Nightwoods - Charles Frazier [103]
He enters the bedroom carefully, in case Bud is in there asleep. But only an unmade bed and more dirty clothes. No books, no records. Nothing anywhere to indicate personality or taste, nobody to point his pistol at. The closet is empty except for a pair of new palomino loafers. He begins opening drawers. Not enough clothes to fill a suitcase. But, in a bureau drawer, he finds a rubber-banded roll of bills. And then, in the nightstand drawers and under the mattress, identical rolls. Also a little brown leather pocket notebook.
He takes them into the living room and sits on the sofa and places the rolls upright on the coffee table. Muffles the flashlight with an amber glass ashtray and studies the notebook. Page after page, phone numbers and matching liquor orders. He unbands a roll and counts. Five hundred exactly. He doesn’t bother to reband the money or to count the other rolls. Together, the meaning of the book and the cash is simple. Whatever Bud has done the past couple of days, he hasn’t run far.
Stubblefield sits in the dark and waits, pistol in hand, trying to bring the diamond light back. If Bud shows up, point the pistol at him and ask some questions. See what happens next.
After two hours, Stubblefield unwinds the dirty bandage and drapes it over the money and the little book displayed on the coffee table. A message. He walks through the front door, and outside, big flakes of wet snow fall and immediately melt everywhere but in the grass. By the time he reaches the dam, snow falls much harder, brilliant and dizzying in the headlights.
At the Lodge, when he steps out of the car, snow falls on his hair, his shoulders, catches in his eyebrows. The lawn is white, and dawn is not even a faint luminosity in the clouds above the eastern ridges. In the kitchen, Maddie still sits at the table, drinking coffee. A pan of biscuits nearby, ready for the oven. She doesn’t wait for his question. Says, She’s still asleep. She needed it, but probably she’ll be mad if you don’t wake her up now.
Hoping to replace the pillow under Luce’s head with his leg before he wakes her, Stubblefield eases in. But his weight on the settle cushion does the job, and she reaches a hand to touch his knee and then sits up and finger-combs her hair. Gives him a glancing cheekbone kiss.
—Where have you been?
—What?
—You smell like outside.
—Out looking. But nothing.
She touches his hair, the drops of water.
—Rain?
—Snow.
She turns her palms up and looks at them a long time.
Stubblefield says, Yeah, bad night. Let’s eat and get back out.
CHAPTER 3
AT DAWN, COLD MIST, pale metal colors. Grey and yellow and blue. Then various degrees of early light as the sun burns through the fog. Each twig and fir needle in its own case of ice. The sun reflecting off the crystals, every which way except the usual. The ground deep in wet snow, and evergreen boughs drooping under the weight. Light bouncing crazy, eye-burning brilliant. Weird and exciting.
Frank lifts his hands above his shoulders and flutters his fingers. Dolores nudges him hard, smiling.
Breakfast is a jar of pickled okra, a bracing start to the morning. They vie to eat the biggest pods, and blink tears from their eyes while they crunch the white seeds between their back teeth. Dolores tips the jar to her mouth and drinks a gulp of the salty green vinegar and reaches it to Frank and he does the same. Both of them laughing at their own puckering and weeping. When they mount up and ride on, Sally’s mane dangles festive beads of ice.
Pathfinding would be more difficult if they had ideas of their own about where they are and where they want to go. Being lost means nothing. Especially when being found seems like a thing to avoid. Where they are is fine, so long as they move through it, onward to someplace else. So they keep looking ahead, and Sally keeps going.
Frank loses his hat. His ears become red, and then they get blue. Dolores takes off her ear-flapped toboggan and whacks him on either side of