‘I wanted to go to the beach and suh-suh-swim! ‘ the little girl wept, and now it was ‘swim’ that sounded exotic — the Vietnamese word for ‘ecstasy,’ perhaps.
‘I said I’d take you this afternoon.’ Mattie was still sniffing, but getting herself under control.
‘Don’t do that again, little guy, please don’t you ever do that again, Mommy was so scared.’
‘I won’t,’ the kid said ‘I really won’t.’ Still crying, she hugged the older girl tight, laying her head against the side of Mattie’s neck. Her baseball cap fell off. I picked it up, beginning to feel very much like an outsider here. I poked the blue-and-red cap at Mattie’s hand until her fingers closed on it.
I decided I also felt pretty good about the way things had turned out, and maybe I had a right to.
I’ve presented the incident as if it was amusing, and it was, but it was the sort of amusing you never see until later. When it was happening, it was terrifying. Suppose there had been a truck coming from the other direction? Coming around that curve, and coming too fast?
A vehicle did come around it, a pickup of the type no tourist ever drives. Two more locals gawked their way by.
‘Ma’am?’ I said. ‘Mattie? I think I’d better get going. Glad your little girl is all right.’ The minute it was out, I felt an almost irresistible urge to laugh. I could picture me drawling this speech to Mattie (a name that belonged in a movie like Unforgiven or True Grit if any name ever did) with my thumbs hooked into the belt of my chaps and my Stetson pushed back to reveal my noble brow.
I felt an insane urge to add, ‘You’re right purty, ma’am, ain’t you the new schoolteacher?’
She turned to me and I saw that she was right purty. Even with circles under her eyes and her blonde hair sticking off in gobs to either side of her head. And I thought she was doing okay for a girl probably not yet old enough to buy a drink in a bar. At least she hadn’t belted the baby.
‘Thank you so much,’ she said. ‘Was she right in the road?’ Say she wasn’t, her eyes begged. At least say she was walking along the shoulder.
‘Well — ‘
‘I walked on the line,’ the girl said, pointing. ‘It’s like the cross-mock.’ Her voice took on a faintly righteous tone. ‘Crossmock is safe.’
Mattie’s cheeks, already white, turned whiter. I didn’t like seeing her that way, and didn’t like to think of her driving home that way, especially with a kid.
‘Where do you live, Mrs. — ?’
‘Devore,’ she said. ‘I’m Mattie Devore.’ She shifted the child and put out her hand. I shook it. The morning was warm, and it was going to be hot by mid-afternoon — beach weather for sure — but the fingers I touched were icy. ‘We live just there.’
She pointed to the intersection the Scout had shot out of, and I could see — surprise, surprise —
a doublewide trailer set off in a grove of pines about two hundred feet up the little feeder road.
Wasp Hill Road, I recalled. It ran about half a mile from Route 68 to the water — what was known as the Middle Bay. Ah yes, doc, it’s all coming back to me now. I’m once more riding the Dark Score range. Saving little kids is my specialty.
Still, I was relieved to see that she lived close by — less than a quarter of a mile from the place where our respective vehicles were parked with their tails almost touching — and when I thought about it, it stood to reason. A child as young as the bathing beauty couldn’t have walked far . . .
although this one had already demonstrated a fair degree of determination. I thought Mother’s haggard look was even more suggestive of the daughter’s will. I was glad I was too old to be one of her future boyfriends; she would have them jumping through hoops all through high school and college. Hoops of fire, likely.
Well, the high-school part, anyway. Girls from the doublewide side of town did not, as a general rule, go to college unless there was a juco or a voke-tech handy. And she would only have them jumping until the right boy (or more likely the wrong one) came sweeping around the Great Curve of Life and ran her down in the highway, her all the while unaware that the white line and the crossmock were two different things. Then the whole cycle would repeat itself.
Christ almighty, Noonan, quit it, I told myself. She’s three years old and you’ve already got her with three kids of her own, two with ringworm and one retarded.
‘Thank you so much,’ Mattie repeated.
‘That’s okay,’ I said, and snubbed the little girl’s nose. Although her cheeks were still wet with tears, she grinned at me sunnily enough in response. ‘This is a very verbal little girl.’
‘Very verbal, and very willful.’ Now Mattie did give her child a little shake, but the kid showed no fear, no sign that shaking or hitting was the order of most days. On the contrary, her smile widened. Her mother smiled back. And yes — once you got past the slopped-together look of her, she was most extraordinarily pretty. Put her in a tennis dress at the Castle Rock Country Club (where she’d likely never go in her life, except maybe as a maid or a waitress), and she would maybe be more than pretty. A young Grace Kelly, perhaps.
Then she looked back at me, her eyes very wide and grave.
‘Mr. Noonan, I’m not a bad mother,’ she said.
I felt a start at my name coming from her mouth, but it was only momentary. She was the right age, after all, and my books were probably better for her than spending her afternoons in front of General Hospital and One Life to Live. A little, anyway.
‘We had an argument about when we were going to the beach. I wanted to hang out the clothes, have lunch, and go this afternoon. Kyra wanted — ‘ She broke off. ‘What? What did I say?’
‘Her name is Kia? Did — ‘ Before I could say anything else, the most extraordinary thing happened: my mouth was full of water. So full I felt a moment’s panic, like someone who is swimming in the ocean and swallows a wave-wash. Only this wasn’t a salt taste; it was cold and fresh, with a faint metal tang like blood.
I turned my head aside and spat. I expected a gush of liquid to pour out of my mouth — the sort of gush you sometimes get when commencing artificial respiration on a near-drowning victim.
What came out instead was what usually comes out when you spit on a hot day: a little white pellet.
And that sensation was gone even before the little white pellet struck the dirt of the shoulder. In an instant, as if it had never been there.
‘That man spirted,’ the girl said matter-of-factly.
‘Sorry,’ I said. I was also bewildered. What in God’s name had that been about? ‘I guess I had a little delayed reaction.’
Mattie looked concerned, as though I were eighty instead of forty. I thought that maybe to a girl her age, forty is eighty. ‘Do you want to come up to the house? I’ll give you a glass of water.’
‘No, I’m fine now.’
‘All right. Mr. Noonan . . . all I mean is that nothing like this has ever happened to me before. I was hanging sheets . . . she was inside watching a Mighty Mouse cartoon on the VCR . . . then, when I went in to get more pins . . . ‘ She looked at the girl, who was no longer smiling. It was starting to get through to her now. Her eyes were big, and ready to fill with tears. ‘She was gone. I thought for a minute I’d die of fear.’
Now the kid’s mouth began to tremble, and her eyes filled up right on schedule. She began to weep. Mattie stroked her hair, soothing the small head until it lay against the Kmart smock top.
‘That’s all right, Ki,’ she said. ‘It turned out okay this time, but you can’t go out in the road. It’s dangerous. Little things get run over in the road, and you’re a little thing. The most precious little thing in the world.’
She cried harder. It was the exhausted sound of a child who needed a nap before any more adventures, to the beach or anywhere else.
‘Kia bad, Kia bad,’ she sobbed against her mother’s neck.
‘No, honey, only three,’ Mattie said, and if I had harbored any further thoughts about her being a bad mother, they melted away then. Or perhaps they’d already gone — after all, the kid was round, comely, well-kept, and unbruised.