Licorice Page 6

  “Shhhhh,” says Danka, pinching my arm. “Be quiet!”

  “Why?” I whisper in return.

  But Danka doesn’t answer. We continue down the path, sideways, because the gravel underfoot is slippery. Soon the path is no longer; there is only a slope heavily littered with beer cans and fast food bags. Across the river the trees are tall and dark, layering the hillside. Something hums. Powerlines. Something gurgles just ahead, but that turns out to be the river parting for a hunk of concrete. Danka picks her way along the bank as I follow until we’ve reached the shadow of the suddenly looming trestle. There we pause, and Danka cocks her head.

  “Listen,” she whispers. “Hear that?”

  “What?”

  “You listen, and tell me what it is that you are hearing. Then if you are hearing what I am hearing, then I will know for sure that that is what it is.”

  “I don’t hear anything,” I say.

  “Shhhhh. Just try.”

  I listen so hard that I believe I hear the insects walking on the river.

  “Nothing,” I say after a minute.

  “That!” says Danka. “Hear it?” and at once I hear a can skidding on the rocks.

  “Someone kicking a beer can. Probably a rat,” I add, looking around.

  “Not that,” pleads Danka. “Come on. Can’t you hear anybody snoring?”

  “He sleeps here?” I ask, astounded. We are no longer whispering.

  “Who?”

  “I thought he lived in the house in the parking lot.”

  “Maybe he does,” Danka answers. “But sometimes he sleeps here on an old mattress under the trestle.”

  “How do you know this? You don’t even know his name.”

  “What does his name have to do with it? If I thought his name was so important I would have asked him.”

  “You’ve spoken to him?”

  “No. Not really.”

  “Danka. What are we doing here?”

  “It was just a possibility. I thought, if….”

  “If what?”

  “If you were homeless, where would you sleep?”

  “In my car. Besides, he’s not homeless. He lives in that house in the parking lot.”

  “He does? For a fact? When did you see him there?” asks Danka eagerly.

  “I didn’t, but–”

  “I can picture it so clearly, him lying on the mattress with his hands on his beerbelly, snoring.”

  “Oh, Danka. You are really in love.”

  “I know. What should I do?” she asks, as we reach the road again. We make our way gingerly back to the car. “Maybe he doesn’t snore,” Danka says as we climb inside. “We should have listened more closely.”

  “Danka.”

  “I know.”

  I buckle my seatbelt. She starts the car. At once, the same pick-up truck we passed earlier appears from a lane in the woods. It pulls into the road behind us, revs its motor and passes, then slows down so suddenly we are driving bumper to bumper. Danka passes but the truck squeals ahead of us in return. The truck’s cab light is on and we can see three teenage boys drinking out of a bottle, laughing at us.

  “Lock your door,” I say.

  But Danka reaches into her purse for her filter and cigarette, then finds her pewter lighter nestled in the space between our seats. When she gives me the cigarette to hold, its bright ash shakes with my sudden fear.

  “Those boys are my son’s age,” says Danka, and takes the cigarette back as she makes a U-turn and applies more gas. Seventy, soon eighty miles an hour, but it’s no use; the road is too flat, too straight.

  “They’re following us,” I say, terrified.

  “No, they’re not. They’re chasing us,” says Danka. But Danka is calm, happy. She slows down until the truck is nearly upon us, then does another U-turn, and waves as we shoot past the boys.

  “What do you think this is?” I ask frantically. “A game?”

  “What do you think it is?”

  I almost reply, “I think they are going to rape and murder us,” but find myself unable to say such a thing to person who survived her childhood in Skarzysko. She used to hear the inmates joking, “Tomorrow you’ll be soap”. Surely Danka would know better than I. I take her cigarette and put it to my lips, not breathing. The truck whizzes by us again, honking its horn, and disappears up the same lane from which it appeared.

  “They’re gone,” I whisper.

  “Don’t worry,” says Danka. “They’ll be back. But all you have to do is beg them to kill you. Then they won’t do it. They’ll be suspicious. You’ll see.”

  I unbuckle my seatbelt, having decided it would be better to die in a car crash than be stuck on the seat with three teenage boys and Danka.

