Nightwoods - Charles Frazier [36]
The day was slowly going dark and chilly. Luce wrapped a quilt around her shoulders and poured amber liquor from an important-looking bottle into a little stemmed crystal glass. Old Stubblefield had told her to use whatever she wanted, and she had found the bottle that afternoon as she’d searched through every room, every closet and corner, under every bedstead. Hours of searching. She hadn’t wanted to go to bed imagining hidden places and getting herself all worked up. Down in the basement, back in a corner tangled with busted-out cane-bottomed dining chairs, she had found stacks of wooden crates, each holding dusty bottles of Scotch or red wine from France.
Luce rocked and looked across the water toward town, judging the separation to be about right. A mile by one measure, an hour by another. She sipped Scotch considerably older than she was, the taste of time in its passing, in harmony with the outer world, where poplars were already half bare and long grasses drooped burnt from the first frost. The call of an evening bird, and the sun low. Bands of lavender and slate clouds moving against a metallic sky, denoting the passage of autumn. Fallen leaves blown onto the porch. The planet racking around again toward winter.
That first evening, as she continued to do for so many of the next thousand, Luce sat through all the degrees of sunset. Venus and the crescent moon and some other planet all stacked and falling through an indigo sky, the three spaced equally down a bowed path toward a jagged line of black ridges. Distant sreetlights in town came on, tiny and yellow, reflecting in streaks across the still water. Long past dark, Luce believed she had watched the seasons collapse, one into the ashes of another. To the east, winter star patterns rose, coming back around again. Orion chasing the Seven Sisters, old reminders of an abandoned order like a deep indelible pattern in the ground. An Indian trail, a long path. She went inside, reluctant, feeling eluded by so much.
CHAPTER 9
IN DIM BROWN LIGHT, an old man scrabbled in a wooden bin, searching for the shiny two-cent nut that would thread onto his rusty bolt. Two boys in Keds and Wranglers studied red-and-white boxes of bicycle tubes for the correct size to fix their flats and give them their freedom back. Along with nails and brads and staples, the space behind the narrow storefront was crammed with lawn mowers, shotguns and rifles, a glass-fronted case of pocketknives, latigo dog collars, ripsaws and keyhole saws and bow saws, two-man crosscut saws so long they hung from pegs near the ceiling almost to the floor. Wooden spirit levels six feet long with silver bubbles floating in mystery green liquid. Many sizes of awls and planes and adzes and chisels. Wonderful adjustable wrenches in several sizes with knurled spirals to twiddle back and forth endlessly, imagining all the variety of nuts they were capable of turning. Brute murderous monkey wrenches two feet long with jagged teeth in their jaws. Sledgehammers and double-bit axes. A general odor of metal and oil, and also some funky underlying man smell that sparked an unwelcome prison memory for Bud.
His shopping trip was not for a little poke of finishing nails or a ball-peen hammer. He’d come to lay down an alibi. So he picked up a cheap rod and reel and the biggest, gaudiest bass lure, for purely artistic reasons. As an afterthought, a filet knife because of the thin, elegant blade.
At the register, Bud shouted, Three fucking dollars for this fucking piece-of-shit Zebco?
Heads turned.
He tried to pay with a hundred, which the cashier couldn’t possibly break. He grumbled some more and