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The book on top of the stack was called Mr. and Mrs. Bo Jo Jones. The cover was a photograph, out of focus, of a boy and girl kissing, only one of them was upside down. Mrs. Bo Jo Jones’s nose was on Mr.’s chin and vice versa. Taken in profile. She’s sixteen, he’s seventeen, a pregnant bride, and her bewildered groom … playing a grown-up game with adult consequences. Cassie picked up the red candle and sat it square on the book; this was surely nothing more than treading the edge of events. She walked outside and around back to take a look at the flat platform she’d built between two gnarled-up trees: it was the first project she’d ever finished on her own. She’d built it in case a flash flood came while they were in the shack, and she’d nailed boards into the tree trunk to make a ladder. The platform was about seven feet off the ground—it couldn’t be a biblical sort of flood. She’d come out here and measured and even drawn a diagram in a notebook, then gone back and had Poppy help her cut some tongue-and-groove boards she’d found in the corner of the garage. She climbed up the ladder and stepped on the platform, then jumped up and down. Solid. She knelt down and checked the nails, but they were all snug in, and then she ran her hands over the edge she’d sanded smooth. From here she could see the river slowly moving, and on the shoreline flashes of a white T-shirt. There was a fundamental difference between the shack and this platform, and it could be felt simply by sitting first in one and then on the other, and whatever the discrepancy was made her wonder if maybe she ought not skip putting a new roof on the shack. Below her the fire was just getting going and it smelled good; whatever kind of wood they were using smelled good. A blood scent filled the air.
“You own any guns?” she heard Leroy ask.
Bobby Puck said, “Guns? Are you talking to me?”
Sitting up here, Cassie was waiting for Jimmy but also not waiting, she had let go some. Her own house could be on fire, this was a thing she often considered, and she wouldn’t know it until she made the walk back and found the thing in ruins, the trucks and smoke and neighbors watching. She would have no first thought but many at once. Did Jimmy come home, did Laura stay planted where she was, refusing to leave, did Poppy get the dogs out, was Belle out floating around, weeping in the yard in her white nightgown? Beyond that Cassie didn’t care, there was nothing she would mourn. Who set this fire?
“Cassie?” Puck was looking up at her from the ground, she hadn’t heard him approach. “Can I come up there with you?” He had a very high voice, like a little girl’s. As he climbed the ladder, his green T-shirt came out of his shorts, and Cassie could see a white stripe of skin. She looked away. “Oh, this is rather high up,” he said, looking over the edge of the platform. “I hope it doesn’t make me dizzy. If we were at the tops of these trees we could see my house, it’s over yonder as Leroy would say, the opposite side of the river from your house, we could see my dad’s blue station wagon in the driveway and my mom’s marigolds, my dad has diabetes. He is a diabetic and never leaves the house anymore, one of his legs is gone and he is now blind.” Puck leaned forward and whispered the last word in Cassie’s ear. She turned and looked at him. Mostly she couldn’t abide people who talked too much, and under normal conditions she might have gone ahead and whaled on him. But something in him raised up a loneliness that settled over Cassie like a cloud. “At the Granger School,” he continued, holding Cassie’s eye, “I was assaulted on a regular basis by ruffians. You remind me of them. When I start at your school in the fall, I’m going to be perfectly silent, in class and everywhere else, so I just thought I’d tell you some things now, that my mom is an aide at the nursing home, and about my dad and whatnot. I don’t like sports, I’ve never gone hunting, I prefer comic books and snacks.”
“Puck? Cassie? Want some frog legs?” Emmy called from the shore.
Puck rose, brushed some dried mud from his knees, then bowed to Cassie. “Ladies first,” he said, gesturing toward the stairs with a sweeping motion, like the hands of a clock.
