Lamb (12 page)

And let’s say Jessie stepped up to the plate, really started leading the team. Really found he missed her, really expressed how fond he was of the child, how he missed her affection. That’s what he would call it: affection. How when investigators talked to him they would be thinking he himself could have done it, he could have taken her and hidden her away somewhere, he could be that guy. How vividly he could imagine it all. How he could be a suspect.
How he was glad she wasn’t his real daughter because how would he have felt, being a man himself and knowing what was likely happening to her? He could never have held that up.

And we could say too that it was all the kids talked about at school for three days, a week, even two weeks, but how—true to a promise David Lamb would make her—Tommie would become a ghost, and everyone would forget her. All but one boy, say, a friendless scrawny kid with a perpetually runny nose and zealous parents, and who’d had a secret crush on Tommie for years, sat next to her in math and always hid his pencils before class so he could ask her for one. Say Tommie never would have mentioned this to Jenny or Sid, but she always packed an extra for him. Say she even let him borrow Lamb’s little silver pencil sharpener and square-danced with him in gym class—pretending, when Jenny and Sid called for it—to be repulsed by his skinny damp hands. His life would be touched by Tommie’s disappearance, how he would come to understand that this was how the universe worked. Maybe his parents would move to Nashville or Buffalo or Dallas before he could find out what happened to Tommie in the end. He’d keep his adult life empty, steeled against perpetuating the shock and horror of finding she’d
been abducted. Say that was the word they were using: abducted.

The cabin was a single large room—a tiny kitchen sink and square foot of countertop, a fold-out couch, a cot, a propane heater and a propane stove. It smelled like dust and vaguely of urine and natural gas. Mouse shit seeded the floor.

“If I come back here to stay,” Lamb told the girl, who held her hand over her nose, “there’ll be some cleaning.”

There was a tiny bathroom: sink and toilet. The water in the toilet was rust-orange, the bowl was lined with rust rings.

“Can you flush it?” She made a face.

“Wait’ll I get the water turned on.”

“I could clean.”

“That would take years.”

She shrugged. “I don’t care. Are we sleeping in the bunk beds?”

“Unless you want a cot. Or a couch.”

“Bunk beds duh.”

For the most part the place was empty of the inventory of daily life. Some tin plates and cups
and plastic dishes in the single kitchen cabinet. A split yellow sheet of paper taped to the inside door: handwritten instructions for turning on the water. Lamb tried the light switch behind the tiny porcelain sink. “Think we need electricity? We could leave the lights off.”

“The whole time?”

“Look, Tom. I’ll be frank with you, right? I’m always going to be frank with you.” He took her by the shoulders and stooped, so they were facing each other. “Here’s the thing. I feel a little funny about the possibility of that old man peeking in the windows and seeing us, and well, getting ideas.”

“Like he’ll know you’re not my uncle.”

“Exactly.”

“But you act like an uncle. Even like a dad.”

“Well, my dear, that’s tremendously kind of you to say, but excuse me for saying I’m not exactly sure either one of us knows what a dad ought to act like.”

“Oh, yeah.”

“And when all the lights in a house are on and a man is outside in the dark, he can see in. Have you ever tried that?”

“Yeah.”

“So.”

“We’ll use candles. Like the olden days.”

“Whatever you want, piggy. But we’re going to have to take care of some business before nightfall.”

“Like lunch.”

“And dinner. And ice. And a cooler. Because this guy is thirsty for a cold beer. And of course your candles. And whatever else we need. Like warmer clothes for you.” He held open the cabin door and they stepped outside. “Think you can stand another hour twenty in the car? See some of the local color?” He shut the door and tried it. Locked.

“I have to get dressed.”

“Yes, you do. Hey,” he called into the shop after her, “don’t put your shoes and socks on yet.”

When she came back out barefoot and dressed in her dirty T-shirt, Lamb swooped her up and she shrieked and twisted. “Careful,” he said. “You don’t want to black my other eye.” She let herself go like a rag doll. “Damn, kid. You’re a heavy sack. What’ve you been eating?”

“Goose livers.”

“Ah, well. Goose livers.” He carried her around to the back of the Ford and opened the hatch and set her down. “Don’t move.”

“I won’t.”

“Promise?”

She crossed her chest and kissed her forefinger.

“You’re sweet.”

