the same thing with his fingers on the bed when he came to tell the girl her bedtime story. Next thing the girl knows, those stubby Elvis fingers are massaging her mother's collarbone, but little Elvis is dumb enough to look back at the girl and grin. “What about it, Pork Chop? You want a taco, a big sloppy burritto with all the juice running out?” The little Elvis laughs. The girl rolls her eyes so he can know she thinks he's a dummy. “Take off them glasses, honey,” the little Elvis says. “Let me see your eyes real good.” The girl stares at him over the plastic frames like one of her two role models, the librarian at the branch library. He grins. “Whatever you want, sugar buns, it's all on me.”

“Mama,” the girl whines, “tomorrow was my dancing day.” She's wearing her only pair of leotards, pulled real fast from a rubber-coated line strung between the trailer and a pockmarked tree.

“Don't worry about it, sweetheart. The whole mystery of a woman's life lies ahead of you. Don't go attaching to some false idol.” Her mother honks at a tractor-trailer parked halfway into the two-lane. They're in redneck country again, looking for something swanky, a Chi-Chi's or like that, now that they know the little Elvis is picking up the tab. “Hurricane coming through these parts soon, anyway. Those trailers, they'll be in Mobile Bay. Besides, those library books in the back seat are way overdue. Didn't they come from Jackson? Honey, check the due date on them while you're riding back there, will you do that?”

There's one book, that's all. It's dusty, stained with cola and forty miles of rough road. Same old, same old, the girl thinks, mimicking her dance instructor, her other role model. She teaches kids for free once a week in the high-school gym a mile from the trailer. “There's not even a card in it, Mama. We lost the card.” It's a book about organic gardening they keep to compensate for the fact they've never had a garden or even turned a spade. It's one thing, like cooking, her mother refuses to do for any man, even in the very beginning.

Remove all sods, weeds, and existing plants, the girl reads. Add peat moss, sand, and sheep manure.
There's a lot in the book about perennials, annuals.
Shrubs have large, sprawling root systems and are dangerous to smaller plants.

The restaurant looks like Mexico. “We're on vacation!” her mother shouts. All the waitresses wear long flowered skirts. One long wall has a painting of an archway and a big hacienda. Everybody's happy, and the girl wonders whether they stay that way once they leave. They order almost everything on the menu, her mother winking the whole time. Little Elvis squints and checks his wallet, but her mother rubs his leg up real good and spits in his ear until he starts smiling. After the tacos and beans and rice and margaritas, plenty of those, he smacks his lips, loudly on purpose to show he liked what he ate. He's got both of them on the same side of the booth with him. “Where we going now, babes?”

Her mother is all lit up. “We going back to that graveyard to ask your mama's permission for some hanky-panky. Lots of nice soft grass in that graveyard. A man can feel right at home there, you get what I mean?” Her devil-smile is plastered across her face. The girl is getting drunk even without much tequila. She's grinning like a nitwit. The retard winks at her, rolls his tongue around in his mouth and slops down the rest of his drink like it's going out of style. He laughs from the gut, and for the first time actually sounds like Elvis, but there's no way the girl thinks he's cute. Then he forgets all about her because he needs both hands on her mother; he's trying to talk her into the motel next door. Her mother shushes him. “I don't leave my daughter in no parking lot,” she says. “It's a little different by the graveyard. She can take in some fresh air, study all the stars. It's good for her.” She's got him love-whispering by now, speaking to that place between her legs where she likes to say all men dream of going.

“We can leave the little one somewhere nice, sugar pie.”

“You'll see how little she is,” her mother says. Little Elvis squints again, trying to imagine the possibilities. The girl's mother is grinning her ass off. The poor sucker is nothing but meat. “Someone like you,” she says, “you must obtain
assent
from beyond before doing what we gonna do. We gonna bushwhack you, bring you back into the world of flesh and blood.”

Outside, it's almost dark. At the cemetery, the little Elvis makes out with the mother a little bit, then stumbles from the car. The girl climbs into the front seat. Then little Elvis gets her mother's door open, tries to pull her out. “Hey, wait a goddamn second,” she says. “You talk to your mama first. You get her okay,
then
call us. We'll come running.” She's got her hand climbing up his leg. He leans into a sloppy kiss, one hand on a breast. “Give
her
a reason to wait, too,” her mother says, motioning to the girl, and he leans across the seat, looks the girl flat in the face. “You the kind of sugar she thinks you is?” he says. The girl smiles an imitation of her mother's devil-smile and licks her lips. He pulls himself to her like a snake and kisses the girl, his crotch wiggling in the mother's lap. He sure don't kiss like a ghost, leaves the girl with her glasses all steamy and the taste of hair cream in her nose.