Doug Allyn - The Best American Mystery Stories 2000

I looked at her a second, then just picked up the whole box of Snickers and put it on the conveyor belt.

“For the little girl,” I said.

The cashier, a dumpy little blond woman with a cute face who’d been looking at Maeve, and then at me, broke into a big smile that was more awkward than fake.

“Well,” she said to Maeve, “I wish my daddy was as sweet as yours.”

Maeve stopped chewing the Snickers and stared at me as if she’d never seen me before in her life.

Understand, we are in a wooded ravine, a green, jungly gash in the earth, surrounded by natural walls. This land between the old mines and town, it’s wooded canyons cut by creeks that wind around and feed a chain of quiet little lakes on down to ours, where the water deepens, darkens, and pours over the spillway onto the slated shoals. From there it rounds a bend down toward the swamps, seeps back into the underground river. The cicadas spool up so loud you think there’s a torn seam in the air through which their shrieking slipped from another world.

One evening I was out on the porch in the late light after supper and saw Maeve sneak off into the woods. The coon dog got up and followed her, and then a couple of other strays followed him. When she didn’t come right back I stood up and listened. The light was leaking fast into dusk. Crickets and tree frogs sang their high-pitched songs. Then from the woods in the direction she’d headed came a sudden jumble of high vicious mauling. It froze me to hear it. Then it all died down.

I went inside for the shotgun and the flashlight but when I came back out Maeve had made her way back through the thicket and into the ghostly yard, all color gone to shadowy gray, the nightslip wadded into a diaper she held to herself with both hands. I suppose it wasn’t this child’s first. She walked through the yard. What dogs hadn’t gone with her stood around with heads held low, she something terrible and holy, lumpy stomach smeared with blood. She went to the lake’s edge to wash herself and the slip, soaking and wringing it till she fell out and I had to go save her and take her into the house and bathe her myself and put her to bed. Her swollen little-girl’s bosoms were smooth and white as the moon, the leaky nipples big as berries. I fed her some antibiotics left over from when I’d had the flu, and in a short time she recovered. She was young. Her old coonhound never came back, nor the others that went out with him, and I had a vision of them all devouring one another like snakes, until they disappeared.

I couldn’t sleep and went out into the yard, slipped out of my jeans and into the lake. I thought a swim might calm me. I was floating on my back in the shallows looking up at the moon so big and clear you could imagine how the dust would feel between your fingers. My blood was up. I thought I heard something through the water, and stood. It was coming from across the lake, in the thick bramble up on the steep ridge, where a strange woman had moved into an empty cabin some months back. I heard a man one night up there, howling and saying her name, I couldn’t tell what it was.

I’d seen her in town. She carried herself like a man, with strong wiry arms, a sun-scored neck, and a face hard and strange as the wood knots the carvers call tree spirits. I heard she’s an installer for the phone company.

When I stood up in the water I could hear a steady rattling of branches and a skidding racket, something coming down the steep ridge wall. I waded back toward the bank, stopped and looked, and she crashed out of the bushes overhanging the water, dangling naked from a moonlit branch. She dropped into the lake with a quiet little splash, and when she entered the water it was like she’d taken hold of me. I didn’t do that to myself anymore, though maybe I should’ve because I was sometimes all over Maeve in my sleep until she began to shout and scratch, for she was too afraid to sleep alone but must not be touched even by accident. But now here I was spilling myself into the shallows where the water tickled my ankles.

I saw her arms rise from the water and wheel slowly over her round, wet head and dip again beneath. She made no noise. She swam around the curve up into the shallows, stood up, and walked toward me and never took her eyes off my own.

She took my hand, and looked into the palm. She had a lean rangy skinned-cat body, and a deep little muttering voice.

“Small slim hands,” she said, “a sad and lonely man. You see the big picture, but you have no real life.” She grumbled a minute. “Short thin fingers, tapered ends. A stiff and waisted thumb, hmmm. Better off alone, I suppose.” She pressed into the flesh below my thumb. “Ummhmm,” she said, tracing all the little cracks and stars and broken lines in the middle of the palm with a light fingernail. She looked at it close for a second, then dropped it. She turned and sighed and looked back across the lake. I turned my eyes from her saggy little fanny and skinny legs.

“My name’s Callie. I’m your neighbor,” she said.

“I know it,” I said.

She said, “Who’s that little girl you taking care of?”

“My niece,” I said. She was my younger cousin, but I had told her to call me uncle because it sounded more natural. I said, “She’s had a hard life.”

“Mmm,” she said, and we were quiet for a while. “Well, the world ain’t no place for an innocent soul, now is it?”

“It is not,” I agreed.

“Must be hard on a man,” she said.

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“I mean being alone out here with a pretty little girl.”

“She’s my niece, I’m not that way.”

She turned and looked at me and then at the house for a minute.

“Why don’t you come on up to the ridge sometime and pay me a visit?” Her thin lips crooked up and parted in a grin. She raised a hand and walked back into the water and swam around the curve into the cove and out of sight. I sat down on the bank. There was a sound and I turned my head to see Maeve up from bed and standing unsteady on the porch, fiddling with the little blue headphones radio, which she didn’t at the moment seem to understand how to use. Then in a minute she had them on again, and just stood there.

Now that she wasn’t carrying, she roamed the canyon with the strays. She ate raw peanuts from a sack I had on the kitchen counter, and drank her water from the lake down on her hands and muddy knees. She smelled like a dog that’s been wallowing in the lake mud, that sour dank stink of rotten roots and scum. I finally held her in the bathtub one day, took the headphones off her head, and plunged her in, her scratching and screaming. I scrubbed her down and lathered up her head and dunked her till she was squeaky, and plucked a fat tick out of her scalp. But when I tried to dress her in some of Greta’s old clothes, shut up in plastic and mothballs all these years, she slashed my cheek with her raggedy nails and ran through the house naked and making a high, thin, and breathless sound until she sniffed out the old rag she wore and flew out through the yard and into the woods buck naked with that rag in her hand and didn’t come back till that evening, wearing it, smelling of the lake water again, and curled up asleep on the bare porchboards.

When I went to the screen door she didn’t look up but said from where she lay hugging herself, “Don’t you handle me that way no more.”

“I had to clean you, child.”

“I can’t be touched,” she said.

“All right.”

“That woman at the big store said you was my daddy.”

“But you know I’m not, I’m your uncle.”

“I don’t want no daddy,” she said. “I just come out of the woods that day I come here, and I didn’t come from nowhere before that.”