Witches on the Road Tonight Read online

  “Mrs. Hayes,” Tucker commands.

  “What?”

  “I spy with my little eye—Sider and Apples Sold by the Pound, Bushel, or Truckload.”

  They are cresting a hill and Sonia doesn’t have time to read the misspelled, hand-painted sign before they have reached a clearing and a slapped-together wooden stand. The structure’s sloping roof is shingled with apple slices drying in the sun and behind it sits an elderly man working a mechanical peeler like a pencil sharpener. He shakes his denim jacket free of skins when Tucker excuses the car to a stop.

  “Look at that ancient specimen,” Tucker says to her as the man ducks beneath the shed’s awning and rises to his full height. “We could saw him in half and count his rings.”

  Tucker and Sonia sit in the front seat letting the old man appraise them through the windshield. He has a fifth-button white beard that Sonia guesses he’s been growing longer than she’s been alive. He has halved his Model T and fitted it with a flatbed. On it, wooden crates of more apples are stacked three high.

  “We need one of him,” Tucker says.

  Tucker swings open the car door as Sonia adjusts the aperture of her camera. There’s good light and a panoramic view of the valley, and she thinks, yes, Tucker is right, this is what they want to see of this place, a roadside Sider Man with his apples and his time. She watches Tucker approach him, loose-limbed and casual, holding out his hand as if for a wary dog to sniff. The Sider Man shakes it stiffly.

  “Mighty fine fruit you have here,” Tucker says, picking up a dull green apple from a basket at his feet.

  “Mountain pippins what’s ripe now,” says the old man. “A few Fousts.”

  “Some venerable orchards up this way, I’d imagine.”

  “Yup,” says the old man, eying Sonia, who has found her settings and stepped out of the car to join them. He traces her figure through her linen shirt and plum-colored trousers. Then his eyes go to the dark roots of her platinum hair and linger disapprovingly.

  “Where I grew up,” Tucker is saying, “we had an Apple Blossom Festival. Y’all have anything like that up here?”

  “In the spring.”

  “I love those festivals,” Tucker says. “Pride of place.”

  The Sider Man nods. His face is deeply lined from sun and tobacco. He rocks back on his cracked naked heels and waits for Tucker to get to the point. Sonia wants to get the truck in the shot, too, and circles around him, looking for her angle.

  “Y’all just passing through?” the Sider Man asks at last.

  “Me and the missus are out and about on behalf of Mr. Roosevelt,” Tucker says. “Works Progress Administration. They’re writing up travel guides to the forty-eight states to give artist types like us something to do. We’re on good terms with the battles and business of this commonwealth, but they want us to send back some flavor. You know, stories, legends, anything that makes this mountain special.”

  The Sider Man stares at him blankly.

  “I don’t suppose you know any legends?”

  “Can’t say I do,” the Sider Man answers.

  “What about local features?” Tucker asks kindly. “Caves or springs? Twice a year when I was a boy, we’d drive these mountains so my father could sit in the hot springs. Met veterans who fought at Bull Run.”

  Sonia can see him casting around for that thing they share. Tucker is always able to find something, she’s seen him get lumbermen and merchant marines, cigarette rollers and seamstresses to talk for hours. But the Sider Man stands mute.

  “Now’s your chance,” Tucker says bluffly. “You’re going in a guide book. People will drive from all over to find you, and you’ll be selling apples faster than you can pick ’em. My wife here will even take your picture.”

  Sonia smiles politely. “It would be an honor,” she says.

  The Sider Man turns back to his stand. “WPA took my photograph years ago. Some Jew from New York City. You vampires gonna come back for a man’s soul, you might buy something first.”

  They are back in the car with a bushel of pippins and a jug of applejack between them. The Sider Man fits another apple to his peeler, unwinds his long russet ribbon. Sonia turns in the front seat to steal a shot as they pull away.

  “Don’t,” says Tucker gruffly. “You can’t take a picture of rejection without deserving it.”

  The stand is gone, they are headed down the other side of the mountain through a granite pass. Laurel bushes cling to the cliff while rainswelled springs flow in channels beside the road like running boards on a car. In a month, this way will be impassable, she thinks. Tucker is taking the turns too fast; three empty Coke bottles roll lazily across the floorboards and clink together, back and forth down the hill.

  Using one hand to drive, he uncorks the applejack with his teeth and takes a deep draw.

  “First lie?” he asks.

  “I don’t lie,” she answers.

  “I asked for your first, not an example,” he says.

  Sonia turns away in annoyance. She has been told no so often she doesn’t hear the word anymore. Someone has always arrived before her wherever she’s been and she has learned simply to shoot from a different angle.

  “He’s right, you know,” Tucker says. “Who are we to turn a person’s life into a stop along the way?”

