American Elsewhere

CHAPTER ELEVEN




When the sun crests the peaks and the afternoon rays come spilling through the valley, Wink slowly fills with the overpowering aroma of pine. It comes from the forest, of course: the sun is literally roasting the sap while it’s still in the trees’ limbs. The outer neighborhoods get the most of it, naturally, and while they claim they love the scent some privately admit that they’d enjoy something else for a change, honestly, even a paper mill would do.

Helen Thurgreen is one of the few who is perfectly fine admitting such a thing in public. While most residents prefer to keep their dissatisfactions quiet, Helen spends most of her time out in her yard, where the smell is nothing short of overpowering, so she feels she has every right to complain. And she has to spend so much time out in the yard, because somehow her house has become quite the thoroughfare, with thoughtless passersby wracking havoc on nearly every single one of her rose beds.

She almost curses to herself as she lugs a spade, a rake, and a hoe from the garage. Someone really should have mentioned how popular this route was when they moved in, she thinks. They might have not even bought the place. But people don’t mention much here.

As she gives one final heave and tears the rake free from a tangle of garden hose, she staggers back and happens to spot what should be the thick, magnificent blooms of a Nacogdoches Rose (a rare transplant); however, three of the most promising buds have been broken off, and dangle dead and browning from the rose’s branches. No doubt it was done by some traveler who carelessly plowed through the poor thing.

“Son of a bitch!” she says. She will have to fix it, she supposes. There are so many things she needs to fix. But nothing compares to the state of the backyard, which is what’s sent her out on this hot afternoon, rummaging through her garage for spades and rakes.

“Is something wrong?” asks a voice.

She looks over her shoulder and sees something unusual in Wink: a total stranger. But then she thinks, and realizes she recognizes this short, striking young woman with the black hair and dark skin: it’s the new girl from down the street, the one who came roaring into town in that ridiculous car and ruined the funeral. Helen had imagined her being a fat, loud creature, but the girl on the sidewalk is fairly becoming, or at least she would be if she cared about her outfit (Helen has never thought much of cutoffs) and her hair (which Helen finds a bit dykey).

“Oh, hello,” she says to the girl. “No, no. Everything’s fine. Just… swearing at the flowers.”

“Oh,” says the girl. “I don’t believe we met, ma’am. I moved down the street, I’m Mona.” She aggressively sticks out her hand.

“Helen.” She shakes off one dirty gardener’s glove and shakes the girl’s hand.

“Doing some yard work today?” Mona asks.

“Yes,” says Helen, who wishes the girl would go away.

But she doesn’t. She looks around at the front beds and says, “Well, you can’t have much to do. These look gorgeous enough already.”

Helen smiles thinly. The girl obviously does not know what she’s talking about, and cannot see the numerous damages. “Well, it’s not for these,” says Helen. “The backyard’s a bit of a mess.”

“I see. Sorry to ask, but would you mind if I ask you a question, ma’am? Us being kind of neighbors and all.”

“I suppose not.”

“Have you lived in this house long?” Mona asks.

“Oh, God,” says Helen, laughing wearily. “Too long.”

“Would you have happened to have lived here when a Laura Alvarez lived at the house I’m in now?” She points down the street as if Helen can’t tell where she lives by the absurd red thing parked outside. “That one?”

Helen thinks. “No,” she says finally. “I’m afraid I can’t recall. I doubt it, though.”

“She would have worked up at the lab on the mountain. Coburn.”

Helen frowns at her mistrustfully and glances around. “I don’t know anything about that.”

“You don’t? Wasn’t the town built around it?”

“I don’t know anything about that,” she says again. “Coburn was gone long ago.”

“Do you know how long?”

Helen, growing impatient, shakes her head. “No. I don’t.”

“Oh,” Mona says. She looks at the spade in Helen’s hand, then up at the gate to the backyard, which is hanging open. Helen cannot help herself: she slowly moves to block the girl’s view.

“Well,” says the girl, “thanks anyways. If you think of anything, I’d really appreciate it.” She waves and walks back down the street, hands in her pockets.

“Ta ta,” says Helen. She watches the girl go, happy that the conversation ended there. There are a few subjects you never discuss, and Coburn is one of them, even though its logo—the hydrogen atom encased in light—discreetly adorns nearly every municipal structure in Wink, if you know where to look. Often you will see it tucked away in the corner of a building’s foundation, or engraved on the very, very bottom of a light post; but then you must forget you ever saw it, which of course is no issue in Wink, where knowing how to forget what you’ve seen is like knowing how to blink. And there are much, much harder things to forget than a little logo.

Helen hauls the yard tools around back. She was not lying to the girl: the backyard is in a bit of a mess. But it’s not the lilies, which need to be thinned, nor is it the morning glory, which is taking over; it’s the enormous sunken hole right in the center of the backyard, nearly five feet across. It’s a very curiously shaped hole, really: it has a large roundish section in the middle, and four rather odd protrusions stick out of its edges, with three bendy ones on one side of the circle and a large square one sticking out of the opposite side. It would be difficult for anyone to imagine what could ever make such a bizarre shape. It could be a sinkhole, one might think, but the rest of the ground is very firm. And it could have been done by flooding or standing water, but these possibilities are ruled out, for those forces take time and this hole appeared overnight.

Helen throws down her tools and begins hastily filling in the hole. Her husband Darrel, who, as always, is mostly worthless, comes out to watch, but does not offer any help.

“It’s huge,” he says softly after a while.

Helen nods sourly as she works at the hole.

“It came right into the yard,” he says.

“Isn’t that obvious?” says Helen.

“They’re not supposed to come in here,” he says. “They stay out in the woods. And we stay away from the woods. Those are the rules.”

“Do you think,” asks Helen between spadefuls, “that I am an idiot? Do you really think I don’t know that?”

“Which one do you think it was?” he asks. “We can report him, if we like. We should report it anyway. If there’s anyone left to report it to… I guess Macey will have to do.”

For a moment Helen stops digging, and looks up. Though the fence around their yard is tall, from here she can see over the top and down into the valley. After years of living in this house, she can see why their yard is such a popular thoroughfare: it’s the lowest and most accessible point between the wooded slopes and the rest of the town. Anything out in the woods would naturally wander this way when trying to get to Wink. And what’s out in the woods, Helen thinks, has never really understood the concept of private property very well.

At the bottom of the mesa is one barren, treeless canyon that her eye lingers on for a long while. Of course it had to be that one, she thinks. It couldn’t have been one of the little ones. It had to be the biggest. That is just my luck.

How I hate this house.

She turns around to face her husband. “No,” she says. “We are not reporting this. Not about him, anyway. Now are you just going to stand there? Or are you actually going to do anything?”

“My back’s hurt,” he says, defensively.

“Oh, it’s always your back.” She returns to filling in the hole. “Or your knee. Or your ankle.”

“I have joint problems,” he says. “It’s genetic.”

Helen scoffs.

After a while, Darrel says, “It came right up and stood in the yard. Why would it ever do that, I wonder?”

“I expect it was doing what everyone else is doing,” says Helen.

“And what’s that?”

She lays the spade aside and starts smoothing over the dirt with the rake. Soon she’ll have to lay sod out, and keep it soaked, but in time it should all be patched up, and no one will have any reason to think anything strange has happened here at all.

Helen says, “Coming to get a look at the new girl.”