Lenny, p.21
Lenny, page 21
‘It’s a cabin, look, a fishing Santa!’ Lucy called out, delighted by the strange lights, the bobbing Santa Claus stuck out on the post.
‘How strange,’ sighed Miss Julie. Life was always doing this, she found – presenting her with unwanted gifts.
As they drew closer, Miss Julie’s scooter struggling with the ramp up to the deck, they saw the old woman and stopped. She looked part human, part as if she grew from the bayou itself, her skin all bumped and gnarled, a wildness to her, even as she slept.
‘Shush,’ warned Lucy, reaching out to touch the old woman’s arm and shake her gently. She would show Jim she was not afraid of anything, that he could rely on her, that nothing would scare her away.
She shook the old woman gently. And then she screamed, as the old woman’s head dropped forward, and Lucy realised, too late, that she was dead.
‘Oh, dear heavens,’ Miss Julie tried to get up out of the scooter, the wheels slipping about on the damp moss.
‘Stop screaming, child. Haven’t you ever seen a dead person before?’
She was sorry as soon as the words came out, for she could see from the expression on Lucy’s face that she had indeed seen people dead before, and at close range, and that her heart had still not healed from it.
‘It’s okay, let’s see …’ Jim lifted the old woman back, so her head rested back on the headrest of the seat. ‘Skin’s warm,’ he said, ‘must have only just passed. She looks …’
‘ … ancient,’ said Lucy, who had managed to calm down, and now instead was just whimpering slightly, and skirted past, peering into the cabin.
‘What a strange place to live,’ she said, gathering herself, looking about, seeing the piles of books – interesting books from so many places. She eyed them like a magpie, thinking of the library. She saw the old blanket, a photograph of a Choctaw chief, a couple of bowls, a spoon, something burnt in one small bowl. No TV, no telephone, no radio.
‘We’ll have to get the sheriff to come,’ said Miss Julie.
The other two nodded, reluctant, but knowing it was the right thing to do, though they doubted the old woman would want to be manhandled in death, tipped into a motorboat, taken upriver – no, none of that seemed to sit with this place, this home.
She would prefer something with dignity, Miss Julie felt, then blushed, wondering was it this stranger she was thinking of, or herself.
‘What’s this?’
Lucy picked up the tiny fox from the dead woman’s lap and showed it to Jim.
‘Lenny!’ said Jim. ‘It’s Lenny.’ He held up the fox on the palm of his hand, and his heart leapt.
Chapter Fifty-Three
Bayou, 2012
Seeing the old swamp woman, dead in her seat alone in the bayou, had struck at the heart of Miss Julie. In her pocket she gripped tight to the envelope, the paper crinkled and familiar against her clenched palm.
‘Let’s go,’ she said, ‘I can smell the sinkhole, Lenny can’t be far.’
‘What if he’s here?’ Lucy wailed, ‘What if she did something to him?’ She was eyeing up the pots and bits of burnt paper and saw the few blonde hairs in the bowl.
‘Look! Isn’t this Lenny’s hair? Oh, God.’
Lucy covered her mouth, but it was too late, and she threw up over the side of the wooden railing.
Jim held her curls back and placed his hand on her back, soothing her.
‘Looks like a broth, some sort of healing concoction maybe.’ Miss Julie pried about inside.
‘I don’t think she meant any ill to Lenny.’
‘How can you know that?’
Lucy wiped her mouth and looked at the old woman.
‘Instinct,’ said Miss Julie.
‘Instinct?’ Jim asked, terrified now at the possibilities, at what may have happened to Lenny and all because he had been wrapped up in his own selfishness.
‘I think Lenny left the fox for her, look, aren’t those his sneaker prints on the deck … and that line, that’ll be the orange box. He’s okay, I’m sure of it, but we have to find him soon. We’ll call Sheriff Lentement later for her. I don’t think she’ll mind waiting. Maybe best you lay her down on her bed, though. Let her spirit rest easy a while.’
