I was too old to believe in such simplicities as The Damsel in Distress Versus The Wicked Stepfather . . . or, in this case, Father-in-Law. I had my own fish to fry this summer, and I didn’t want to complicate my job by getting into a potentially ugly dispute between Mr. Computer and Ms. Doublewide. Devore had rubbed my fur the wrong way — and vigorously — but that probably wasn’t personal, only something he did as a matter of course. Hey, some guys snap bra-straps. Did I want to get in his face on this? No. I did not. I had saved Little Miss Red Sox, I had gotten myself an inadvertent feel of Mom’s small but pleasantly firm breast, I had learned that Kyra was Greek for ladylike. Any more than that would be gluttony, by God.
I stopped at that point, feet as well as brain, realizing I’d walked all the way to Warrington’s, a vast barnboard structure which locals sometimes called the country club. It was, sort of — there was a six-hole golf course, a stable and riding trails, a restaurant, a bar, and lodging for perhaps three dozen in the main building and the eight or nine satellite cabins. There was even a two-lane bowling alley, although you and your competition had to take turns setting up the pins.
Warrington’s had been built around the beginning of World War I. That made it younger than Sara Laughs, but not by much.
A long dock led out to a smaller building called The Sunset Bar. It was there that Warrington’s summer guests would gather for drinks at the end of the day (and some for Bloody Marys at the beginning). And when I glanced out that way, I realized I was no longer alone. There was a woman standing on the porch to the left of the floating bar’s door, watching me.
She gave me a pretty good jump. My nerves weren’t in their best condition right then, and that probably had something to do with it . . . but I think she would have given me a jump in any case.
Part of it was her stillness. Part was her extraordinary thinness. Most of it was her face. Have you ever seen that Edvard Munch drawing, The Cry? Well, if you imagine that screaming face at rest, mouth closed and eyes watchful, you’ll have a pretty good image of the woman standing at the end of the dock with one long-fingered hand resting on the rail. Although I must tell you that my first thought was not Edvard Munch but Mrs. Danvers.
She looked about seventy and was wearing black shorts over a black tank bathing suit. The combination looked strangely formal, a variation on the ever-popular little black cocktail dress. Her skin was cream-white, except above her nearly flat bosom and along her bony shoulders. There it swam with large brown age-spots. Her face was a wedge featuring prominent skull-like cheekbones and an unlined lamp of brow. Beneath that bulge, her eyes were lost in sockets of shadow. White hair hung scant and lank around her ears and down to the prominent shelf of her jaw.
God, she’s thin, I thought. She’s nothing but a bag of —
A shudder twisted through me at that. It was a strong one, as if someone were spinning a wire in my flesh. I didn’t want her to notice it — what a way to start a summer day, by revolting a guy so badly that he stood there shaking and grimacing in front of you — so I raised my hand and waved. I tried to smile, as well. Hello there, lady standing out by the floating bar. Hello there, you old bag of bones, you scared the living shit out of me but it doesn’t take much these days and I forgive you.
How the fuck ya doin? I wondered if my smile looked as much like a grimace to her as it felt to me.
She didn’t wave back.
Feeling quite a bit like a fool — THERE’S NO VILLAGE IDIOT HERE, WE ALL TAKE TURNS — I ended my wave in a kind of half-assed salute and headed back the way I’d come. Five steps and I had to look over my shoulder; the sensation of her watching me was so strong it was like a hand pressing between my shoulderblades.
The dock where she’d been was completely deserted. I squinted my eyes, at first sure she must have just retreated deeper into the shadow thrown by the little boozehaus, but she was gone. As if she had been a ghost herself.
She stepped into the bar, hon, Jo said. You know that, don’t you? I mean . . . you do know it, right?
‘Right, right,’ I murmured, setting off north along The Street toward home. ‘Of course I do.
Where else?’ Except it didn’t seem to me that there had been time; it didn’t seem to me that she could have stepped in, even in her bare feet, without me hearing her. Not on such a quiet morning.
Jo again: Perhaps she’s stealthy.
‘Yes,’ I murmured. I did a lot of talking out loud before that summer was over. ‘Yes, perhaps she is. Perhaps she’s stealthy.’ Sure. Like Mrs. Danvers.
I stopped again and looked back, but the right-of-way path had followed the lake around a little bit of curve, and I could no longer see either Warrington’s or The Sunset Bar. And really, I thought, that was just as well.
On my way back, I tried to list the oddities which had preceded and then surrounded my return to Sara Laughs: the repeating dreams; the sunflowers; the radio-station sticker; the weeping in the
night. I supposed that my encounter with Mattie and Kyra, plus the follow-up phone-call from Mr.
Pixel Easel, also qualified as passing strange . . . but not in the same way as a child you heard sobbing in the night.
And what about the fact that we had been in Derry instead of on Dark Score when Johanna died?
Did that qualify for the list? I didn’t know. I couldn’t even remember why that was. In the fall and winter of 1993 I’d been fiddling with a screenplay for The Red-Shirt Man. In February of ’94 I got going on All the Way from the Top, and that absorbed most of my attention. Besides, deciding to go west to the TR, west to Sara . . .
‘That was Jo’s job,’ I told the day, and as soon as I heard the words I understood how true they were. We’d both loved the old girl, but saying ‘Hey Irish, let’s get our asses over to the TR for a few days’ had been Jo’s job. She might say it any time . . . except in the year before her death she hadn’t said it once. And I had never thought to say it for her. Had somehow forgotten all about Sara Laughs, it seemed, even when summer came around. Was it possible to be that absorbed in a writing project? It didn’t seem likely . . . but what other explanation was there?
Something was very wrong with this picture, but I didn’t know what it was. Not from nothin.
That made me think of Sara Tidwell, and the lyrics to one of her songs. She had never been recorded, but I owned the Blind Lemon Jefferson version of this particular tune. One verse went: It ain’t nuthin but a barn-dance sugar
It ain’t nuthin but a round-and-round
Let me kiss you on your sweet lips sugar
You the good thing that I found.
I loved that song, and had always wondered how it would have sounded coming out of a woman’s mouth instead of from that whiskey-voiced old troubadour. Out of Sara Tidwell’s mouth. I bet she sang sweet. And boy, I bet she could swing it.
I had gotten back to my own place again. I looked around, saw no one in the immediate vicinity (although I could now hear the day’s first ski-boat burring away downwater), stripped to my underpants, and swam out to the float. I didn’t climb it, only lay beside it holding onto the ladder with one hand and lazily kicking my feet. It was nice enough, but what was I going to do with the rest of the day?
I decided to spend it cleaning my work area on the second floor. When that was done, maybe I’d go out and look around in Jo’s studio. If I didn’t lose my courage, that was.
I swam back, kicking easily along, raising my head in and out of water which flowed along my body like cool silk. I felt like an otter. I was most of the way to the shore when I raised my dripping face and saw a woman standing on The Street, watching me. She was as thin as the one I’d seen down at Warrington’s . . . but this one was green. Green and pointing north along the path like a dryad in some old legend.