Good Girls (26 page)

Forty years.

Most of those years he'd whiled away by candlelight at this cherrywood desk in this tent, while the rest of the monsters, whoever was in camp, did whatever they did to waste their decades: whittle or whistle or recount slights or swap hunting stories; play card games, board games; fuck, smoke, dance, vanish; talk or sing so convincingly about missing someone or other, you'd almost believe they were capable of it, that anyone or anything on this planet was truly capable of feeling another's absence.

Sometimes, working here in the desktop candlelight, Caribou thought that that was the world's cruelest trick of all, and its greatest gift: the longing for longing. For those fleeting, heart-hurt moments when life had
taste.

These were his thoughts now as he sat at the desk Aunt Sally had somehow caused to appear right here, one miraculous night, so long ago. For reasons he had never fully understood, she had chosen him—lanky Caribou of the long, long hands
—
out of so many others, and so he considered this desk the symbol of his Office and the significance of his duties. When he sat here, with the others down the bank or in their tents or gone and Aunt Sally in her rocking chair outside or in her own tent, dreaming her unimaginable dreams, Caribou sometimes imagined himself her greatest vassal, her Walter Raleigh, mapping the world for the woman he knew would one day behead him. And sometimes—just occasionally, on star-soaked, tingling, dangerous nights like this one—he felt like an artist, a monster-Faulkner, drunk and driven, not just mapping the world but creating it.

Only, Caribou was never drunk. And instead of a Yoknapatawpha County, he made charts.

Here they all were, cataloged and coded in their labeled folders in his cherrywood drawers. Some of them were nothing more than hand-drawn maps. Some were lists, some sketches. But all were constantly updated, their details and demarcations shaded and sharpened. Mother's Whistling fool could keep his iPhone and laptop, his GPS and Google Earth. No program and no satellite would ever see the few thousand square miles of his world—the haunted, disappearing Delta, which Aunt Sally had dreamed and Policy had purposed—in the way Caribou could. In the sheer variety of ways he could.

And so tonight, for a single moment, as he prepared to do what he had never once, in forty years, done, Caribou leaned out of his chair, in the sticky summer night that never, even on the hottest days, made him warm, held his candle over the open drawer, and marveled at what he had accomplished. Here was his own contribution to Aunt Sally's Creation: the jacket folders, numbered and lettered; the unlined papers inside those folders covered with notations and sketches but free of flourish or calligraphic design, smooth in their vellum sleeves, clean and flat as test pressings. They really were like record albums, every one, ready to sing as soon as he dropped his eyes into their grooves.

The monster's Mississippi, Mother had once scoffed, but in admiration. Even she had admired this: the whole of the territory they roamed and hunted, cataloged (and, more importantly, counted) by freeway exit, by distance (miles), by distance (travel time), by number of streets and alphabetical order of street names, family names, businesses, by numbers of magnolia trees or junipers, by address and phone prefix, by births and deaths (current year), births and deaths (historical), by town and county, by times any of Aunt Sally's denizens had passed through or set foot near or in them. A thousand charts, all compiled and rigorously maintained for the sole and express purpose of keeping Aunt Sally's children's actions un-chartable, even by the children themselves, thus ensuring that their orbit—for orbit it was and must inevitably stay, Aunt Sally too great and massive a star ever to release them, fully—remained as elliptical and mysterious as a comet's.

Even more, the charts were meant to ensure that no one, not one of them, ever did what Caribou was going to do tonight. He'd known he must from the moment Aunt Sally had told him what she needed. Even now, he could barely calm himself enough to hear, again, that word in her voice, which sent a shudder through him so bone-deep, so pleasurable and painful, it seemed to emanate from his very center, thundering down the dead, echoing arteries of his entire being like a heartbeat.

Children.

For just a moment, in his excitement and unease, he tried to pretend that he
wasn't
doing what he knew he must, knew he was. What violation, after all, was he actually committing? Aunt Sally had tasked him, and him alone, with selecting and procuring the guests for this special, special Party. The numbers he had used to guide the selection of the file in his drawer, then the chart in that file, then the entry on that chart, were precisely the numbers Aunt Sally had suggested his dreams indicated, and she had arrived at those numbers by using the ever-growing, interpretive key she had devised long before there had ever
been
a Caribou.