She gestured at Jim, who picked up the dead woman gently, and did as instructed. Lucy bent down to the water and tried to wash her face, darting her hand in and out again quickly, fearful of gators, the jacket getting wet as she leant over the bank.
‘Sorry,’ she said to Miss Julie who looked on, but just shrugged.
Miss Julie didn’t care about the jacket, never had, it was always more the idea of it she had liked, that one day she and Stanley would travel and go to places far away, they would do unexpected things, live a life full of adventure – but then she had never learnt to ski, he had never returned and it all seemed unlikely now. The girl could leave it there for all she cared. Then, seeing the look of pain on Lucy’s face, Miss Julie softened and put her scrawny arm around the girl’s shoulders.
‘We’ll find him soon and he’ll be fine. You’ll see.’
Lucy sniffed and tried to smile. Then Jim laid the old woman out on her bed and pulled shut the cabin door. Miss Julie told him to let Sheriff Lentement know as soon as they made it back to town, and the three of them continued on, following the trail of muddy prints, following Lenny, deep into the bayou.
Chapter Fifty-Four
The Sinkhole, 2012
As he rounded the corner, Lenny, who had been walking along squeezing the agate stone tight in his fist, telling himself he was not scared, almost stepped off the end of the boardwalk into thin air, for the wood had been pulled clean away – only a ripped wooden plank and a twisted thin metal band left hanging mid-air. Beyond the ripped edge of the boardwalk surged and gurgled and spat the sinkhole.
The sinkhole was as big as the public swimming pool over at Constan (the bigger pool, the one with the deep end that scared Lenny for he couldn’t see the bottom, couldn’t see how far down it all went, all that water underneath him without end). It was as long as two of Man March’s fields, as wide as the bend in the river where the Mississippi used to join up with False River long ago … Lenny whistled and stared out at it, watching the surface bubble and burp. He kept one sleeve wrapped over his mouth and nose, to try and dull the smell, and he looked up, noticing how quiet and still the swampland had become around him. There was no birdsong. All the birds had flown away.
Carefully, Lenny stepped back. He did not want to fall in. He had seen the way the sinkhole would, all of a sudden, grab chunks of land, pull the trees down, trees that had grown for over hundreds of years, swallowed in seconds.
Instead, he walked back a way and found the sturdiest tree he could spot – a tall majestic oak, one that rooted deep and wide where once long ago was land, and taking off Stanley’s sweater he tied it above his head to the trunk of the tree, then grabbed a hold of one sleeve to lever himself up the trunk, his feet flat against it, then once above the sweater, he leant down and untied it and pulled it round again with one free hand, the other holding tight to the branches above him, and like this, he climbed up into the branches of the tree and kept climbing until he was high above everything, high above the canopy of leaves, and able to look down and see for himself the sinkhole gurgling, ready to suck everything into the belly of the earth.
Lenny had never climbed so far before. Up there he could smell the sulphur less, and a breeze caught the leaves. All around him the tops of the trees shone with reds and golds and greens. In the distance he could see the towns beyond Roseville, smoke belching from factory chimneys along the river, to the south and west stretched the bayou, further west the highway, and the woods and the swampland and river reached out to the east, towards Roseville, with its rows of houses snaking around the bend of the False River in the sunlight.
And everywhere the land was sinking. Whole villages and towns, graveyards and electricity pylons, submerged half under water – telephone wires sticking up showing the only sign of lives once lived, before the waters rose and claimed back the land. Salt drifting up water from the Gulf, killing the trees, destroying the marshes. Spits of land, disappearing so quickly now, some feared there would soon be nothing left, nothing to hold on to. Lenny looked down on it all, this watery destruction.
If only Arturo could see him now. He would never call Lenny a sissy again – that was certain.
Lenny felt he was almost close enough to touch the clouds. If he squinted in the distance, he told himself, he imagined he could see all the way over to Baton Rouge, and somewhere down there was Mari-Rose. He wished she could see him. She would have been mad as all hell, he thought. But she couldn’t see him, and she had let him go, and he would let her go too – because that was what she wanted. He looked at the watch on his wrist. It had stopped somewhere along the journey.