She was back home and on the steps by three o’clock. The day had grown hot, and hours to go yet, so she took off her swampy tennis shoes and wet socks and let her feet dry in the sun. Her gray T-shirt said NOTRE DAME WRESTLING TEAM, it was her favorite shirt. Poppy had found it at the dump, back when he used to be a dump crawler, before Laura put her foot down. Cassie missed those days, the great things he’d come home with: a miniature guitar with no strings, a set of rusty golf clubs, a plastic cereal bowl with an astronaut in the bottom. The astronaut was floating outside of and appeared to be larger than his spaceship. All such things Laura dubbed A Crime. But then Poppy came home with a Memphis Minnie album, and when he handed it to Laura, her eyes filled with tears and she turned around and went up to her room and no one had seen her for a whole day, and Belle said Poppy shouldn’t have told her it came from the dump, and Poppy said, confused, Was I to lie?
Cassie’s eyes were closed and the world behind her eyelids had gone red when she heard the dogs, not Poppy’s dogs who never ran free, but a pack that had been born that winter to a stray down the road. Born in the Taylors’ toolshed. The Taylors had no intention of keeping the puppies or of killing them or of having anything to do with them whatsoever, those were Willie Taylor’s words to Poppy exactly. Anything whatsoever. A stray who picked us out, we didn’t pick her. There were four pups, a brown, a red, a black and white, a black, and they were all hardmuscled, with coats so short they looked like leather, and heads like pigs. Cassie thought of them as the Pig Dogs. They weren’t much bigger than young pigs, either. All day long they killed. They killed chickens, ducks, cats, who knew. Once they had run up to Cassie as she walked down the road, and the head of the brown one was completely covered in blood, all the way back to his shoulder blades, still red and wet. No one could touch them. Now they ran toward Cassie with great joy, nearly bouncing, except for the black and white, who was carrying a dead groundhog in his mouth, an animal more than half his size. They were going to leave it in her yard, she could just feel it. Her opinion was that they’d started killing more than they could eat, so they were spreading the carcasses around for fun. The King’s Crossing was their game board, and they’d left something on every corner. Cassie stood up and took a menacing step toward them, and they all backed up, tails wagging. They had smart eyes, the Pig Dogs, this was one of their worst features. Cassie stomped, waved her arms, yelled Go on! Git! and the dogs turned one at a time, still sneaky and joyous, and started to run back down the road, except for the black and white, who trotted a few steps farther in and dropped the groundhog, then turned and streaked off after his brothers.
“Cassie, you still out here?”
The groundhog had barely hit the earth, and there was Belle so soon, she would take it personally that Cassie had allowed such a thing to happen. Belle stepped out onto the screened porch, wearing a black leotard of Laura’s and an old Indian-print skirt, there was a pointedness in her voice that had arrived only in the past two years but seemed to be here to stay. All the way back in Cassie’s memory to the place it grew dark and muzzy, she saw Belle with her on a day like this, Cassie at five, Belle at seven, performing their different tasks: one her father’s girl, the other belonging solely to Laura. Cassie had her work cut out for her, no doubt about it, being the one to wait and gather clues and wander about the house studying Jimmy’s belongings and trying to capture the smell of him somewhere, in his closet, on his pillow. But Belle, maybe, and this was a thing Cassie had only begun to consider, had it a little worse, because her parent was right there and couldn’t be reached.
Laura, standing in the kitchen, having a contemplative smoke in her butter-yellow capri pants and white blouse, clothes that came from Somewhere Else and marked her. She wore not perfume or cologne but the oil from a love potion made for her by a Yoruba priestess, oil filled with rose petals and something that looked like whole clove. One brutal fight between Laura and Jimmy started when he called her a yat; Cassie had heard yak and assumed her father had been drinking until Belle explained. Bone-thin mother, shoulders slightly hunched, arms crossed loosely over her abdomen, listening to records. She made their meals but didn’t eat with them. She smiled, never lost her patience or raised her voice, it was difficult, in fact, to do anything loudly enough or close enough to her range of vision to even get her to turn her head. Bix Beiderbecke with Frankie Trumbauer’s orchestra, Singin’ the Blues. Louis Armstrong, Jelly Roll Morton, Sidney Bechet. One of the only things Laura loved even a smidge about living in Indiana was that one of the earliest jazz labels, the Starr Piano Company and Gennett Records, had been in Richmond. The Friars Society Orchestra had recorded there, and King Oliver, Armstrong, Bix, Hoagy. Laura knew where the building had stood in the Whitewater Gorge, and had driven the girls by on in what was a rare thing for them, a field trip.