In other words, she'd gotten the numbers from Policy, same as always. All he had done was shuffle the order in which the numbers would be applied. He'd had to skip one, it was true, but he often had to skip, even on ordinary nights, if a particular digit in a sequence proved inapplicable to the section or chart the previous number had directed him to consult. He wasn't changing or subverting Policy, just applying it. And that had always been his job.

He wasn't altering the formula by which they had all agreed, for so very long, to make these particular choices. He was simply shaping it, so that when his hands slid into the drawer, gliding over the tops of the files like birds in formation, they alighted atop the 117th file, then held there, as though settling on a branch. A hum buzzed in his throat. A shiver rocked him, almost as if he were surprised, as if his very skin were playing along, maintaining the illusion that this was just another Policy decision. Chance, not Caribou.

As if he didn't already know which chart he was going to pull, and what the 28th entry on it would be, and where he would be getting their guests for this momentous night.

He withdrew the file, staring as if in amazement at the neat heading across the top:
INSTITUTIONAL, ISSAQUENA, SHILOH VALE, WASHINGON, EAST
.
Below the heading was just another brief list: schools and civic centers, two libraries, a YMCA camp center, long abandoned.

An orphanage.

He allowed himself a single sigh so deep, it felt like breath, or like he remembered breath feeling. Was this Policy guiding him, after all? Or Aunt Sally? Was
he
guiding Policy (and there it was again, that tiny tremor of unease)? But even if he was—if
they
were, he and Sally together—she had
made
Policy, after all. She had given it to Caribou, to all of the others, like God giving his Commandments to Moses.

Which made him Moses?

He was actually laughing as he slid into Aunt Sally's blue LeSabre and started down the muddy track out of camp. No one, as far as he knew, had used this car in months, but Aunt Sally always made him keep it gassed and primed and ready, even though she never went anywhere. When, Caribou wondered, was the last time he had driven? He'd forgotten how much he liked it, and he laughed again, watching his reflection in the windshield gliding along the edge of the river like an otter. Then the river was gone, and he angled the LeSabre through the bottomlands, past soybean fields rimmed far to the east by that miles-long furrow of wildflowers that blossomed blue out of the buckshot soil every single summer, appearing all together, overnight, as though they'd fallen from the sky more than sprung from the earth. Then came the cotton rows where Aunt Sally's shyer monsters sometimes liked to lead their Party guests, on the nights of Aunt Sally's Parties, when the tent got loud and the music rumbled in the ground and rippled the river. Next, the swamp where one night, not too long ago—the night, Caribou realized, that Mother had finally left for good, chasing her Whistling fool—Aunt Sally had let him canoe her, mile after slow mile, through snarls of reeds that always crept closer yet somehow never reached them, pods of sleeping alligators that stirred as they passed like the scaled skin of the swamp itself, clouds so low and heavy that they clung to the earth like wet cotton, and, close on to morning, lightened just a little as the moon settled in behind them. Aunt Sally hadn't said anything about going back, and then it was too late to go back, so they'd sheltered in the crisscross shade of a sycamore grove, and she'd started to allow him to make love to her and then sung to him instead, cradling him like the roots of a tree, rocking him—and herself, it seemed, for that one, magical night—like a baby. Lay down, Sally.

Was this, Caribou wondered, why all the not-monsters—all those pathetic creatures out there roaming or sleeping away their pallid nights beyond the Delta—loved driving so much? Was this why Mother's jabberer sang and whistled so many songs about it? Because every single trip away from home was a passage through everything that made a place home to begin with?

Especially if you knew, as he knew, that this would be the last time? That after tonight, he really might not be back? That this was home no longer?

