Why the Devil Chose New England for His Work Page 2

  “Like glass,” he repeated, amazed at the way she put it. She was like no one he had ever met. He closed his eyes as she touched his face, covered his lips with her fingers. When he opened his eyes again, she was running back up the trail.

  “I’ll see you tomorrow,” she yelled and was gone.

  The rotting smell of the riverbank came to him, and he noticed for the first time that the sky was cloudy and the air quickly growing cool. But everything seemed different, somehow luminescent, awash with mercurial light. He sat down on a rock and watched the water swirl in the current.

  In the following days she formed a list of things she wanted to have and do and be, without Ron. A boat, but not any boat, a giant motor sailer they could take all the way down the coast to Florida, so big there could be a storm and they wouldn’t even notice down in their cabin below, where there would be a fireplace and a television-VCR in one. Who would be sailing the boat? Dion wanted to know. They would hire someone for that. But the rest of their life was imagined in modest proportions: dogs, golden collie mixes, not pure at all; three children; a house where everyone had a bedroom and there was one extra for a guest; and some land with a view of the hills around town. She didn’t want to live down by the river or so close to a neighbor that you could see in their window at night. She had never thought of living anywhere else? He had thought of Montana. Montana—the word sounded chewed in her mouth. God, she said, shaking her head. Other places. Gardner? Farmingdale? Monmouth? Those places, the only other places she knew, were bad enough. Imagine what people were like even further away. No, she wanted to go to Florida, though. Not to live, just to go there as the Nasons did every winter, taking their daughter Julie with them so that she came back with a tan, even if she did look like a squirrel. And no matter what time of year it was Natalie would have fresh flowers in every room of the house. This idea from her mother, of how people really lived. And a horse in a red barn for her daughter. And light blue carpeting in every room. Our room, she said, with a canopy bed, but he didn’t know what one was. It has a kind of roof, like a tent, she explained. He didn’t see the point but pictured it anyway, a bed with a tent in a room that already had a ceiling and above that a roof. He had pictured a cabin in Montana where you could look up and see the nails from the roof shingles coming through. And lavender, she said. No one would be allowed to smoke. Every room would smell of lavender. Like me, she said, and pressed her wrist to his nose. This was the smell of their future.

  None of us had been in love, not really, until now. Anything we had called love came back to us as mockery in the face of this sudden flight from reason. Andy had said he was in love with Missy, and it was a shame Missy was not in love with him. A daily lament rose from him like the steam of the heat from the pipes at school. Andy’s mother hit the counter with her fist. “They’re too young,” she said, talking about Natalie and Dion, and we knew she was talking about their tongues running along the inside of each other’s teeth and the suddenly anxious too-tight grip of her hand between his legs, and the taste of each other’s skin, and the smell of each other’s bodies, and the feel of him slipping inside her and her settling down over him, the shape of her mouth, the shape of his. She was talking about their bodies but thinking about the words they had used. Everyone knew. “Love,” she finally growled, as if the creature itself had risen from her dreams to take over her kitchen. She gripped a package of spaghetti as if it was a club and stared at the wall, paralyzed by the idea of them out there.

  They hadn’t been going out for a week when she got in his brother’s car and rode out to the next county. They ate at a Howard Johnson’s. She ordered an ice cream sundae and he ordered a grilled cheese sandwich to go, in case she wanted to go all of a sudden. She ate her sundae and ordered a milk shake; he couldn’t eat. He bought her a blue shirt in a fancy store, a boutique. It’s a nice shirt, he said. It looks nice on you. It’s a blouse, she said, turning for him in the parking lot with her eyes closed. A blouse, he repeated.

