Mislaid & The Wallcreeper: The Nell Zink Collection. Nell Zink

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СКАЧАТЬ sockets hanging out the wall. But I know she’s all right, because she had two Chesapeake Bay retrievers. The one of them had a head on it like a bear. It could bite through your tires. The other one was the most nervous animal I ever saw. They was both laying dead in the mudroom. She could only have shot them herself.”

      “Wait a second.” Meg looked at him questioningly. “She shoot her own dogs?”

      “Nobody else could get close enough to those dogs to shoot them,” he assured her. “She couldn’t take them down to Dominica. There’s a quarantine.”

      “She’s in Dominica?”

      “I don’t know! She might be in Cuba or Antigua.” He shrugged. “No human soul ever put the time she did into dog food. Every day she made them a pot of stew. If she had to go, it was a mercy she killed them. Sometimes you have to think about the best interests of the animal.”

      After Lomax drove away, Meg considered his remarks on the dogs and decided an alarm system might be in order, as well as a way of storing cash and drugs that didn’t involve the bed where she slept.

      She took Karen down to the shelter and let her pick. And thus it was that they acquired a six-year-old spayed cockapoo bitch named Cha Cha and eventually several sets of nesting Tupperware suitable for burial in the yard.

      It was their eighth meeting before Meg knew there was a girl sitting outside in Lomax’s van the entire time, and only because Karen brought it up. Karen asked whether the girl in the van could come out to play, and he promptly responded, “She’s a little old for that. She’s my girlfriend.”

      Karen objected. “I’m not old, and I have a boyfriend!”

      “What’s his name?”

      “Temple Moody.”

      Lomax looked at Meg with one eyebrow raised. “He Canadian?”

      “He’s black like us,” Karen said.

      “Y’all black?”

      “So black it’ll blow your mind,” Meg said. “Blackhearted as coal. Versed in the black arts.”

      “So you’re a witch, and your boyfriend is a warlock?”

      Karen snickered. “Yeah. We got a real voodoo doll made of wax and hair. That’s how Temple could hypnotize ants to join his ant farm.”

      “Well, I’ll be doggoned,” Lomax said. “You’re joking, right?”

      Meg managed to keep a straight face, and Lomax suddenly felt insecure. He suspected that as an Indian he was supposed to know something about magic and spirits, but his grasp of the world was congruent with the grasp of his two hands. Now at least he had an explanation for Meg’s interest in herbal medicines.

      He went back to the van and told his intermittently dozing girlfriend about it as he drove her home to their trailer 120 miles away in the woods near Danville.

      “I wish I were a witch, but I’m the wrong generation,” Flea (short for Felicia) said. “Witches are born every seventh generation, and my grandmother was already a witch.”

      “You’re saying Poodlehead and her daughter can’t both be witches. But if her boyfriend was a sixth-generation warlock?”

      Flea paused to think and said, “You’re so smart.”

      “We could both be witches and not know it. Hell, I don’t know what my ancestors were doing seven generations ago.”

      “Can you cast a magic spell?”

      He sucked on the roach clip smoldering in the ashtray, cleared his throat, and sang, “Hey-a ho-yah ho-yah, hey-a ho-yah ho-yah, ohm anautcha sheila, ohm anautcha rama.”

      “Isn’t it Shiva, not Sheila?” Flea asked.

      Flea was a dropout, like Meg, with intellectual ambitions that outstripped her resources. But on a smaller scale. Like Lee, she was a sexual outlaw who had left home young. But not to go to boarding school. She had ditched sixth grade to move in with Lomax.

      It was no fault of his. She had long legs. Her girlfriends were older, and she pitched her voice low. She wore makeup and tight pants and styled her hair. In a dry county, there are no bartenders to turn away jailbait for a man’s protection. There was only a low stone retaining wall by a river, where everybody went to party. When they met, it was dark. The morning after, he got a surprise.

      He saw himself as her protector. As long as she was with him, she wasn’t hanging out at the wall, waiting for whomever. He could make an honest woman of her. He proposed marriage.

      Her father said Lomax was a rat. Flea puffed on a cigarette and said he was just jealous. Her parents drank. She could repeat many things that made her seem worldly and mature. There was no privacy in her childhood home. Every conflict was open for all to see, so she knew love was wrapping paper and a battle for supremacy. Her clique of eighth graders taught her feminist pride, as they understood it: it meant knowing how to wait for a better offer. Lomax brought order and stability to her life and allowed her to be a child again. With every day she spent riding around in his van, she became more innocent and ladylike. She never had to beg or flirt. She just asked for what she wanted—a Darvon, say, or Mountain Dew and pork rinds—and he would figure out a fast way to get it. No effort was needed to catch his eye. He was always watching her, more often than he looked in the rearview mirror.

      Sometimes he needed her to do difficult things, but here her experiences compared favorably to those of her friends who were thirteen and unattached and still going to the wall. Among her friends his social status was in a class by itself. They called him “the Candy Man” and envied her openly.

      Even after she turned twelve, her father refused to consent to her preengagement, so they could not be married. Still she lived as an adult, her lover’s all-round helpmeet. She was older than Byrdie by about six weeks. To look at, she was a leggy, wispy, lovely girl. But almost nobody ever saw her. She was under orders to stay in the van, where she killed time listening to the radio.

      Sometimes watching Karen fall asleep at night, Meg suspected her of weaving romantic fairy tales to herself about her father and brother. She might well remember them, or the lake, or her paternal grandparents’ house at Christmas. Every time one of Meg’s stories featured a lost royal child, fairy changeling, or disenfranchised heiress (she especially liked retailing what she remembered of Mistress Masham’s Repose), she watched Karen’s face closely. There was no glimmer of recognition. But during ugly-duckling-style stories—the kind where someone underappreciated turns out to be a princess, if only by marriage after the story is basically over—Karen would sit up straighter and appear dissatisfied, setting her mouth in a horizontal line. Confronted for the first time with Cinderella, she protested her working conditions and said the midnight rule was unfair.

      It disheartened Meg to think that Karen might regard her minimal roster of chores and homework as equivalent to the labors of Cinderella. In reality, it was much stranger than that. The mind of a child! Children have no hearts (cf. Peter Pan, another story Meg could reproduce fairly accurately), and their minds are rickety towers of surreal detritus. Of course Karen remembered Lee and Byrdie. Once there was a house, a boat; once there was a big, mean boy. There were men, wading pools in sunlight, termites, stamp hinges, and coffee-table books of illustrations by Maxfield Parrish. There was a push-button gear shift, high up on СКАЧАТЬ