  His hands are trembling lightly on the steering wheel, his face rudderless and resigned, just as it was the night of Bennett’s party, as he watched the cars along Fifth Avenue. As if the trip out here is more than the trip inside, and the forward motion alone might prove him courageous. She knows because her body becomes the journey as much as anything else, the unfolded map upon which all of these men lose and refind themselves. They speak of marriage and wanting to give her a child to show that this is real and she plays along, going so far as to give their imaginary child a name, calling him Pa when he calls her Ma, feeding each other waffles in the brown and olive crypts of one-star hotel dining rooms. Then, later, with quiescent Juliette or Angela or Veronica (they always want a girl, these men) sanctifying the union, he is free to fold her legs up to her ears and weep away his guilt on her breasts, telling her how beautiful they will look swollen with milk. It’s the same thing, she thinks. Before. After they just have to somehow make it okay. All these men with their hats in their hands and their pained, expectant faces.

  “Stop the car,” she says with enough force that he obeys her. He stops on a blind curve, parking the Ford as close to the cliff as he dares. Below them on the other side, a gorge of grapevine and waxy rhododendron spills down to white water. Sonia picks up her Rolleiflex and steps out, slipping down the embankment.

  “Where are you going?” he calls. A tinny, gimcrack blue jay answers loud above the water.

  Caves and rivers and natural bridges. Their assignment is to send back anything other than the orderly intersections of towns, or why else would a family feel the need to purchase a car and pay for gasoline and overspend themselves to leave home? Sonia points her camera into the gap, trying to capture the dizziness of plunging into the forest. Forget the Sider Man. It’s all an intrusion, where they’ve been, where he’s headed next, the fat black line of Fort Dix that underscores the end of their trip, and from there into whichever European woods or field or intersection of streets they’ll send him to fight. If you’re going to feel guilty about one trespass, you might as well feel guilty about them all.

  Sonia has slid halfway down the embankment and stops to catch her breath. Now that she’s put enough distance between them, she feels sorry for Tucker Hayes. She is the last woman he’ll be with before he leaves. She is old enough to remember the soldiers returning from the last war and how their women understood, dropping the barricades of bustles and corsets. Here boys, you’ve crawled through enough mud. Here is a shoulder, a knee, a field of flesh. Sonia’s fingers hover over the buttons of her damp linen shirt. Ahead is the roar of water deep in the gorge. Here, she thinks, as one by one she loosens the buttons, leaving her shirt d
raped over the low-hanging branch of a black gum. Take it. The shade is damp and her Rolleiflex is cool next to the sweat between her breasts. Sonia unbuckles her belt and steps out of her trousers, walking deeper into the woods.

  Tucker will be impatient when she doesn’t return to the car. Come and find me, she thinks. He leaves the road, his pride twisted up over not being the Sider Man’s first, but she can imagine the tug in his groin the instant he spots her shirt hanging like a surrender. Up the hill, she hears him call her name. Beyond the shirt, he finds her trousers, ahead a stiff wire brassiere, a pair of perfectly white cotton panties—the only part of her untouched by road dust—that she washes out and hangs to dry in every hotel sink. He is moving forward, away from sadness, one discovery at a time. I am alive, he thinks. Here is life to be touched and tasted, a woman who makes herself a maze for me. She is waiting for him at the bottom of the gorge, stretched out on a blanket of moss. He is breathing heavily when at last he finds her, holding her discarded clothes in one hand and the crock jug of applejack in the other. What would she have done had he not come? But she knew he would come, and for a moment she sees he hates her presumption.

  “Refresh me with apples,” she laughs, teasing him out of the mood. “For I am faint with love.”

  He drops her trousers and shirt and bra at her feet, and tips the jug to let an amber stream of brandy spill down over her naked body. She twists her hips away. She’s played this game before and knows how it can burn.

  Tucker kicks off his shoes and tears at his belt, stepping out of his crushed linen trousers. He falls upon her and licks her clean like a mother cat. Sonia closes her eyes and arches her back. In the ravine behind her, the white water rages over stone as he puts himself inside. She is here and at the same time she is sitting by a stream in Potsdam outside of Berlin, the sun falling through the branches of a willow onto the page of her book. The scientist has no proof, still he writes that all the continents once were one, the Appalachians and the Atlases part of a long, contiguous chain. Now they are two halves of a broken heart, separated by an ocean, each eroding in its own time. She wraps her arms around Tucker and holds him close, even as he tries to pull away and not leave anything inside.

  “Don’t go,” she whispers against his ear. “You just got here.”

  Does she know what she’s saying? his eyes are asking her. She knows. But her body is not hers anymore. It belongs to this bed of moss and its black ants tickling the monument of her thighs. It belongs to the wind in the trees and it belongs to him.

  He groans, thrusting deeper still. She loves him, she must love him, not to send him away.

  When it is all over, he lies inside her for a very long time. She moves in and out of sleep.

  “We’ll bring our daughter back here when she is five years old,” he whispers, licking her nipple still wet with applejack. “We’ll bring her to this spot where we first imagined her. We’ll hold a little ceremony in the woods like the Druids used to, and you will be naked and I will be naked and she will be naked and we’ll daub ourselves with mud in all the right places and have the sparrows and grazing deer and grizzly cubs resanctify our union. Then we’ll get drunk on elderberry wine and she’ll sip nectar from a tulip cup.”

