Nightwoods - Charles Frazier [102]
ONE IN THE MORNING and the weather bleak, Stubblefield drives the lakeshore until he hits pavement, then turns in the direction of town. Cold rain falls through the headlights, drizzling forty-weight viscous down the windshield, on the cusp of deciding to freeze.
Luce had been exhausted from lack of sleep and gainless searching, hardly able to speak from calling the children’s names into black woods. Both of them frazzled from many cups of Maddie’s bitter gritty coffee. At midnight, Stubblefield had led Luce to the settle and calmed her to sleep with her head in his lap. Saying meaningless phrases about how everything was going to be all right. Kneading her shoulders, smoothing his palm down her face from hairline to jaw, fingers through her hair from brow to crown, fingernails on her back under her shirt.
He eased her head onto a throw pillow and covered her with an afghan, put on his jacket with the .32–20 in the pocket, and walked into the kitchen. Maddie sat at the table with a cup of coffee, and she looked a question at him, and he had said, Sleeping.
It suddenly occurred to him that Maddie hadn’t been home since the kids disappeared. He said, Where did you stay last night?
Maddie said, Luce’s not got but about forty bedrooms and doesn’t use a one of them. I made do.
Stubblefield said, Thank you, and headed out the back door, grabbing the flashlight on the way.
Now he drives across the dam and along the shore to town like through a tunnel, a dark wall of woods rising to the left and the lake barely visible to the right, an emptiness behind the rain. Stubblefield is terrified of the next couple of hours, not at all expecting to find the kids and be the hero. But the night at the Roadhouse keeps coming back around. Bud dismissing him as no kind of threat, then slicing him open. Luce scared but glaring Bud straight in the face. The cut hand is still wrapped in windings of muslin bandage, dingy and unchanged for the past two frantic days. Underneath, a wide pink scar and a thin line of brown scab.
If he finds Bud home alone, it probably means the kids are dead. Then what? Stubblefield’s first fallout with Bud went poorly, and the terror of that moment still grabs at his breath. But a saying of his grandfather’s loops in Stubblefield’s head. Ride to the sound of guns. A stirring sentiment, except his grandfather never spent a day in anybody’s army, which could serve as an excuse to make a three-point turn and head back toward the Lodge. Yet Stubblefield keeps on aiming the Hawk forward.
For a short while around the black lake, he succeeds in holding a bright image in his mind, a pinpoint of diamond light. Convinced that hope rules us, not fear. But at the city limits sign, the light blinks out. In its place, the blood and darkness he saw down inside his cut hand. Still, he drives on into town and parks. Walks two blocks in the rain. Wet dead leaves on the pavement and windows dark in the bungalows. Bright rings misting around the scallop-shaded streetlamps.
At Bud’s place, no light shines. But the green pickup in the driveway casts fresh waves of fear. Stubblefield draws the .32–20 from his coat pocket and goes through the side yard to the back door. Gives the knob a slow twist, to no effect. The lock is nothing much, though, and he’s brought a stout wood-handled screwdriver from the Lodge. One yank outward, and the door pops open with a screech of old wood shredding. Stubblefield presses his back to the clapboards of the outside wall and waits. He listens on and on. But nothing. No sound of children, no Bud coming with his knife to check out the noise.
Stubblefield steps inside and switches on the flashlight in quick bursts to orient himself. In the kitchen, dirty dishes in the sink and on the counter. In the living room, a dirty white T-shirt on the floor, a pair of white socks with two red bands around