This was what Cassie had been thinking of lately, all those injuries of Belle’s, all the flaps of skin hanging from her knees, the head wounds bleeding furiously, the falls down stairs, the bicycle wreck in the thorn bush, her slightly chipped front tooth. How could it have been, the two of them side by side and playing the same game, that Belle was always falling? Cassie rarely got hurt. If they walked across the backyard, it was Cassie who found the dead baby bird, the caterpillars and nightcrawlers, she found treasure in tall grass because Belle was looking up. What she was looking for Cassie couldn’t say, winged things probably, orioles or nuthatches or bluebirds, or those tiny yellow butterflies that arrive in swarms one day and are gone the next. Belle got hurt, she took her pain in to Laura like a gift, she cried then tried to look brave. There was a demand in her. Cassie thought, but couldn’t say (wasn’t sure what the words would be) that this wasn’t the way to go, Laura didn’t like to touch or be touched, she was doing her work at a minimum and preferred to be alone. Belle’s wounds were akin to getting too thick into events. At eleven Belle started to withdraw from the Great Wide World, as Jimmy called it, she moved inside and became top of her class, at twelve had nearly memorized Edith Hamilton’s Mythology, which a thoughtful librarian had given her as a gift. Every day she begged for a copy of Virgil In Translation. She had taken to the house and could almost always be found at the kitchen table, under the hanging light with the round shade, and there too was Laura, staring out the window above the sink, and Belle thought she had gotten what she wanted, but Cassie wasn’t so sure.
“What’s that in the yard? Do you see what I’m pointing at, Cassie? Go on over there and take a look.”
Cassie walked across the gravel driveway, periodically stepping on a sharp rock that made her say ow, ow, ow, and through the side door that led into the cool garage, where she picked up Poppy’s shovel.
“Do you see the thing I’m talking about, that gray mound over there? Mom’s not going to want to walk out here and see it.”
The groundhog was lying belly up. He’d been a fat little guy. Cassie studied his face: dead. Also his small, expressive hands, curled now: dead. She put the shovel under him and felt that he’d—
“What is it, Cassie, do you know?”
—been turned to liquid. There weren’t bones or organs to offer any resistance. The Pig Dogs had had a time with this one. She got the shovel under his back and tried to lift it; he was very heavy, in addition to being liquid, and he rolled off the end of the shovel and landed facedown.
“I’m going in, I’m not watching this. Take it across the road and over the fence. Drop it over the fence, Cassie, so those dogs can’t get to it and bring it right back. Do you hear me?”
Cassie got the shovel under his belly and tried to lift him. He rolled off and landed on his back, and that was about all it took for Cassie to see what she was up against. Her shoulders strained and her back began to sweat, It wasn’t his weight so much as the fact of him down at the end of the long shovel, and her up at the other end. She gripped the shovel in the middle of the handle, stuck it under the groundhog’s back, he was maybe easier to lift this way, but he rolled off and landed on his belly. Simply by turning him over repeatedly, she’d managed to get him a few feet across the yard, so she did that some more: turned him again and again, rolling him like a sausage in a pan. Belly up, belly down. They made it across the road and to the ditch, and putting him in the ditch was no good, Belle would know or the dogs would know. The sun was a violence against Cassie’s back, sweat ran toward her eyes. She took off her T-shirt, wiped her face with it, then covered her hands and grabbed him by his paws, his front two in her left hand, his back two in her right. She turned herself sideways, spun around twice, then let him fly, across the ditch and over the fence. At the peak of his flight his back arched like a high jumper’s, his chin tilted regally, his arms and legs were loose in surrender. Cassie was, at ten, a child who would have to learn to look away.
Thursday evening, after dinner and a visit with Edwin Meyer and Poppy, a game of Chinese checkers and a bowl of green sherbet, Cassie went out on the screened porch and waited, and Friday she got up very early and went outside and waited.
