Nightwoods - Charles Frazier [3]
They sported new clothes the State had given them. A blue cotton print dress and white socks and white PF Flyers for the girl. A white cotton shirt and stiff new blue jeans and black socks and black PF Flyers for the boy. Both children had hair the color of a peanut shell, standing ragged on their heads as if the same person had done the cuts in a hurry, with only the littlest regard to gender.
Luce said, Hey there, you two twins.
The children didn’t say anything, nor even look at her or at each other.
—Hey, Luce said, a little louder. I’m talking to you.
Nothing.
Luce looked at their faces and saw slight concern for themselves or anybody else. They sent out expressions like they sure didn’t want you to mess with them, but maybe they wanted to mess with you. She went to the back of the car, where the man from the State was unloading a couple of cardboard boxes from the trunk. He set them on the ground and touched the smaller box with the toe of his loafer.
—Their clothes, he said. And that other one is your sister’s. Personal items.
Luce hardly glanced down from looking at the kids. She said, What’s the matter with them?
—Nothing much, the man said. He thumbed the wheel to a Zippo and lit a smoke and seemed tired from the long drive. Ten hours.
—Something’s the matter with them, Luce said.
—They’ve been through a bad patch.
—A what?
Luce stood and waited while the man took a drag or two, and then she broke in on his smoking and said, You’re the one that collects a salary from the State to do this job, but you can’t even talk straight. Bad patch.
The man said, One doctor thought they might be feebleminded. Another one said it’s just that they saw what they saw, and they’ve been yanked out of their lives and put in the Methodist Home for the time it took to sort things out. The father’s legal matters.
—He’s not their father. They’re orphans.
—It took time to figure that kind of thing out. We got used to certain wording.
—And Johnson? Luce said.
—The trial’s coming up, and they’ll convict him. Sit him in the big wood chair with the straps and drop the tablet in the bucket. It fizzes up, and pretty soon he chokes out. Immediate family gets an invitation.
—To watch?
—There’s a thick glass porthole, tinged like a fishbowl full of dirty water. If there’s a crowd, you have to take turns. It’s the size of a dinner plate. Pretty much one at a time.
—Count me in, Luce said.
She watched the children rove wordless about the yard in front of the Lodge. Going slow, but in some purposeful pattern, assessing the space like a pair of water witches looking for the right spot to dig a well.
—And that bad patch, Luce said. That’s all that’s the matter with them?
—All we know.
The man looked around at the relict lodge and the lake and the town across the water, hazy through the humidity, identifiable mainly as a distant low geometric break in the uniformity of green woods. A couple of steeples, arrowheads aimed at heaven, rose above the tiny red brick store buildings and the white houses sloping up from Main Street. Whichever other direction you looked, mountains and forests and lake.
The man waved his cigarette in two circles to encompass all the lonesome beauty and decay. He said, To look at it, you wouldn’t think it would take so long to get from town to here.
—It’s a long lake.
—Yeah. And all these twisting dirt roads.
—Well, Luce said.
The man said, Beyond here, what? Nothing?
—The road goes on a few miles, but this is the last place anybody lives.
The man looked at the blanched wood sign hanging from two rusty chains above the steps to the porch. WAYAH LODGE.
He said, Indian?
—Cherokee. Means wolf.
—I don’t know anything about your finances, the man said. Luce looked him in the eye and tried to express nothing at all.
—This place doesn’t take tourists anymore?
Luce said, It stopped sometime around the