Nightwoods - Charles Frazier [46]
When he returned to her, Stubblefield started trying to say some vague things about the Lodge’s potential and its liability, talking like he was all business, using the bald lawyer’s vocabulary. Assets and profit and shit. Imaginary money. He broke off and said, I guess when the power goes out, you don’t hardly notice.
—I miss the radio.
Then Stubblefield decided to tell Luce about his memories. Except it wasn’t exactly a decision. He blurted something stupid before he could catch himself. Like, Great God, do you remember that beauty contest back when we were in high school?
ON THE WAY HOME he kept striking the steering wheel with the heel of his hand and trying to remember exactly what he’d said. His face felt flushed red as a lipstick kiss. Was it possible that he’d concluded his memories with, You were so beautiful back then? Had he really committed that unforgivable past tense?
But he remembered her response pretty clearly, at least in précis. How embarrassing that she ever did something that silly. But, good God, she was seventeen. At that age, we’re mostly high-pitched and crazy. All the urgent chemicals raging around the blood course. And that’s why we do dangerous and embarrassing things, as if simultaneously we’re immortal and going to die tomorrow. And that’s why we look back on that time so fondly from the dimmer years to come. Remembering the days when we were like Greek gods. Mighty and idiotic.
Something like that. It was a fairly awkward conversation.
But Stubblefield was quite sure Luce had concluded by saying, I’m not the same person as that girl. Sure, too, that he had collected himself enough to state a firmly held belief. We are who we are. Ten or eighty. What we see in the mirror is all that changes. Same fears and hopes running around inside like hamsters on a wheel.
—Well, that’s depressing, Luce had said. But whatever. I didn’t win that day.
—They chose wrong.
—The sunglasses?
—Could have been the Mars bar.
After Stubblefield had turned and started to walk away, Luce said, either to his back or to herself, So, a flame still burns?
Even in that dizzy moment, Stubblefield at least retained enough clarity to know sarcasm when he heard it. Or would that be irony? Fine line, sometimes.
He had kept walking, but raised a hand as far as he could reach above his head, made a leveling motion, and said, Yea high.
As he rounded the corner, he saw the children sitting in rockers at either end of the porch, glaring and intemperate like pickets guarding the flanks. Stubblefield thinking, If they had muskets they’d shoot me down.
Later that night, back at the cottage, Stubblefield remembered that he had seen Luce one other time. The summer after the beauty show. His final summer at the lake. A teenage burger joint in town. Luce leaning over the jukebox, studying the songs. Her long hair falling forward, hiding her face until she hooked it behind her ears and he recognized her profile. She had on boy clothes. A white button-down shirt, the tails untucked over faded jeans. Black penny loafers with dimes in the slits. And the memory, when it came, kept spooling all the way to her dropping the nickel in the slot and the fans of shiny 45s rotating until one fell onto the turntable and Johnny Ace began singing “Never Let Me Go,” scratchy and hollow, since the record had been in the Wurlitzer for some time. Luce slow-danced solo, doing the Stroll, back to her booth to rejoin her friends, some dismal triple-date arrangement of cheerleaders and football players. As for weather, it was raining that long-ago night when Stubblefield walked out to his grandfather’s car. The neon of the cafe set the water drops on his windshield alight with pink and lavender.
CHAPTER 2
MIDMORNING, LIT ROLLED SLOW down a gravel road, letting farmers harvesting crops see their tax dollars at work. It was one of the perks of the job, plenty of time for driving and thinking. That plus the cruiser, a lawman special with the big-block engine set up so hot that citizens couldn