Peter Heller - Celine

Elbie Chicksaw was not at the address in Red Lodge that the sheriff had given them. No one was. No one, it looked like, had been there for quite a while. The little clapboard crackerbox was on a side street on the north end of town, which it shared with a double-wide trailer and an abandoned body shop. The small front yard was overgrown with knee-high dried grass and sweet sage and there was a tumbleweed pressed against the front door like a stray dog hoping to get in. The windows were boarded up with weather-stained plywood and a plywood sign at the gate said in spray-painted letters: FOR SALE BY OWNER. No phone number, no address. Interesting marketing, Celine thought. To be worthy of buying his house one had to hunt down the tracker. Well, we can do that, she thought. She eased the truck fifty yards down the rutted street to the trailer and got out. A wheelchair ramp led to the front door. She rapped. The little girl who opened it held a squirming puppy and her face, and the puppy’s, were smeared with chocolate.

She pushed her lips around, cocked her head, and gave Celine a twice-over while trying to keep the puppy’s licks out of her eyes. She thumped the dog on the head; he squirmed happily, and she yelled “No, Tucker, no!,” tried to blow a strand of hair out of her face but it was too heavy with chocolate. “We’re making moose,” she announced.

“Moose?”

“Yep, chocolate moose, with giant antlers. Wanna see?”

“Definitely. Are your parents home?”

The girl turned her head and screamed “Maama!,” turned back. “We call him Tucker ’cuz no one gets no rest till he tuckers out.”

“I see.”

Behind her came an electric wheelchair. The woman driving it was in her twenties, broad-shouldered, with a thick blond braid lying over her breast. Dark circles under her eyes but prominent freckled cheeks, cute in a straightforward, no-nonsense way. She looked to Celine like maybe a ranch girl who had practiced on the cheerleader squad before heading home to do chores. Her daughter hopped out of the way like a pedestrian in a crosswalk. Celine was going to tell these neighbors that she was Elbie’s mother, but seeing the woman she knew that wouldn’t wash. She found that some people she met just expected the truth and it was almost impossible, and probably a sin, to tell them otherwise.

“You looking for Elbie?” the woman said.

“How did you know?”

“Anyone looks like you shows up on our doorstep they’re looking for Elbie. We pay our taxes, and I can see you’re not a Mormon.”

“How do you know?”

“You know that hundred-mile stare ex-cons have? Mormons have it too, except they’re gazing at the afterlife. Try to hide it but you can tell.”

“Well.” Celine laughed. “I was a Catholic, though, in the beginning. I always thought that was a great disservice—to teach a little girl to believe in Hell.”

“Ha!” the woman barked. It caught them by surprise. “There’s hell all right. But you don’t need to die.”

“Amen.”

“Elbie’s on vacation.”

“Seems to be a pandemic.”

“Be back in the spring maybe. You can leave your number with me. I’m guessing, though, you’re not interested in the house.”

Celine shook her head.

“Well what, may I ask, are you interested in?”

“Helping a young woman find her father.” Celine was not smiling. She said it with such pathos the light in the entryway seemed to dim. The words settled on the young mother like a flock of exhausted songbirds.

“We know a little about that,” she murmured. Celine noticed the scuffed gold band.

“Your husband?”

“Let’s just call him the father of my child. The way I’m feeling lately. Jay’s been in the oil fields five months and counting. If he doesn’t come back for elk season I’ll know we’re pretty much toast.”

Celine whistled without knowing it. Long and soft.

“You two wanna come in?” said the woman.

Celine wanted to find Elbie before the morning was over. But she had several creeds, one of which was that if someone made the effort to invite one in, well, one went. “Thank you,” she said. “We’d love to.”

By the time they left the trailer they had eaten enough dark chocolate mixed with whipped egg whites to feel queasy. They helped Lydie and Raine pour the mixture into the little moose-shaped cups and set them on a rack in the fridge, and they both got peed on, a little, by Tucker. When they stepped back out onto the ramp and into the brisk and windy morning they had a detailed map of the logging roads that led to Elbie’s camp.

They’d driven half a mile when Pete said, “Can you pull over, please?”

“Pete?”

“Something’s bugging me.”

Celine pulled half off the road and they got out. Pete went to the back of the truck.

He got stiffly to his knees, then lay prone on the dry weeds and slid half under the frame as if he were checking for an oil leak. He slid himself back out, shook the gravel and dirt off his jacket and khakis, and held out a small black box the size of a Zippo with a little wire antenna poking from one end. The way they were looking at each other, a passerby might have thought he was handing her a rose, or a silver pendant.

Celine said, “Bingo! Let’s leave it for now,” and back under he went.

Hank was just twenty-one when he drove down Interstate 91 along the Connecticut River between New Hampshire and Vermont, back to Putney and the school he had loved so much. He was a junior at Dartmouth, most of the way through an English major that thrilled him, and which he fully understood did not prepare him for the job market the way, say, premed would have done. He didn’t care. He was reading Faulkner and Stein, Borges and Calvino, Bishop and Stevens. He felt wreathed in the music of language, and as long as he heard it and could write it down, as long as the pulse was in his veins, he didn’t care if he lived out of the back of a truck or in some crappy rent-by-the-week for the rest of his life. The rougher, maybe, the better, because he also understood that somehow hunger sharpened the notes, cleared the static. He wasn’t sure why, but he could see that the most comfortable writers—the most well-heeled people, even—were often the most deaf. Ah, youth.

But it wasn’t for love that he was coming back to his old high school. Or not love only. It was to find his sibling. He knew that there were two male teachers who had taught both him and his mother. He’d start there.

Hank was shy about showing up on campus when there was still a class of kids that knew him, so he avoided the hilltop cluster of clapboard buildings and went straight to the house of Bob and Libby Mills, on Lower Farm Road. It was a blustery day in late October, biting cold, and he walked across a small farmyard matted with wet maple leaves. He climbed the slate front steps of a tight red clapboard house and knocked. Bob was an unlikely suspect, for, like Pete, he was a coastal Mainer who spent too much time cutting firewood and in a canoe to trouble his life with the shallower pleasures of sin. He also seemed to have a wonderful marriage. They seemed, the two, to be real best friends. He remembered once splitting cordwood with the biology teacher and Bob telling how he and Libby had taken their honeymoon on the Allagash. It was a weeks-long canoe trip through the Maine woods, and at the time river runners were required to hire a registered Maine guide. Their man was Calvin C. Beal. One night they camped at the head of a small rapid and climbed the ridge behind. Big views north and east. Bob said, “Hey, Calvin, what is that mountain just there, with the rocky top?” “Owl Peak,” said Calvin. “And what about that far range there?” Calvin thought for a second and murmured, “Don’t know.” A few more considered seconds later, he said, “Nobody knows.”