It didn’t matter whether the watch worked or not for it only told time one way, as if everything travels in one clear straight line. Hour after hour, day after day. But it doesn’t. Lenny knew that. He knew that as he had circled, lost, deep in the bayou, too frightened to call out loud but inside he was calling out to Mari-Rose, over and over, rolling the agate stone in his pocket, until it grew warm in his fist, even though he knew that for all that time could stretch and bend, he could not make her come back.
Lenny often wondered what had become of Mari-Rose. Was she happy now? Where was she? He didn’t allow himself to imagine that perhaps she was somewhere thinking about him, missing him, trying to figure out a way to come back, and if she did that, would it be okay? No, not that – there was too much hope and wishing in it, and then, hadn’t things been better without her? Didn’t Miss Julie look out for him, and Lucy Albert, and his daddy – when he was sober and in his right mind?
He polished the stone in his pocket and tried to hold on to all his memories of Mari-Rose and the happy times, for they had been happy – sometimes.
Lenny remembered watching old MGM musicals on TV, Mari-Rose singing along, her feet dancing on the floor, her pulling him about the room, laughing, looking over her shoulder, a nervousness about her like she was always meant for somewhere else.
It had shocked him, the first time he had realised this – that she and he were not one and the same, but different souls, each within their own separate worlds. It had shocked him to his core to see that and know it true.
‘One of these Sundays, you won’t need me at all,’ she had said to him one night, pulling closed the voiles on the window, switching off his bedside lamp, and he had stayed awake a long time that night, fearful and sad at the thought of being apart from her.
She had been gone so long now, however, the weeks becoming months, one running on after the last, yet she had never called or written or cared to visit, and if she had she would have found them gone on their Great Adventure – living wild in the woods on the edge of town. Would she even know them anymore?
For a long time, he had thought she would come back – for wouldn’t she miss her garden, the flowers, the trees, and Lenny – wouldn’t she miss him too? Then, when she showed no sign of return, he grew angry. It was then he had stopped going to school, at first missing a day here and there, until seeing that Jim was preoccupied, he stayed away longer and longer each time, and as the letters went to the old house Jim was none the wiser, so what harm could it do? After all, it was his mother’s fault. And she could be mad at him when she got back – if she ever returned.
‘School’s the best you can do, Lenny. Learning takes you places. Gives you options in life. You’ve got to get to class. Then you won’t end up like me – stuck here.’
She had told him that so many times – especially when Miss Avery would call her up, back when the telephone was connected, calling to complain that Lenny had taken to daydreaming again during the school day.
‘Seems like the boy’s not here at all,’ the teacher had chided Mari-Rose.
‘It’s his daddy. Misses his father, that’s all.’
Mari-Rose would apologise and promise Lenny would do better, and Miss Avery would make sympathetic, understanding sounds down the telephone line while Mari-Rose would take to crying over Jim and the war, and how hard, how hard it was to be her. Then the women would forget all about Lenny for a while, and it would just be a shared sadness at the world and the distance it cast between people, until Mari-Rose would eventually hang up. Then her tears would switch to shouting and anger, her voice chasing Lenny around the house, until he took to hiding out at Miss Julie’s, who sheltered him from enemy fire.
Lenny knew all this as he looked at the broken wristwatch, and out over the trees.
From the top of the silvered oak tree, Lenny could see everything.
He saw that he could travel time any number of directions: that the moments and memories knitted one into the other, in an infinite number of possibilities. In his mind, he travelled back to when Mari-Rose would tell him that story about the little boy with the golden curls, the fox, a planet far away and a broken plane lost in the desert.
‘What happens next?’ he had asked his mother, feeling immense sadness for the lost prince so far from home.
‘A story can end all sorts of ways,’ she had soothed him, stroking his forehead as he looked up at her, his dark eyes clouded. ‘Happy, sad … and sometimes it doesn’t end at all, it’s just beginning.’ She had looked away from him then, blinking back tears. Perhaps she was already thinking of leaving him. Even then.
