Nightwoods - Charles Frazier [43]
Dolores held her thin arm up and dropped the bracelets one by one past the elbow and then tipped her arm down to spill them jangling over her hand to the greasy dirt floor. And then again, over and over and over. Frank upended the muff and wore it like a hat, and then he wore the hat like a muff. Then he set the green hat, punctuated with a gold hatpin, on top of the muff, and pulled the black veil down over the white fur. Lily, though, was nowhere to be found.
Not curators by nature, they reached for contact with her by deconstructing her things. Breaking the golden hinges of the blue leather jewelry box and pulling out the blue velvet compartments. The hatbox, with its octagonal walls and thick lid and double floor, became a flat stack of pasteboard, hunter green striped with cream. They separated the hat into its components, green felt and black satin and veiling. The locked white train case, nearly as big as the hatbox, took some work, but it finally yielded many fragrant tubes and boxes and squat cylinders and, finally, two pink circles of pleated satin lining. The locked pink case held hair, two blond wigs and a ponytail extension, plus circles of white lining. The lumpy fox stole with beady-eyed heads and dangling tails was tricky, but eventually, after much picking at stitching with the rusty nail, it became three separate flat animals with no insides.
They continued their work until bits of Lily’s life covered the smokehouse floor. Lily, though, stayed far away. Frank took a big powder puff from the train case and held it as high as he could and shook it. A pale shape formed in the air and then disappeared. They began heaping the stuff back into the big box, leaving until last the fake ponytail and useful stacks of paper tinder wrapped in red bands. Frank held the tail up and tipped his head back and brushed his face lightly with the ends of the long hairs. Dolores held one stack of tinder near her face and thumbed bottom to top and let the dry flammable leaves flutter her cheek.
Back at the creek, they lay on the bank, turned their faces to the sun, and remembered Lily hugging them tight, both at the same time, until their stomachs tingled and they laughed uncontrollably. Lily saying over and over, Love you, love you, love you, till the day I die.
CHAPTER 1
A LATE-SUMMER AFTERNOON. Tall stalks of ironweed and goldenrod bordering the dirt road nearly ready to bloom. Stubblefield drove one-handed, sipping a beer, trying to keep the Hawk from dragging its sensitive underparts against the rocks. Raking its shiny flanks against the various jungle shrubs encroaching on the passway. He had worked most of the way through a green eight-pack of Rolling Rock pony bottles, a gift from the Conway Twitty–looking dude leasing the Roadhouse and very much wanting to keep his jolly position, it being so central to a certain half-legal local social whirl.
Jollier still to be the owner of the Roadhouse. During Stubblefield’s tour, the potential for entertainment seemed clear, even hours before opening time, no music from either jukebox or live band, neon off, back-room pinball tables dark and silent. Daylight blared gritty through the opened door and cast a vampire-killing trapezoid onto the nineteenth-century wood floor, the splintery puncheons hip-wide and wrist-thick, cut from trees nearly two hundred years ago and made to last. Still bearing adze marks from bearded pioneer ancestors. The festive stale odors of spilled drinks and tobacco smoke soaked so deep into the thick boards that some archaeologist with sharp instruments could scrape down the layers of wood and identify McCallum’s Scotch spilled by some horseback trader in the days of the Cherokee Nation. Might as well put up a sign: SERVING HIGH TIMES FOR TWO CENTURIES. Stubblefield imagined cashing a check every month, and yet no other responsibilities on his part than to be el patrón.
The Hawk rounded a turn, raked its oil pan alarmingly on the high center of the two-track,