Saturday morning she woke up and listened; if he was still gone, this would be the longest in a while and would signal nothing good, but then she heard them, the voices that had awakened her. Jimmy and Laura didn’t fight about Everything, as some parents did. The tear and scramble of their lives centered around only two subjects, Money and the Prior Claim. The two could be mixed and matched and combined in novel ways. Cassie had hovered for years at the edge of the conversation and could reduce its complex elements to two sentences:
JIMMY: She has a prior claim.
LAURA: Prior to your children?
Cassie had written these sentences in her notebook: for her they were no less than Virgil in Translation. She and Belle both wanted to get to the bottom of something, and even if they ultimately knew what it was—lost cultures, Barbara Thompson in a trailer park in Hopwood—they would keep at it. Young scholars. Their parents were having the conversation in the bedroom next door, which was the marital bedroom and contained many mysteries. Laura complained that she hated every stick of furniture in there, the bed they slept in, the dressers and mirrored vanity that matched it, all won by Jimmy in a card game with the Minor Criminals of the Midwest, who were not famous for their taste. The queen-size headboard was tall, flat, and covered with quilted, yellowed vinyl, attached to the frame with brass buttons, brass mostly missing. The dresser and vanity were made of blond wood, perhaps for a blonde woman, which was the opposite of Laura but similar to Barbara Thompson, whose name so far had not been mentioned.
The voices weren’t much more than a murmur. Cassie had to get out of bed and creep like a cat across her floor in order to hear what she hoped were the sounds of Jimmy taking his change, his keys, and his breath mints out of his pocket and placing them carefully on his dresser, because this meant he was staying for some hours. Last summer he would sometimes drop in late at night or early in the morning, expecting the girls to be asleep, and deposit with Laura a handful of disputed Money and leave again, that went on for weeks. Cassie heard the loose change land on the dresser top, Jimmy say he was tired, Laura make a sound that was perhaps a word or a cry, and then Cassie knew it was okay to get back in bed awhile. Wherever it was he went—and she didn’t believe she’d ever know—her father got very little sleep, he loved to come home and slip into bed in the morning light. She slipped into bed and lay on her back; the sun was coming up on the other side of the house but would reach her soon enough. Her heart pounded, she could see the plaster on the ceiling very clearly, the crack that zigzagged like a fault line from one side of the room to the other. She tried to close her eyes, but they popped right back open.
Last summer Belle had crept into Cassie’s room late one night and gotten in bed with her, then wrapped her arms around Cassie from behind the way she had when they were small and whispered in Cassie’s ear Are you very very sad? In all the great wide world Cassie couldn’t imagine another soul who would ask a question like that one and not expect to get beaten up good. Cassie hadn’t answered, had just lay there feeling Belle’s breath on the back of her neck and trying to think of a true answer. Every day was a vaccination. She missed her grandmother, who had been old and soft, who said few words but who gave to them: she and Poppy had taken them in without a word so long ago, when they had nowhere to live. They’d opened up all the old bedrooms, Buena Vista had gathered up her sewing things and moved them to the attic, and Cassie remembered those years with Buena Vista like a long party where the party is going on inside and no one talks about it. Cassie could still imagine her grandmother so clearly, her white hair curled tight against her head in a permanent wave, the skin on her face that had fallen and kept falling, her watery blue eyes. Buena Vista had been heavy, especially in her legs, and she walked with a kind of back-and-forth Frankenstein gait, and unable to control the distribution of her weight, she had walked hard and made everything in the house shake, especially her animal figurines. She had been just an old woman in a faded housedress, sometimes she even wore her slippers to the grocery store, but something about her had been their hearts’ salvation.
Now, lying in bed, her father asleep in the next room, Cassie felt herself swaying back into sleep. Can you smell the water? Maybe someday she would tell Belle that she hadn’t been, she wasn’t sad, she was … she almost knew, and then began to dream, there was a wide field, pink and spongy, or maybe it was a desert, there was no sign of anything anywhere, only the vast pinkness all around her, and she guessed she had to cross it, so she started walking.