She heard him go back in the shop and clanking metal and rushing water, and when he came back it
was with a towel over his shoulder and a carton of powdered soap and a full plastic bucket.

The girl pulled her legs up. “No way,” she said. She scooted back into the Ford. “Too cold.”

“Oh, stop it.” He got on his knees. “Give me your feet.”

She shook her head.

He opened and closed his hand, beckoning. “Come on,” he said. “Nothing comes next till you let me.” She watched him. “Come on. I got a towel. Your feet are filthy. You got to wash them before you put them in your socks. What if we can’t find any kid socks in town? These’ll be the only ones you have all week.”

She inched forward.

“Good girl.” He opened the tub of soap. “We’ll say that in this story you’re the princess, right? And I’m just the grizzly old guy who lives in the barn and cleans your feet.”

She looked out over his head while he scrubbed her feet and ankles and calves, pushing his fingers between her toes and admiring her arches. He put his fingers to her heel and lifted her foot. “It’s the perfect foot,” he said. “You have the perfect foot. If I were a sculptor,” he said very gravely, “I could not have a conceived of a more perfect foot, Tommie.”

They drove an hour out. A thousand, two, three thousand feet down to a high plateau dark with trees, edges of the highway shaggy red with Indian paintbrush. Cattle wrenching yarrow from the weeds with huge square teeth. A crow perched on the shoulder of a dead pronghorn, its carcass deflated in the gravel. They drove through three cattle gates, black cows and bulls among the trees and on the hillsides and in the rocks and knee-deep in empty irrigation ditches on both sides of the highway. The two-lane widened into a four-lane. They passed a ramshackle taxidermist’s, a drive-through taco stand. Tack and Feed. Snake Creek Mercantile. Pizza Hut, Sears, Kum & Go, Napa Auto Parts, and Safeway. Cardboard-colored condominiums set up in a row like empty shoe boxes, a stage set for children, a temporary game. They passed an adult boutique in a windowless concrete building. A broken metal swing set at the base of an outcropping of red-and-green striped rock. A skinny teenage girl in red-and-white dots pushing a stroller. Empty lawn chairs outside the Roundup Motel. A life-size plastic pinto rearing up from a little island of volcanic rock and weeds.

“Where is everybody?” she asked.

“Somewhere else.”

Downtown was eight blocks long: little yellow, blue, and green houses with cement-slab porches, crammed among leafless cottonwoods, dirt lawns, and cracked sidewalks. There were two gas stations, one boarded up. One tall grain elevator rusted at its metal seams, a small glassless window at the top, the gaping black mouth eating rain and snow and sleet, eating all the cries and accusations the wind carries with it, of failed enterprise and family farms. A one-story brick liquor store advertising fishing and hunting licenses; a lopsided pickup in forest-service green and rotted wood-handled ranch tools scattered around it. A mom-and-pop hardware. A country kitchen. A white-painted church.

Lamb parked across the street from the kitchen, a ratty shingled awning shading red and yellow letters painted on the windows.
CHICKEN-FRIED CHICKEN $3.99
and beneath that:
COLD BEER $1.00
. A tier of lumpy pies turned beneath an orange light in the window, and inside a huge old man in suspenders bent over his newspaper at the counter, holding his tiny white ceramic coffee mug with a massive, giant-knuckled hand. A sign posted inside the diner said
ROOMS FOR RENT
, and Lamb stopped in the middle of the empty street, wide for running cattle, and looked up. “You could come back here to live when you’re sixteen,” he said. “You could be the waitress.”

“And live up there?”

“We’d get you your horse, and a flowered apron for your waitressing dress—one with long sleeves, it keeps you covered, and buttons all the way up the front. And everybody in town would know you.”

“Where would I keep the horse?”

“And everyone would love you. All the patrons would want you to marry their sons and nephews and grandsons. Smart people. And you’d know all about them. Names of their children, names of their shepherds and blue heelers. Health of their old folks. And you’d go to the town meetings in long skirts, and you’d pin your hair up, like women should. And smile at them with your perfect milk white teeth. And I’d stay out at the little house, all old and gray, and you’d feel sorry for me so you’d come on your horse with slices of peach pie and cold meat loaf, wouldn’t you?”

“It wouldn’t be because I felt sorry for you.”