  “Please lock your door.”

  “What difference does it make,” says Danka, crossing her legs in their black hosiery. “You think three boys won’t smash a window? If they were women, I’d be trembling, also. Mean women are meaner than mean men. Say that fifty times. It will make you feel better.”

  I’m still saying it as, alone, we make our last pass through Bloomingham into the fields, where the night has reached its coppery turning point. Having never been so alert at this hour before, I can see its allure. It’s as tranquil as no-man’s land.

  “Mean women are meaner than mean men,” I recite. “That’s fifty, I think, but I still don’t know if it’s true or not.”

  “It is,” says Danka. “Men puzzle more easily, right in the middle of things. You’ll see. I’ll slow down. I’ll give them something to wander about.”

  I whip around in my seat. The truck is tailing us again; how could I not have noticed? One of the boys is asleep, his head slung back against the window of the truck, but the others are only bleary-eyed. The one in the middle is staring at me. To look tough I stare back, but I’m quaking inside. His gaze is as blank as a bull’s, drained of energy by the live wire that is the rest of his body. Danka slows to ten miles an hour, opens her window and waves with a flutter of fingers. Is she crazy? Or does she know what she is doing? Maybe she has a plan. Still driving, she reaches into her handbag, finds a bottle of nail polish, unscrews the top, applies the delicate brush to a run in her stocking. Now I know she is nervous, too; she had meant to use clear polish, this polish is plum, a wet purple bruise.

  “If you beg them to rape you, too, does that mean they won’t do that, either?” I ask.

  “Whoever said such a thing? I can’t imagine – but watch this.”

  Danka lightens her foot on the gas, lets the car glide to a halt. Smack. The truck rear-ends us, the three boys yelp, and in a second we take off like a rocket.

  “You see what I mean? They’re stupid,” says Danka, calm as can be when enough time has passed. “That’s out, I see.”

  “What?”

  “That cigarette.”

  Ashes litter my blue jeans, the dashboard, the tops of my feet. Now I practice composure. If I could be like Danka. … I twist the cigarette free of its holder and drop it elegantly into the ashtray.

  “Breakfast?” I ask casually. “We could go to Bob’s Big Boy for bacon and biscuits. Say that fifty times.”

  “You’ve got to be joking,” says Danka. “It is nearly five o’clock in the morning. No, thank you. I am going to bed. I need my rest. Besides, William will be having bad dreams. Do you believe that? He grades papers in his toga, and has bad dreams. I have such an old man for a husband. I always know what to buy him for his birthdays – lined slippers, reading pillows, one day I will buy him a lap desk.”

  “Why not cooking tools?” I ask, my mouth still dry, my voice still unsure of itself. “Like cookbooks, aprons–”

  “Aprons!” yells Danka. We have started to laugh. “Tea cozies! Oh, God. The man I have married!”

  “The father of your children!” I say.

  “Well, not exactly,” says Danka.

  We glide back into town, feeling safe again. There are trucks on the highway, headlights on, and a wo
man rocking on a porch in a bathrobe, reading a map. It’s a steamy dawn. Danka titters, then goes silent and still all at once.

  “God, I am sleepy,” she says. “Why don’t I drive straight to my house, drop you off, let you walk home? You’re the hungry one. You can stop on the way home for breakfast.”

  “Why don’t you drive me home.” I say.

  “That’s all right. You’ll have a nice walk, feel refreshed when you get there.”

  “If you don’t drive me home, I will tell William what you told me.”

  “What?”

  “About your children.”

  “What about them?”

  “They’re not his.”

  “They are, too. They’re not mine. You must be shameful telling me I would lie to my husband about such a thing.”

  “All right,” I agree. “Just stop. Let me out.” She does. There’s a U-Haul parked at the curb, the backside open, chairs on a ramp. I have a terrible urge to sit on one. It’s velvet with covered buttons and gleaming mahogany legs and arms. The velvet is cranberry mostly, with blues and pinks. If I weren’t so spacey, I’d do it, I’d sit. Instead I simply gaze, half asleep on my feet, until someone says, “Liz, you all right?”