Laura smoked. Belle sat at the kitchen table doing homework and tearing at her cuticles, her fingernails were already so short they sometimes bled. Poppy came in through the mudroom, “Laurie, have you seen my level?,” and Laura said no, she hadn’t, and he left again. A few minutes later he popped back in with Roger, who made a mad dash around the kitchen table and back out the door. “Laurie, have you seen my old canvas camp stool?” No, she hadn’t. He left. Cassie wandered from the kitchen to the screened porch, drinking a soda that made her stomach burn, as she hadn’t eaten anything all day and here it was almost two in the afternoon. She sat in the rocker with splinters. Finally Belle stuck her head out the door and said, He’s up.
Cassie went into the kitchen and casually sat down at the table, picked up Belle’s history book, and opened it to the page on Eli Whitney and the cotton gin. Upstairs the shower was running, then it turned off. Jimmy hummed as he shaved. When he came downstairs he smelled sweet, had a swing in his step. Cassie wrote on her palm with her fingernail the things she wanted to talk to him about: a door for the shack, help fixing her bicycle chain, would he toss the football with her, would he figure out how to get a better fence around the garden—the deer were tearing it up. Poppy needed new propane tanks on the Airstream, and there was something else. She tapped her fingernail on the table.
“Stop that,” Belle said. Cassie stopped.
“Hey, girls,” Jimmy said, sitting down at the head of the table.
“Hello,” Belle said, not looking up.
“Hey.” Cassie glanced at him, his hair was still wet from the shower and he had some tan across his nose. He’d put on a pressed white shirt, linen pants in a mossy green, one of his thin leather belts. He sat at the table as he always did, with his legs crossed like a woman’s, his torso slightly turned. Other fathers looked to Cassie like livestock; Jimmy was how it was supposed to be, a jangly, dancing man. She remembered she wanted to tell him that last week she’d been walking down the road and a fox had bolted out of the tall grass and run right in front of her, she could almost feel him against her skin, and she’d been tempted to follow him. But they move fast.
“Get a some coffee here, Laura?” Jimmy asked.
Her mother turned away from the window, dropped her cigarette in the sink where she’d been washing dishes, filled the percolator with water, slammed it against the counter.
“Whatcha working on there, Bella Belle?”
Belle blushed, tore at a cuticle. “A book report. On Where the Lilies Bloom.”
“Aren’t you—Isn’t this summer vacation?”
“I’m just,” Belle said, placing her hands over her notebook, “doing it on my own.”
“I see. Good book?”
“I liked it.”
Jimmy nodded. “Well.”
Cassie kicked the chair with the back of her foot until it started to ache.
“How about you, Cass? Having a good summer?”
She glanced down at the palm of her hand, where she’d written her invisible list, then cleared her throat.
“Laura, how about putting a little soup in a pan for me?”
Cassie cleared her throat again—she’d start with the bike chain, she figured—and Laura turned slowly and looked Jimmy up and down, then pulled a pan from the cabinet with a hard rattle and slammed it on the stove.
“And maybe a cheese sandwich.” Jimmy looked at Cassie, grinned, shrinking up his left eye as he did so, his bit of a wink. “Man could starve to death in his own home, huh, Cass?”
Cassie thought she might be called upon to betray her mother, it was not at all out of the question for Jimmy to demand such loyalty, but she was spared the request by a block of cheese sailing from the direction of the refrigerator, not its sailing so much as its landing was the distraction. It skidded underneath Belle’s papers and came to a stop. The three at the table looked up at Laura. Some very bad things had happened this way, some of which could still be discerned on the ceiling.
“I can see I’m not wanted here,” Jimmy said, pushing himself up from the table.
“How dare you,” Laura said, crossing the kitchen like a storm. “How dare you come home after four days—”
“Five,” Cassie said.
“—five days and push me into giving you an excuse to leave again? What in the name of Christ sort of person are you?”
“Mom,” Belle said.
“Shut up, Belle, and you shut up, too, Cassie.”
“I don’t appreciate you talking to me like this in front of my daughters,” Jimmy said, pulling himself up to his full height, an inch shorter than Laura.
“Oh, oh, that’s rich, too, your daughters,” Laura said, getting closer to Jimmy’s face with every word.
“All I came home for was my stick, anyway.” Jimmy turned and walked into the living room, stopping at the coat closet, where he took out his cue case.