  Sonia nods against his strong shoulder and lets him kiss her deeply. Her clothes are tangled between their ankles. Her bra, her limp white shirt. She had meant for him to come get her, hadn’t she? So why does he taste like the bread crumbs she dropped to find her own way home?

  In the gleaned sorghum field behind the school, a dozen kids form a circle around Eddie. There’s Frank, whose daddy has him chopping wood so his fingers are nothing but knots and sinew. Ray, pushing two hundred pounds at ten years old. The hands of DumbDon are weak as fresh butter, but Eddie could never break through on DumbDon because he has water on the brain and it would be shameful. The brothers, Monty and Jim and Calamus, are playing. Calamus has been left back three times and Jim twice, so that they are all bunched up in their youngest brother’s fourth grade class at school, which is also Eddie’s class. It’s rare they all show up on a given day, but the crops are in, so their mama sent them to school to get them out from underfoot. The two bad girls from sixth grade, Lou and Rosaleen, usually lead their own circle games—How Many Kisses Do. You. Get? They don’t count. Eddie steps up to Ray and Frank.

  “Is the door locked?” he asks.

  The two boys tighten their grip and chant. “Yes, child, yes.”

  “Can I get out of here?” Eddie asks.

  “No, child, no.”

  Eddie walks a few paces toward the other side of the circle then spins, running at the clenched hands of the two boys. Their fists land in his gut and send him flying backward onto his eight-year-old ass. No one smiles but DumbDon. DumbDon laughs at dogfights.

  Eddie picks himself up and brushes away the sorghum lint. His jeans are turned up three times at the cuff but he has grown this year and his mama needs to let them down. He’s stalling, retying the rags around the unstitched flap of his old shoe. Eyeing the feet of the other boys, he’s looking for whose are planted wide and strong, who seems off balance. He sees the mean black boots of the other Jim, who taught them all how to play this game. He’d learned it from his uncle, who learned it from some other boy when he was a kid, who got it from his big sister, and so on and so on. The other Jim is fourteen and even though he is holding the hand of his six-year-old cousin, Ferris, it will be like trying to blow down a house built of bricks.

  Eddie approaches the big and little boy. To hold hands, Ferris has to reach high like he’s flying a kite. “Is the door locked?” Eddie asks.

  “Yes, child, yes,” say the boys.

  “Can I get out of here?”

  “No, child, no.”

  Eddie squares his shoulder and rams the two. The other Jim is so tall he has only to swing his fist and it connects hard with Eddie’s grinder teeth. Eddie falls to the ground and grabs his cheek. It will be purple tomorrow and his mama will ask about it.

  Leaping up, Eddie flings himself from side to side, thrown back each time as from the ropes of a boxing ring. The kids of the ring stand firm, their calls fast and wild. Is the door locked? Yes, child, yes. Can I get out of here? No, child, NO!

  The sky tilts blue against what yellow the birds have left in the field. An hour ago he was in the woods with his mama. She always keeps him home during ginseng season, there’s too much money to be made digging roots. I’ll go this way, you go that way, boy, she said, and he’d walked for miles finding nothing until he reached the clearing and his friends. He’ll only stay a little while, he tells himself, then he’ll hunt some more.

  Eddie is flying inside the circle, tossed from one set of hands to the next. His mama said: Don’t come home empty-handed. You’ll have no school clothes this year if there’s nothing to trade. Beyond the boys, a cloud of dust whips down the dirt road and for a second he thinks he hears her calling from the whirlwind. No, child, no. Then the others turn to look—it is not a car they recognize. Eddie feels their distraction and takes his chance, charging hard into the two biggest boys. Their fingers fly apart, he stumbles to the ground, then is up and racing away.

  “Escape!” DumbDon shouts from his big head and the chase is on. Whoever lays hands on him is the winner and gets to be prisoner next. Everyone wants to be the prisoner. He’s the one with all the action. Eddie runs like a rooster from the ax, leaping away from Monty, whose legs have grown so fast he trips all over them. His red shirt open and flying behind him, Eddie sprints the distance of the sorghum field, leaping the broken stalks, jumping his own shadow. Poor, fat Ray, doubled over and panting. He’s only a year older than Eddie but he’s big enough to be a man. He’ll never be a prisoner, though, because he’s too slow and fat to catch anyone.

  “I’ve got you!” Eddie hears a scream up close, sees a flash of braid. The girl, Rosaleen, is on him. How Many Kisses Do. You. Get? He can’t be caught by a girl, it would be worse than being kissed and coun
ted. He doubles his speed, running blindly toward the road. Behind him the children shout—Watch!—when he is tossed once more, this time high into the air before hitting the ground. Through a haze of sudden dust, he watches plaid and navy shirts scatter across the field, disappearing into the woods. He watches Rosaleen race off to catch her bad friend, and Ferris, the littlest boy, cowering behind the schoolhouse, begin to bawl. Their teacher has long gone home.