  She made him drive faster, clinging to his arm, with her lips pecking gently against the nape of his neck. God, she said, God. Her breath smelled of chocolate. His eyes watered when she rested her hand on his knee and started to rub his thigh as if he were cold. She rubbed until his leg burned. Her stomach rose and sank over the gentle slopes as Dion pressed down harder on the pedal. The road to Monmouth was straight and rolling, the Firebird rising and falling as if with the swells of a heavy sea, the shocks rattling in a drum roll. Slow down, she said, but he didn’t. What’s in Monmouth? she wanted to know but didn’t want to know. There was no reason to know, even though she had heard and did know. The bar everyone had heard about, the Chanticleer, that no one, at least no one from Bigelow Junior High, had been to. We heard it smelled of a cellar after a flood, the sweet twinge of wet walls and soaked carpets on a warm day.

  It was a low windowless building tucked under a maple tree between the side of the road and a trickling stream, no light outside except the one BUD sign. This beer, golden from the tap, was sweeter than what Ron had given her, stolen from his father’s icebox. She sat in the back of the room, far away from the others at the pool table, and stared down into her glass. She took a sip and put the mug down. He came over from the pool table and traced his finger along her lower lip, leaned over to kiss her. He loved her in that yellow sweater, her breasts weighted, pushing against the soft fabric, her yellow hair, each strand distinct, falling around her chin. She didn’t want him to put on any music, she didn’t want to play pool, she didn’t want to have another beer, she didn’t want to sit alone so many miles from home, she didn’t want to be sitting under the bar light, dissected in its brightness at the end of this numberless dark road. So he took the keys to the car, the hell with the rest, and they drove all the way up to Monmouth over the Kennebec River and back again.

  They held hands all the way; he said nothing and she loved the way he said it. She didn’t want to go home, and so they kept going in another direction. All the roads looked the same at night. She said it clearly to him, LOVE, just before dawn, and he was afraid as they parked by a river, further away from home than she had ever been, of touching her. So she touched him as she had seen herself touch him in her mind, and just as she had imagined he held absolutely still. If he said anything, he said what she thought he would say, he said what she wanted him to say, what we all wanted to hear, things he had never said to anyone before, words he had never thought before, whose meaning he would not have been able to explain but felt as he said them as clearly as he felt her breath on his neck, as surely sweet as her hair was soft, as clearly as he felt he was not the same and would not ever want anything, anyone, as much as he wanted her.

  The night she didn’t come home, the first night ever, people thought of her bruised and bleeding in the corner of some motel room halfway between Vaughn and Mississippi. Others thought of her in the Hyatt in Boston, or they wouldn’t wait so long: the Marriott in Portsmouth. Or they were on a cruise, on the Scotia Prince headed for Halifax, gambling in black tie and satin dress. And still others said, shaking their heads, No, no, she was gone, long gone from us, lying somewhere by the railway tracks. The man in the caboose will find her the next time we hear the Boston and Maine. She’s somewhere between Haymarket and Bangor, bleeding into the gravel, her linens smudged, silk torn, the blush of her cheeks chalk white, and Dion halfway to Mexico. Andy was the only one who got it right, the more obvious answer: they lay side by side in the back of his brother’s car parked on the edge of a field in the next county. She pulled the blanket beneath her chin as he pulled her head against his chest and ran a single finger through her hair. When she tilted her head, only her bangs and her lips caught the moonlight.

  Everywhere Andy and I went was in search of her, just as Mr. Dawson drove up and down Litchfield Road and all the way across town to the quarry and back saying to himself he was on an errand when he was really hoping, just for a moment, to catch a glimpse of her. Her father was out looking
for her now, too, in the truck, rifle at his side. Two of her uncles were on opposite sides of the town, covering all the roads leading in and out. Her mother told herself she had known the time would come; but not like this, she said to herself. Not with him. She had thought of Ron and the wedding, the white dress she would sew (had already spent hours, days, years, shaping it in her mind). Even if they found her, she would not be the same now.