  “Just tired,” I say. It’s a history professor whose class I sat in on a couple of years ago. Her husband’s a lawyer.

  “You moving?” I ask.

  “We’re blowing this popsicle stand.” She laughs, drops a box on the velvet seat of the chair, carries both into the shadows of the van. Lonely, I walk away before she comes back out, and when I reach home I sit on the porch swing awhile sipping cold water and eating a shoelace of black licorice, not wanting to wake up Daniel. He’s upstairs in our bed; I hear his sighs escaping through the window. He left the kitchen nice and clean; the jars of powders aligned on the counter, the balance wiped and covered, three spoons, one pipet, and several spatulas drying in the dish rack.

  But there is no place to lay my head on this swing, all hard wood slats and one saw-dusty pillow. And the yard is slick with dew. I lay my head on my knees, rock for a minute and decide to take a nap in the spare room on Gail’s old sheets that must smell of tangled bodies. Down the hallway I go, removing my clothes, and open the guest room door. The blinds are drawn, and the room does smell of bodies, but clean ones, sweet and dreamy. On the bed the sheets are velvety but won’t cover me up; I tug and tug, but the other side of the bed keeps tugging them back. Odd, how it takes me so long to realize I’m not alone. There’s a naked person here, murmuring in sleep. It’s not Daniel, I know, because he’s upstairs, and it’s not Gail because the hand suddenly on the pillow is unmistakably a man’s. I won’t scream, I think. Better to sneak out and lock him in the room before calling the police. But the sight of the fingers stops me, and in a minute I know whose they are. They are sun-browned and callused, but the backs are black fuzz, so soft on the eyes I almost drift off to sleep. The knuckles are smooth, the fingernails rimmed with dirt. I place my own hand on top, give his knuckles a squeeze.

  “Wake up,” I whisper, and he sits up, terrified. It’s him, the Soho Tree Man, bare shoulders shaking, hand on his throat. He’s not naked, after all. He’s wearing briefs of creamy satin, slick as can be, with a watery, rainbow sheen.

  “Where’s Gail?” he finally manages. “I think you got the wrong room.”

  “Nope.”

  “Oh,” he says, looking me over apologetically. “I’ve seen you around. Nothing personal. It’s just that I want Gail, you know? And if she came back and found you in her…”

  “In her what?”

  “In her bed.”

  “She won’t. Believe me. Don’t you know what’s going on here? Do you know you’re in my house?”

  “This is Gail’s house” he says.

  “My house.”

  “But this is Gail’s room.”

  “My spare room. My guest room. Gail was my guest, for a couple of days. That’s all.”

  The Tree Man shakes his head. His hair is down around his shoulders, feather upon feather.

  “I could have you arrested,” I say to him gently.

  He shakes his head again, grinning nervously. How surprisingly frail he looks. I had thought he was an eagle, but he isn’t, he is only a wren.

  “You might let me go to sleep in my own house,” I recommend.

  Shocked, he hands me a corner of sheet, then drapes the folds over my chest.

  “Seriously?” he whispers after a moment.

  “Seriously what?”

  “Everything you told me.”

  I nod.

  “So I guess I better get my ass out of here.”

  “My husband’s upstairs,” I tell him.

  “Where’s Gail?”

  “I don’t know, exactly. She left. She’s a real sweet potato.”

  “I know,” he says sadly.

  I lay my head on the pillow, and on the verge of sleep I realize what it was I’d meant to say. Not sweet potato. Hot potato. She’s a real hot potato.

  But when I open my eyes to tell him, he’s gone.

  INTERVAL ONE

  THE STAIRWAY leading from the front hall to the second floor of Ben and Leah’s house consists of six steps, then a broad, bare landing where a window looks out, then five more steps climbing to a corridor always littered with stray bits of laundry. At the landing the stairs jackknife, and the window frames a view of a lawn sloping down to the creek where some saplings are planted. On the ground floor just behind the front hall, beneath the six ascending steps, is a cubby lined with coat hooks and high, narrow shelves where Ben and Leah store an assortment of items: boots, gloves, hats, binoculars, even a set of barbells. Hanging among the coats are several net bags and leather-handled baskets, one—Leah’s favorite – with a purple stripe woven into the straw. On the floor is a mess of shoes and toys, also the telephone. The oddest thing is a medicine cabinet hung on the wall, mirrored door and all. Inside on the flimsy glass shelves is where they stack the bills.