Cassie jumped up and ran past him, grabbing her sandals off the porch as she went. She leaped down the porch steps and landed on some sharp rocks, had to make her way down the driveway to where he’d parked, pulled open his passenger door. It was hot inside, it was shocking. Jimmy drove a 1971 Lincoln Continental with suicide doors and red leather interior, and if they were starving to death or would die without penicillin and the only way to save them would be to Sell The Car, then good-bye Cassie, good-bye Belle. This according to Laura. Poppy reluctantly agreed.
A minute passed. Jimmy had undoubtedly gone upstairs to collect his things, and would come sailing out the front door any minute. He favored a dress shirt that allowed room for an entrance, or an exit, in its graceful folds. He sailed out the door. Laura was right behind him, speaking quickly but not loudly, and she threw something but Cassie couldn’t see what it was. Conditions were not ideal, Cassie realized this right away.
Jimmy walked down the driveway, his walk a kind of glide, and pulled his door open. “Get out, Cassie,” he said, starting the engine. Boiling air blew from the vents. “Sweet creeping Jesus, it’s hot in here.”
Sweat poured down her face and in a stream down her chest. “Get out, Cassie, right this minute.”
Laura still stood on the porch but she was hard to see behind the screen.
“Right this goddamn minute, Cassie, I’m not playing.”
She turned and looked at him. His long black eyelashes had never worked to his advantage when he was angry, but she could see he really was. Angry.
“GET OUT OF THE CAR.”
Another minute or two and he’d see what her point was.
“Fine,” he said, his teeth grinding. He pulled the gearshift into reverse as if he wanted to pull it off the column, then backed out so fast stones flew up and hit the bottom of the car, and obviously this wasn’t something Jimmy would wish to happen to the Lincoln. He was beyond himself. His tires screeched against the King’s Crossing as he moved the transmission into drive, and then Cassie was thrown against the red leather seat, and the compass bobbing around in liquid on the dashboard swung around, up and down.
“Do you see what you do to me, all of you, every last blasted one of you? You make me hate my life, Cassie, how does that feel?” Jimmy slammed the lighter into the dash, flipped a cigarette out of the pack in his breast pocket. “I don’t know what I was thinking, picking you out at the zoo. I honestly do not know.”
Cassie rolled down her window, stuck out her head, let the wind fill her mouth and nose. When she leaned back, Jimmy was smoking, driving slowly, listening to his favorite radio station, Frank Sinatra was singing “Fly Me to the Moon.” Jimmy hummed along with him, Jimmy’s beautiful voice.
They drove the four miles into Roseville, a town famous for two things: a small candy factory called April and May’s, after the unmarried sisters who’d run it out of their kitchen; and a restaurant, Holzinger’s, which boasted a large, expensive buffet. Cassie had been there only once, on her parents’ anniversary a few years before, and buffet was probably not the correct word. She and Belle had been stunned into silence when they entered. The restaurant occupied four floors: the first was appetizers, the second was breads, the third was entrées, and the fourth was desserts. Cassie had stopped in the appetizer room—the mountain of cold pink shrimp on ice in the middle of a table, the cold silver platter underneath it beaded with condensation, had made her want to run.
Now they passed the Granger School, which was beautiful and looked as if it might fall down, and then the gas station and a flower shop. The main street was tree-lined and shady.
“High suicide rate in Roseville, you know that, Cass?”
Cassie shook her head.
“Oh yeah. I coulda told anybody who asked, and for free, but they hired an expert instead.”
She doubted it would have been for free.
“County coroner—you know him? Robbie Ballenger?—he suggested it to the county council. Read some article about national suicide rates, saw that ours are as high as an Indian reservation. Don’t want that, do we.” An old rocking horse and a birdcage were sitting on the sidewalk outside the antique shop. “The Christians are calling for Robbie’s resignation. An in-erad-i-cable rule of life, Cassie,” he waved his cigarette at her like a stem finger, “do not piss off the Christians, they will throw their stones at you every time.”