  The members of the basketball team, sure now that they would lose the final game of the season and miss the playoffs, were home with their parents watching television or eating potato chips or talking on the phone or listening to their parents talking in the next room or lying on their backs thinking of Dion out there with her; they listened to the sound of crickets and cars passing and shouts from up the street and dogs barking and pots clinking in the sink and footsteps of sisters on stairways while they thought of him out there touching her neck with the tips of his fingers before looking away to drive the car or order another beer or wave to his brother, as if the practicalities of living could distract him, even for a second, from where he would touch her next.

  “He took her, he took her,” Natalie’s mother moaned over and over to her husband and his brothers.

  “He dragged her off. He threw her in his car and took her away.” Natalie’s father was on the phone, calling Sheriff Chuck Sheldon and everyone he knew, which was everyone, the fathers of all the basketball players, fathers of daughters who were Natalie’s friends, younger brothers of fathers of Natalie’s friends and basketball players, fathers of girls not yet old enough to be in junior high, though when they were another Dion would be waiting for them.

  All over town parents of girls who would be like or wanted to be like her and boys who might think of doing what he had done lay in bed staring at the ceiling, saying a few words to each other: What do you think? We’ll find them tomorrow. What will you do? Don’t know. Do you think she’s all right? I really don’t know. They didn’t mention what they were thinking to their children, listening to them talk from the next room, giving voice to their thoughts of what might be happening out there, what he might be doing to her. No image, no story, once started, would complete itself in their minds: she was tied in the backseat, the purple, no the pink silk shirt, ripped down the front and her pale breasts shivering in the moonlight with her nipples like cherries on cream pie—where was he? Hovering above her. Just a hand comes into view; he was gentle now that he had what he wanted. Or she was running down the road in front of his headlights. They had pulled off the road, and she had gotten away, though just for a moment. Her blouse had been stripped off and was lying torn somewhere out of view, probably in the backseat or on the side of the road, and she ran just in her white panties with the cloth riding up between her cheeks above the tan line of her bikini, the point where everyone’s eyes had previously been turned back briefly exposed now. Her head turned, her face flushed and mouth open, her eyes wide and wild, like a cat in high beams: he was catching up. And when he did catch up she would be in the backseat or on the side of the road, her back pressed against the ground, her breath taken away by the weight of his body, all her mother’s clothing, so carefully sewn together, made well enough for her daughter’s children to wear as costumes of a previous era, lying in shreds, and her face tied in a knot, biting her lower lip, eyes pulled into her skull, as he lowered himself.

  In our minds love had gone bad, but not in theirs. “No,” she said, pushing off his chest. “Not here. I want it to be perfect.” He didn’t understand, though he obeyed her, and she pulled him back against her on the seat where they lay together, her lips traveling over his face. “Just hold still,” she said. “I always knew,” she said, “it would be like this.” He didn’t know what it was or what this was, only that he had been chosen. He closed his eyes as she pressed his face against her sweater. All he could smell was her. “I love you,” she said again and again until the sound of her voice covered him like a blanket. “I want to hear you say it.” He said he had already said it, but she wanted him to say it again, so he did, repeating it into her sweater, into her breasts. “You do,” she said, “don’t you?”

  She told him to hold his hands at his sides no matter what she did. He smiled at her, as if she was kidding. You trust me, she said. It was a question. He nodded in a way that made her love him even more. He was her child. He asked her what was the matter. Her eyes had watered. She told him nothing and ran her hand over his eyelids, smoothing them closed. “Hold still.” He nodded. “You nodded!” she scolded and he tried not to smile. She sat on his lap, feeling her shorts ride up. She ran her finger along his forearm. His fingers twitched. Abruptly she laid her palms flat against his chest and pushed, angling her chin up. She took one shoulder in each hand and ran her hands down his arms as if she were wringing out wet clothes. He grinned. “Stop that!” she said. She undid her blouse and bra then put one hand on his shoulder, one against the side of his cheek, and lowered her chest against his face wrapping her arms around the back of his head. He raised his hands, she pushed them back down; he raised them again, she took them and sat on them. “There,” she said. She leaned forward, pulling his nose between her breasts, his mustache tickling her skin, and found the edge of his knuckle between her legs.

