Nightwoods - Charles Frazier [76]
—Yeah, Stubblefield said. One day when it gets to be a good story, I’ll tell it to you.
Maddie struck a match and burned a needle. Licked the end of black thread to sharpen it and aimed through the needle’s eye dead steady and drew about a foot from the spool and scissored it and paired the wet end with the dry and knotted them. She pressed the back of Stubblefield’s hand firm against the table and told him to keep it still. The cut gapped and didn’t want to go back together, and Maddie’s pressing and yanking on his hand caused Stubblefield to make a noise like a high-pitched cough.
Maddie said, Need a stick to gnaw on, like in cowboy movies?
Stubblefield said, Go on.
Maddie made the best sense she could of the bleeding slash and sewed a baker’s dozen of tight quick stitches, angling from the pad of meat at the base of the thumb toward the little finger. Then she slowly tilted the brown bottle and poured the remainder of the peroxide over his hand. Pink foam rose along the puckered line of stitches, and the blood on the tabletop washed into the woodgrain.
—From now on, palm readers won’t be able to make shit sense out of your future, Maddie said. Look at that ragged new love line. This is going to throw everything off.
—Ha ha, Stubblefield said, looking down at his mangled hand.
—The children? Luce said.
—Let ’em sleep, Maddie said. Get him home before he passes out on me.
MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT, Stubblefield sat at his breakfast table, holding his cut hand higher than his heart in a failed attempt to keep it from throbbing. Grouped on the white Formica like a modern still life, a half-empty fifth of Smirnoff stood beside a full Davy Crockett jelly glass sitting in a pink plasmatic puddle. Stubblefield angled his hurt hand into the light. Still oozing. The black thread looking damn bad against the waxen skin, even paler than the tabletop.
Luce slumped in the armchair. She had set the radio to her late-night music. Lightning somebody. Smokestack something. So many of the musicians seemed to be either little or blind. Then an ad for a record store and Royal Crown hair dressing.
—He’s white, you know, Luce said.
—Who’s white?
—The DJ. I’ve seen a picture of him. He sounds black, but he’s white as they come. His voice is an expression of his state of mind because he loves the music so much.
She paused and said, You didn’t tell me.
—What?
—That he was here.
—Rumors. I had to drive an hour to a library that takes downstate papers to find out he’d been let go. I didn’t want to worry you until I knew for sure.
—Future reference, don’t ever leave me out again.
Couple of songs went by, and the phone rang. It squatted dense and black on the table at the end of the sofa. Luce answered immediately. Old habit.
Bud’s voice, pitched thin over the wire as cricket song, said, They’re not your damn children, Lucinda. Go live your life, and forget about me. Do it and don’t look back. And remember what I said about keeping your mouth shut, because I meant it.
Luce said, How did you know to call here? But the line went dead after her first word.
She put the phone back on the hook and looked at Stubblefield.
He said, Him?
AN HOUR LATER, Luce sprawled on the sofa, asleep, her head pillowed on her right arm, her shoes kicked off. The girlfriend dress twisted around her, bloodstained.
The line of her hip and thigh and calf hit Stubblefield as painfully pretty, and somehow consonant with the heartbeat throb in his hand. He sat at the table way into the early morning with his vodka and Luce’s powerful radio music, watching her sleep. Holding up his cut hand like swearing an oath, and imagining the remote borders he might be willing to cross on her behalf.
CHAPTER 11
OUT OF FEAR AND ALSO making assumptions like he would do if he were dealing with normal people, Stubblefield placed a couple of phone calls. Within a day, a guy he knew in Jacksonville had an address for Luce’s mother.
You need a safe place far away to hide, what’s more normal than over the