As they approached the center of the downtown there were fewer and fewer businesses, just empty buildings. An evacuation order. Uncle Bud’s sat on the corner of Main and Railroad; it had been a drugstore fifteen years before, a low and long building with a green awning along the front windows. The windows were covered with a film that made them look silver from outside: mirrors. Jimmy pulled into one of the three parking spaces facing the back door. Behind them, on the corner of Railroad and fifth, was a bar called Howdy’s. A sign outside advertised fiftycent Miller drafts for and a whole room devoted to darts. Other than Howdy’s, everything seemed deserted. A few faded storefronts proclaimed fly-by-night mechanics, flown, and body shops. Cassie had been here once, sent inside Uncle Bud’s to fetch Jimmy when Laura was so mad she couldn’t get out of the car for fear her legs would explode. The place had held Cassie in an attraction so powerful she could no longer remember the specifics, only the heart-knocking joy. She felt a shadow of it every time she went past this part of Roseville with Poppy, on the way out to the highway and to the strip of stores at the edge of Hopwood.
Jimmy rolled up the windows, reached into the back for his cue. “You’re not to bother me.” Cassie nodded.
“I’ve come here to visit my table and get in some time, not to focus on you.”
“Okay.”
“And if Bud comes in, who is as you know an old sumbitch, and says you have to leave, then you’re going to have to skedaddle and find something else to do.”
“Okay.”
He leaned over and kissed her on the forehead. His lips were smooth and hard and cool. “You know you’re my favorite, Cassie, although God knows that ain’t saying much.” Stepping out of the car, he pulled his shirt away from his chest, fanning himself witrh it, then looked for the key to the back door.
The door was steel, gunmetal gray, no window. In the back room Jimmy pulled a string, and a bare bulb illuminaed the rough wooden shelves covered with boxes of Master chalk, cases of crackers filled with cheese or peanut butter, new balls. On the floor were boxes overflowing with empty beer and soda cans. Against one wall was a line of cues that looked as if they were awaiting surgery. Cassie took a deep breath. This smelled better than anything in her life, better than a Christmas tree, better than the raspberry bush at the edge of the house, tangled with honeysuckle, better than Jimmy’s winter coat.
“I’m not going to entertain you, and the rules are the same as when the table was at home, you can’t touch it.”
Jimmy used another key to open an ugly green door with a frosted glass panel that seemed to have been stolen from a hardboiled detective agency. They were in the dim main hall. Bud’s bar still looked as it had, Cassie guessed, when the building was a pharmacy—a long counter with stools, and a mirror behind it with Rx painted in vivid blue, a mortar and pestle beside it. On the shelves below the mirror were trays of balls and boxes of chalk, mostly battered, and bags of potato chips clipped to a black metal rack. A single jar held dill pickles in cloudy green brine. There were no draft beers or fountain drinks; everything was lined up squarely in a refrigerator with a glass door.
“And I’m not buying you a soda or chips and have you make a mess in here, so don’t ask.”
Cassie’s eyes glanced from surface to surface. She’d never been anywhere so clean and precise. Bud used a big old-fashioned cash register: five-dollars was the last anyone had paid. On the steel counter next to the cash register was a big rectangular book with a grainy black cover, the word ACCOUNTS. The book was centered so precisely on the counter it looked like Bud had used a speed square. A sign on the bar explained that between three and six in the afternoon the tables were a dollar a person per hour, and between six and two in the morning, they were two-fifty. In one corner was a silent jukebox, and other than that just the tables.
“And don’t ask for quarters for the jukebox because I didn’t bring any.” Jimmy had taken out his cue and was screwing the joint on the butt.
Seven tables, five feet from the wall and five feet apart; a light with a green accountant’s shade hung over every table. At each end of the room was a rack with ten house cues. A shelf for drinks and ashtrays ran the length of the room, and there were four tall chairs against the wall and ten stools scattered around the room. Cassie wandered around, not quite touching anything, taking in the smell of chalk, beer, cigarettes, while Jimmy used a third, smaller key to unlock the door to the glassed-in room at the end of the hall. Inside the glass room was one table, no stool, no chair. Cassie hovered in the doorway, watched him flip the switch to the light that had formerly hung in their garage.
“Ahhhh,” Jimmy said, resting his stick on the toe of his shoe. “There’s my best girl.” He spread his arms as if making a gift of the whole room to his daughter. “I ever tell you how I came into possession of this table?”