So many places had resonance, for him, it turned out, a surprising number, given how infrequently he had stirred from the tents by the riverbank.
There:
the ruins of the juke joint where Mother's Whistler had learned so many of the songs he sang. And,
there,
just as the gravel turned to macadam and the first streetlights lowered themselves over the glowing, clayey dirt in the fields and baked it ordinary: the bus stop where he and Mother had broken down together, in this very car, and had had to walk the long miles back to camp, not talking to each other, but also not minding or being jealous of each other, for once. Where had they even been going?

The miles unspooled down the hours, down the charts in his head. Here it all was: gas stations; nighttime barbecue stands with their furtive customers packed around picnic benches in the shadows like moonshiners; a trailer park; a single subdivision, developed years ago but never populated; little towns, Brattleford, West Brattleford; the abandoned shacks of Grace Holler—the former lynching capital of the Delta—all sinking now beneath their kudzu shrouds as they melted into the ground. That was the only place, in all these decades, that Policy had ever directed Aunt Sally's children to visit twice. At the time, that had seemed cruel to Caribou—only right, maybe, but also cruel—until years and years later, when the Whistler had returned to camp one day with the ballad that had surfaced about it all, out there in their world.

Such a beautiful, haunting song, a terrible thing, especially in the Whistler's greedy, reedy voice, in his Whistle that penetrated skin like teeth.

They had ripped out the heart of a cursed town, Aunt Sally's children, and replaced it with a nightmare, a myth for the ages, a fresh Crotoan. Grace Holler, where no one plays, and none dare go. The heart of a town seemed a small price to pay, in the end, for that.

So fast, too fast, his Mississippi fell away in the rearview mirrors and vanished behind him. He would have stopped or slowed to watch it go. But Aunt Sally was awaiting her guests. And there was never enough dark.

Even he was surprised at how little trouble he had spotting the turnoff, which he'd used exactly once before, on the night he'd found this place. It came up right where remembered, a little opening in the longleaf pines, deeper into the Piney Woods than he should ever have had reason to venture in the first place. How
had
he found it originally? Caribou couldn't remember. What did it matter, anyway?

More important, why was he stopping the car now, switching it off and just sitting, despite his time concerns, half a mile down this barely rutted track that hardly qualified as a lane, amid these skeletal, towering trunks that looked more like dock pilings than forest, the foundations for some massive, unimaginable ruin? Moonlight rolled between them, pouring over the ground cover, turning it that glowing, perfect Piney Woods green, that green of nowhere else.

And what was this stinging sensation, all of a sudden? This stab of … something about this place. These trees, this light. The crumbling white plantation house he knew was back there, a mile or so farther down the lane.

The fact that it was all too beautiful for what it was, perhaps? Or maybe that that house, and the people who inhabited it, had been out here so long that the world had all but forgotten they existed, which made them and it more than a little like Aunt Sally's camp full of monsters?

That last thought startled him, made him sit up straight and touch his own cheeks with his fingertips. And then he had another thought: what if this place was reminding him not just of his home now, but his home
before
? His birthplace? Was that even possible? Or did it just feel possible tonight, because tonight promised to be so momentous?

All at once, he gasped, actually sucked in air, an old and meaningless reflex. Apparently, there was magic in Policy, still. Oh, yes, there was. So much more than Aunt Sally professed to believe, maybe more than she knew. Because the only reason he had stopped just here was that he'd been seized by these feelings, and by the moonlight. And they had seized and transfixed him in this precise, Piney spot, at this exact moment. And that was the only reason he saw her.

Actually, all he saw at first was her eyes, little green pinpricks in the new dark, just there behind the trunk of a pine five feet or so to the left of his driver's-side window, blinking closed-and-open, closed-and-open. As soon as whatever was back there saw him looking, it skittered off, low to the ground, like an armadillo burrowing through the needles and leaves, away and farther left, deeper into the pines: a wood creature, surely, a squirrel or badger or wolverine, except he knew it wasn't any of those things even before he stepped out of the car. Silently, leaving the car door open, he glided over the ground cover into the woods, never quite losing sight of the movement, the little figure barely stirring branches as it ducked between and beneath them. He tracked her less by her movements than by those eyes that glanced back from time to time, greener even than the piney green dark, opening-closing.