  They rocked together as if in an embrace of grief until her breaths came in quick, panicked bursts, as if she was short of breath, not him. She squeezed the back of his head so tightly he yelled into her chest. She rolled off him, backing against the far door, pulling her blouse over her chest. Her face was scrunched up, smeared.

  “Don’t tell anyone what happened,” she mumbled.

  His mind raced for something to say, not the wrong thing. “What?” he said. “What happened?”

  She shook her head. “I don’t know,” she said. Whatever had happened it wasn’t his fault. It was hers. She was cold. The windows had steamed up but were now frosted over. “It’s all right,” she said thinking of the movies, TV. It had all gone just like that until now. She tried to think of what would happen next. “I’m scared,” she said, trying to follow the script. “Hold me.” He moved over on the seat. Already, part of her didn’t want him to touch her, but this couldn’t be true.

  She knew when she fell in love with him that she would be in love forever just as she knew when she woke up in the backseat the next morning, cramped and headachy, and looked at Dion sleeping with his mouth open that she was no longer in love with him and never would be. She opened the door and stepped out into the damp morning air. She began to think of Ron’s long fingers resting on the steering wheel of his father’s Mercury, his thin legs and gray slacks as they drove to the movies and held hands in the dark. She thought of his thin lips brushing against hers, his hand resting carefully on her shoulder, and of his parents reading in bed waiting for him to come home, his father’s air-conditioning.

  Dion stretched, scrunching his eyes, his limbs snaking around the corners of the seats up to the back dash. His T-shirt pulled up to show his stomach. He opened his eyes and watched her standing in the open doorway. He smiled.

  “We should go,” she said. “I’m afraid someone will find us here.” He shrugged. Obviously he cared nothing for what people thought. How had she missed this before? He moved like an oaf, like her father, slowly opening the door, as if there was no hurry. Digging the keys out of his pocket. Finally he started the car and launched them forward, speeding. At least they were moving; she rolled the window down and stuck her face into the breeze as if into a splash of water. Poor Ron. What was he doing now?

  “I’m not feeling well,” she said, making a show suddenly of holding her stomach.

  He leaned forward over the wheel and shot her a glance. “What’s wrong?”

  “I don’t know,” she said irritably, as if it was all his fault. He recoiled a little against his door and leaned his elbow out the window, steering with one thumb.

  As they neared her house, he started to get nervous, leaning forward over the whe
el.

  “When am I going to see you again?”

  She looked at the dashboard as if she hadn’t heard. He pulled over to the side of the road and turned to her, the words she had been saying—his own name, and I love you, I love you—playing through his head. He wasn’t going to say them, they were her words, and he didn’t want to tell her to say them, but he needed her to keep saying them.

  She put her hand on the door. He watched it resting there. “I can walk from here,” she said and stepped out of the car.

  “Where are you going?” He screamed so loudly she stumbled off the road. She could see her house from here, across the road and down the field.

  “I don’t love you anymore.”

  He was out of the car now with his hands on the roof, just looking at her.

  She repeated it. Her bellow drew out and continued as a groan as she bent over with her knees together and hands pulled around her stomach. Tears burst down her cheeks, her blonde strands sticking to her lips.

  It seemed now that he must have known all along what would happen. He could have made a noise like the sudden roar of gravel pouring from a dump truck at the construction site where his father worked. This much force and more had built up in his chest. He could have crushed her words with his own. He could have screamed so loudly she would have ceased to exist, but he was silent.

  She sensed him stumbling through the field after her. Her mother came to the window, saw her, and called her father who arrived at the window with his shotgun. Seeing her father, Natalie ran away from the house toward the woods. Her mother came out onto the front steps and screamed, “Natalie!” Natalie tripped and vanished into the blonde straw. By the time she stood, her father was on the phone, calling. His friends ran for their trucks and cars, funneling from Central Street, Winthrop Road, and Water Street onto Litchfield Road.