  Tonight Ben pulls handfuls of bills off the shelves, then sits on the floor to sort through them for clues. Simon is quiet in his father’s lap, one torn envelope balanced on his knee. He is picking his nose. First, Ben scans the long distance calls on the telephone bills-her mother, his mother, her sister, her glaze-supplier in New Jersey-but finding only the usual begins shuffling aimlessly hoping for letters from travel agents, from airlines, even sweepstakes announcements. There’s nothing, though, and that’s just it, because whatever it was, she would have taken it with her. Daniel has a plan; we listen, we nod, and pretty soon we’re all busy looking for what’s gone. At once, I find a missing pair of canvas platform sandals; that is, they are not on the shelf where they are ordinarily, and Daniel finds a raincoat missing from the second coat hook. The purple-striped basket is gone, as well, along with a twenty pound barbell and a wide-brimmed hat. Leah’s sunglasses are not on the dining room table, but then again, they often need to be hunted. So, we hunt, and give the hunt seven minutes, which is how long it usually takes Leah to find them.

  Afterwards we gather at the wobbly table, empty-handedly bearing our hodgepodge of clues. Leah, it seems, was not taken entirely by surprise. (“Taken by surprise” has become, in this town, a horrifying pun, as if “surprise”–winged, taloned–might swoop down at any moment and take any one of us.) Clearly Leah had a plan, as the things she brought with her add up to a kind of forecast – sunshowers, we agree, and we identify a few possibilities. Vancouver, Mississippi, Seattle, Maine, really anywhere damp as long as it’s far enough away, because she took the whole stack of Sunday Times magazines as if for reading on a train. She chose a cookbook, too, although it takes us a while to figure out which one’s missing from the shelf. It was a present from Ben, a book of international sweets. For a minute we imagine her preparing those foods-the pastries, the syrups, the delicate custards – for a tableful of guests whose faces and names we don’t recognize. Once, because she found it amusing, she read to us a passa
ge from a recipe for Indian jamuns. “Display the sweetmeats on a serving platter of unusual beauty,” Leah read, and recalling this I quickly open the cabinet where she keeps her serving platters, but all of them are there; the raku, the stippled pastel, the hand-painted floral.

  “She must be headed someplace where she can work on pots,” I say, and Daniel stares at me as if I’ve said something really stupid, which of course I have.

  “She can work on pots here any damn time she wants,” says Ben, bewildered, wounded. Simon pulls a platter from the open cabinet, distracting us, at which we notice all at once that little Stevie is not in the room, we haven’t seen him in a couple of minutes, he’s gone, he’s missing, and we stand unnaturally until hearing the thump of his crawling.

  BEN CONSIDERS the presence of Leah’s winter jacket still hanging on a coat hook to be an encouraging sign, suggesting that she plans to return before winter if only to pick it up, but I don’t tell him Leah mentioned to me recently that she was due for a new one; the armpits on that one have always been tight. She told me this as we were strolling to the reservoir a bit behind the men, talking about possessions. About how much things mattered. I commented on the men’s cut-offs, so threadbare and torn we could peek at their bottoms.

  We did, for a moment.

  “Men’s bodies never change,” I remarked. “Any clothing a woman had that was that old wouldn’t fit her anymore.” It was a fact to which I alone am an exception among the women I know.

  “Really,” Leah said. “Anything pre-Simon, forget it, it doesn’t fit me under the armpits these days. Across the back.”

  Then, the thing about the winter coat. Which seems portentous, now, as if she’d known we three would be sitting here. She didn’t, though. Not in advance, and I believe that with all of my heart. She must have realized all at once that she was leaving, too late to stop it from happening. The straw basket over her elbow, the rain hat crammed into the sleeve of the coat, the sunglasses askew on the top of her head amid haphazard strands of hair. Then a second later she was gone.