Cassie nodded, she had heard the story many times.
“It’s a vintage Brunswick, this one. Built in 1884, probably in New Orleans; moved with a family to Alabama and eighty years later was back in the Big Easy, where one James Claiborne happened to win it in a game that went on so long God wished me luck and went on to bed.” Jimmy lit a cigarette. He bent and studied the length of the table, looking for wear on the felt. “I hauled it in the back of a borrowed station wagon to the boardinghouse where I was staying—oh, don’t worry, it was a Christian boardinghouse for Christian men. The slate, rails, legs, pockets, rack, sticks, and balls, the whole shebang, I reassembled it in an abandoned tobacco warehouse on Tchoupitoulas, the key to which I happened to find upon my person after another difficult game. In an old hotel, that one. Spooky.” Jimmy rested his cigarette on the small shelf against the wall, not in the ashtray provided but on the shelf. There was a series of dark stripes in the wood, as if he’d placed burning ash there on a number of occasions. He ran his hand along the shining hardwood of the rails. “There was a single missing part, believe it or not, and I found it in a Brunswick repair shop on Frenchmen Street. It’s a civilized town, Cassie, that has a Brunswick repair shop. It’s long gone, just like old Jimmy Claiborne. I’d bet I’m still talked about, though. If I were a betting man.”
He didn’t say the table was walnut, but Cassie knew The legs were ornately carved and the pockets woven leather. It was four feet by eight feet, the measurement Uncle Bud called True. The slate had been flawless when Jimmy won the table, and remained so; Bud changed the felt, made of fine wool from somewhere in the Netherlands. Wood spun and dyed by virgins, Jimmy said. Cassie wished he would go on, she wished he would tell the story of the light, too, which she had studied for hours. The glass was deep red and imprinted with black Chinese characters, and red silk fringe hung like liquid from the bottom of the shade. She wanted to hear Jimmy say the words Colorado and mining town, which she’d long ago written in her notebook.
But he said nothing more. His cigarette sent up a ribbon of smoke against the wall. Cassie watched him rack the balls (they came from Belgium, and he would have no others), knowing she was invisible to him. She watched as she had hour after hour, sitting on a kitchen ladder in the garage. The one ball was the yellow of a sunflower; the two was the same shade as the Indiana sky on a flawless summer day, Cassie had often had the feeling they had been made for her, or that they represented, at the very least, the possibility of something beautiful. At night sometimes, unable to sleep, she would imagine the balls spread out across the green table under the red glass of the lamp: someone had stepped on a box of paints and let them fly. Ruined paints on new grass.
Jimmy stood at the foot of the table and, using a house cue left propped in a comer, took two practice strokes (never one or three), then sent the cue ball crashing into the gathered tribe. All fifteen balls careened around the table, and the four and the thirteen fell. He was practicing straight pool, even though he’d been saying for years that the days of the great straight players were over, and that the money was now on 8-ball for hustlers and 9-ball for professionals. Cassie didn’t know which he was. Jimmy moved around the table quickly, as if on a preordained path. When the table had been at their house, all those years, she had watched Uncle Bud and many other men play against Jimmy, and she knew her father had a strange and specific style related to his restless grace; he bent at the knees instead of at the waist and didn’t sight down the cue as if down the barrel of a gun. In deep concentration, he made his bottom lip so thin it vanished. She would have never told him or anyone, but she had missed this table fiercely, and even after spending her whole life with a man to whom objects gravitated and then were lost—things that came and went like the stray men Jimmy invited to dinner and a game, who would never be seen again—she had not understood what had happened, how the table went missing and ended up here at Bud’s.
She had been standing in one spot, watching her father, FOR so long that when she heard another key rattle in the ugly green door, she awoke as if from a dream. Uncle Bud stepped in, gently closing the door behind him. As he passed the glass room where Jimmy played, Bud barely gave him a glance, and there wasn’t the comfort of old friendship in the look, either; Jimmy rarely earned such a thing. Uncle Bud had been Jimmy’s childhood companion, they had a long history. And there WERE a few dark moments in the past two dark years when Bud had stepped into their house in Laura’s name, had roughly set things right.