“You wouldn’t, would you?”

“No.”

“Come, dear.” He took her arm. “I’m going to feed you really good.”

They crossed the street, walking toward the image of a man and a girl in the windows before them as if finally, after all this travel, they were approaching themselves. There they were—hovering somewhere inside the restaurant, walking on air,
looking out at their street bodies, beckoning like ghosts.

Lamb held open the swinging glass door. Flatware rang against ceramic plates from the fat man at the counter, a skinny man and his wife in a booth. Bobby Vinton played on the AM radio. The waitress was a teenage girl with a big belly and short dark hair and thick eye makeup. She led them to a small Formica table flecked with gold and topped with a chrome napkin holder, a bottle of ketchup, a bottle of hot sauce, and forks and steak knives rolled up tight in white paper napkins. Magpies lined up on the telephone wire across the street. The waitress put laminated menus on the table, just wiped and still wet.

“Okay,” Lamb said. “I want you to pick out what you want, and order two of them. Then dessert.”

“I’m not that big a pig.”

“Yes, you are.”

“What are you having?”

“Chicken-fried chicken.”

“Me too.”

“No mind of her own?”

“I’ve never tried it before.”

“Oh, I see. Wants to try new things, does she?”

“So?”

“I’m just teasing you, dear. I think it’s a fine choice. Know why?”

“Why.”

“It was my choice.”

By the time they left the diner it was early evening, chilly. They passed a bar with the outline of a neon cowboy on horseback swinging a rope, the red green yellow and electric blue light brightening against the failed day.

At the Safeway they bought a can of red chili beans, a can of ranch beans, a can of pinto beans. A dozen cans of Dinty Moore Beef Stew; little paper-wrapped cans of potted meat; a dozen flat paper-wrapped cans of sardines; raisins and jack cheese. Sliced bread; a jar of peanut butter; two pounds of bacon and three dozen eggs; a two-liter glass bottle of brown whiskey; apple juice and tomato juice. Matches. Soap. Powdered milk. Powdered cocoa. Instant coffee. Potato Buds. Shampoo and toothpaste.

“You use an adult toothbrush?”

“Yes.”

“Good.” He put two in the cart. “You floss?”

“Not so much.” He threw in two wheels of waxed, mint-flavored floss. “You’re going to use both of those before you leave.”

“That’s a lot.”

“We’re going to start you on some good habits.”

“Are we staying for two years? Because we’re buying enough.”

“Oh, we are not. This is called preparation. This is called planning ahead. This is making sure you have everything you need and then some.”

“Okay.”

“It’s for your sake.”

“Okay.”

“If nothing else we’ll send you home with a bunch of loot, right? What else do we need? Did we get cashews? Are you over the cashews?”

“I’m over the cashews.”

“Good.”

They loaded up outside in the dark, and a mile down the road Lamb stopped again in front of another painted window. “One more stop.”

He led Tommie, teeth-chattering and hugging herself in her yellow sweater, into the Sportsman’s Paradise. It was faced with rough unfinished planks of dark wood, and just outside the door a plastic man with a plastic beard in a real red-and-black checked shirt held a plastic shotgun in one hand, a plastic fishing pole with reel line in the other.

“Are we going to buy a gun?”

He raised an eyebrow. “We’re here for shoes, stupid.”

“Hey.”

“Well, come on.” He nodded at her feet. “What are those? Did you think those were shoes? Who bought you those? Did your mother buy you those nine
years ago?” He held open the door. “Put them both together and you don’t even have a third of a shoe.”

Small bells hitched to the glass door rang as they stepped in, and the store was warm and quiet. It smelled like rubber and pipe tobacco, was crowded with cardboard boxes of shoes and carousels of shirts and sweaters and jackets. Basketball hoops hung from the rafters, a line of fishing poles from the front doors halfway to the back. The brown-carpeted floor sloped beneath their feet. In the front, a man in glasses stood behind a glass counter filled with knives. He regarded them without expression, offering no greeting. Tommie followed Lamb, who took giant steps and walked brusquely to the back, promptly lifted a beige boot with yellow laces and blue rubber bottoms and waved it at the skinny pimple-faced kid in a brown vest with a white name tag that read:
CLARE
.

“That’s a name,” Lamb said. “You know that? You don’t hear that kind of name anymore.”