Nightwoods - Charles Frazier [24]
She found the porch empty and the Lodge too, best she could tell in a quick pass shouting their names. She ran down the lawn to the lake. Along the shore. Up the creek and over the ridge and back to the Lodge. Shouting all the time as she went. Red-faced and blowing air. Frantic and terrified.
Luce ran back to the house, but they hadn’t returned. She drank water from the spring dipper and walked the other way along the lakeshore and up the next creek and over the next ridge and back to the Lodge. Nothing. She was less frantic and more exhausted and shamed within herself, for she had let them go.
She had let her attention turn away for a moment, and suddenly they were nowhere. Bears and panthers out there in the mountains. Not to mention snakes. The children were capable of hiding behind a stout tree trunk and not making a move or drawing a breath while you walked ten feet away yelling your lungs out, calling their names to the world with evident desire to reunite with them.
Luce went back down by the lake, where they surely had no better sense than to drown themselves, and found them standing at the bank throwing rocks at each other. She ran and tried to hug and kiss them and they would not look her or each other in the eye. They stood stiff against her hugs with their necks twisted around, as if something mildly interesting was happening down the road.
Luce followed their eyes and saw rising above the treetops a shape of black smoke against the ash-colored sky. It might have looked more like a funnel or a mushroom, but in her mind it was an exact projection of old Stubblefield’s empty house, which stood on the other side of the ridge.
CHAPTER 6
LIGHT RAIN MISTED west across the island. Cool for the season. The Atlantic olive drab, and either way you looked, a thin band of black seaweed wavered along the tideline into the distance like one long cursive sentence in a lost alphabet. Stubblefield put on a raincoat, glanced in the mirror, and wished somebody else looked back. Outside, he passed the rusty showerhead where end-of-summer beach tourists should have been washing off sand and salt. Except it had been rainy for so long that they all checked out and climbed into their station wagons and drove home.
Over the dune to the empty beach, and then he slogged north in wet sand just above the runout of waves. The past winter, locals had referred to Stubblefield as that man who walks at night. This summer, he had been that man who swims at night. But he wouldn’t be doing either in this weather. A few hundred yards farther, and he turned inland at the beach shop. Air mattresses and Frisbees and hula hoops. In the window, a Coppertone display with the little tan girl’s white ass uncovered by the dog tugging at her bikini bottom. A page taped to the inside of the door said, Be back when the weather clears.
Well, you could only hope. And Stubblefield really appreciated the casual attitude toward business. But at some point you quit counting on anything too far in the future.
He walked toward town. Past a lighthouse and the entrance to a historic fort. Lots of contention here, back in the past. Some progression of displacement involving Indians, Spaniards, English, and, lately, us. For better or worse. On down the sidewalk past a salt marsh, the high school, a hamburger joint, a church.
At the beginning of Centre Street, Stubblefield reached the milestone of the movie theater. An ordinary-looking small-town façade. But behind it, all was provisional, the building like a big Quonset hut, a corrugated metal barrel-vault. It