He tapped the broken wristwatch gently, careful with the cracked glass, but it was long dead. He had held on to it all the same, even though it had stopped working properly. He looked at it once more, then took it off his wrist. Underneath the skin was paler and sticky with sweat. He rubbed at his wrist a moment, and holding on to the tree with one hand as its cracked branches dipped and bobbed in the breeze, with the other hand he threw the watch far out into the sinkhole, as far as he could throw it, and watched it drop down and hit the surface, and then sink quickly under until it was gone from sight. He rubbed his empty wrist a moment, and for a second regretted getting rid of the watch even though it no longer served him, but then he was glad. He had said goodbye.
From where he sat, looking out over the glinting bayou rivers and waterways, one arm held tight around the trunk, the rough bark scratching against his thighs, Lenny felt a letting go deep inside of him.
At first in his spirit as he said goodbye to Mari-Rose, he felt himself shake loose a little of the hold she had on his heart, and then he heard the gurgles from the sinkhole growing, and felt the earth tugging underneath the oak tree.
For a moment, everything was still and then, with a sound like a sigh rising from the sinkhole, everything was jolted sideways – as if the earth had let go of gravity.
Lenny grabbed a hold of the tree trunk with both hands. He felt the agate stone slip out from his pocket, saw it bounce from branch to branch below, hurtling towards the earth. He cried out, his voice lost against the fury of the sinkhole as it swallowed up shoots of young trees below him. Lenny closed his eyes. He heard the roots being pulled from the earth below. He felt himself flying through the air, the giant tree shuddering against him. He let go, falling backwards, twisting as if swimming through air up to the surface. G-force. Lenny’s world tipped upside down. He was flying.
He heard a voice call out: was it Mari-Rose? He did not know. He saw the world a blur of greens, everything falling, hurtling towards the sinkhole, yanked into its gravitational pull, his arms reaching out, trying to catch a hold or pushing the branches out of his way – he wasn’t sure which, only that he was free. He was flying at last.
‘Time is elastic.’ Jim’s voice came back to him in that moment. ‘You can stretch it out, make it last longer.’
Sometimes, though, it speeds up, taking you with it. Lenny wanted to slow down time. Wanted to freeze the moment, the feeling of weightlessness, of letting go. Lenny took a hold of time. He let it wind backwards, he felt the tree tip back up towards the sky, felt the pull of the sinkhole surrender the oak tree, found his grip on the sturdy trunk once more, the agate stone back, warm and heavy, held in his palm.
He felt a million different moments flickering through him, like the universe was trying to tell him something. He heard the voice of a boy far away in a desert, as if calling out to him. He wanted to help him, but what could he do?
Time coursed backwards through his veins, splitting off in a multitude of directions and all the while he held tight to the stone, back now in his fist.
Lenny stretched time and held it taut.
Chapter Fifty-Five
Bayou
It was so lonely by the sinkhole, Lenny holding on to the trunk of the oak tree as best he could. How was it he had managed to take a hold of time? He had been falling, the tree pulled downwards, and yet – Lenny looked out over the treetops, wishing he were not alone. Somewhere, surely, Jim would be looking for him. And Lucy, and Miss Julie – didn’t they care too? Lenny closed his eyes, willing them to find him before it was too late.
It was Lucy’s voice Lenny heard first, coming along the boardwalk beneath him, then his father’s, both calling for him, their voices hoarse, shouting in all directions. Then he heard Miss Julie saying, ‘Quiet down, we’ll never hear the boy, you keep that up!’
‘I’m up here!’ he shouted down to them, startling them all, so that Miss Julie almost tipped forwards out of the scooter.
‘Don’t go further – the sinkhole, it’s around the corner. Watch out!’ he yelled down to them, fearful they would fall in.
They stopped and looked up into the dense branches of the ancient oak, silvery with salt, that towered above them. They could not see Lenny but they could hear him.
‘Come down, Léonard,’ said Miss Julie, her voice rasping and rattling more than usual. Exhausted, all she wanted was to see the boy safe and get home – it had been too much excitement for one night, for one lifetime she felt.
