there last summer, and she had liked sitting in the Happy Chef’s spoon.
Nina, not speaking to Hud, combed her long, white-blond hair. A strand flew in Hud’s face, and he plucked it away and let it fly out the open window. They drove past a mailbox and a spooky crooked iron weather vane. Hud imagined Nina’s strand of hair finding its way into an old house where a man lived alone, a man who had maybe killed his wife in silence and buried her in a small patch of his miles of untrespassed-upon land. Hud imagined the old man waking with the long hair on his pillow or finding it in his soup and from then on living in terror of what he’d done.
“What’s the name of your doll there in your purse?” Hud asked, to get Nina talking again.
Nina looked down at her clear plastic purse and tapped her finger at the doll head inside. “It’s not a doll,” Nina said. “It’s just a head. Heads don’t have names,” and she returned her stare back out the window.
Hud now felt entirely sober, and very tired. He wished he had just peeked in on Nina, had just watched her sleep undisturbed. A good father, Hud thought, lets his children sleep through the night. This was what Hud didn’t like about being sober. He didn’t like coming to his senses. Good sense can prevent a man from taking what he should have.
When Hud’s car began to sputter, he stomped on the gas pedal, and the car went a little farther before sputtering again, then stopping. It wouldn’t start back up. The needle of the gas gauge had been stuck on empty for years, and the odometer had read 138,323 for several hundred miles, but the old Pontiac and its habits had become so familiar to Hud over time that he’d thought he knew well how far he’d get on a full tank.
Before turning off onto the country roads, Hud had taken a deserted back highway, with no traffic across its broken pavement. They wouldn’t make it back tonight on foot even if he could find the way. He tried to think of what else might be wrong with the car, something he could easily fix. He turned the key again and listened closely to the engine as it still refused to turn over. He became frightened, and he worried over all the destruction that was about to befall him. By not returning his daughter to that bed next to that wide-open window, in that house with the weak locks, where his wife slept through everything, everything for him could change. He might be arrested. He might not be allowed to take Nina out again. He might lose his job.
“Goddamnit!” he practically screamed. “That bitch!” He pounded his fists against the steering wheel. He punched the horn at the center of the steering wheel, then drove his fists into it, holding the horn down to blare. The muscles in his arms were tight, and he thought if he pushed harder, he’d make the noise louder, deafening.
When he let up on the horn, the hollow silence of the night fell again, and he could hear Nina sobbing. Her face was turned away from him, and she held both her hands tight at her mouth, like she was trying to keep herself quiet. Hud gently pushed the hair from Nina’s face and behind her ears. “Nina,” he said, “I’m sorry. I should have just let you sleep.” He should have just taken her out trick-or-treating, to collect some sweets and heave some bad eggs, like everybody else was doing.
“It’s all right,” Nina said, still crying.
Hud wiped her tears with his thumb. She swallowed hard, then wiped her face with her sleeve. She took from her purse a little hinged box and opened it. “I haven’t shown you this,” she said, her voice still all chokey. She displayed her collection of dead desert bugs, identifying each one—the brown recluse, the palo verde beetle, the tarantula hawk. When she touched her finger to a brittle scorpion’s back, its hooked stinger broke off. When Tuesday and Hud first tried a trial separation almost a year ago, the fall before Gatling left, Tuesday had taken Nina with her to Arizona, where her mother lived in a cool, square cottage painted blue. Tuesday had even talked about moving there but had been concerned about the bugs in the house. She wanted to know which ones to fear, to learn about poisons and toxins and antidotes. She’d heard that scorpions climbed up walls and flung themselves into children’s beds, that wasps caught in sheets on the laundry line and stung in the night. “I need to know what to be scared of,” she’d told him on the phone. She’d used a playing card to knock a black widow into a Dixie cup. She’d freeze the bugs, then take them in a little tin that used to be a sewing kit to Poison Control, where she’d have them identified.
“I caught some fireflies for you tonight, but I guess I forgot them at the drive-in,” Hud said. He thought of them dying, slowly losing their flicker in the olive jar. “Nina . . . we’re out of gas, I guess. And I’m not real sure where we are. But see that dot of light over there?” He pointed to someplace far up the road. “I think we can walk over there, and maybe there’ll be a phone.”
Nina shrugged, and said nonchalantly, “Mom won’t be mad. It could happen to anybody.”
Hud took a flashlight from the glove compartment. Outside the car, he squatted so that Nina could crawl onto his back. She wrapped her legs around his waist, clasped her hands at his chest. With her warm breath on his neck, he thought he could walk for hours and hours. And he thought he might have to—the small dot of light was not growing. When Hud nearly tripped on some barbed wire at the edge of a cornfield, it was as if he could feel the danger in his ankles then, a tenseness, and he kept the beam of the flashlight low to the ground. After a while, Nina’s grip loosened, and she was slipping, and he asked if she’d like him to carry her in his arms so she could sleep. He felt her nod her head against his.
In his arms, she was much heavier, and he tired quickly. He sat down to rest on the edge of a ditch. When he looked up for the light, it was gone; the family in the house had simply turned out their lights and gone to bed.
Let it happen, he thought. Let’s stay lost. The summer sun could wear their skin away and bleach their bones. Experts would have to unlock their rib cages and untangle their skeletons. Then, in memory and punishment, the town could celebrate Halloween again, no matter what season of the year, dressing up in skull masks and glow-in-the-dark bone suits.
Nina scratched her ear in her sleep. As Hud ran his finger along her cheek, the bridge of her nose, her lips, he welcomed all the misery that would come in the morning for having kept her in his arms in the middle of nowhere. He felt brave only because Nina felt safe and protected enough to rest.
3.
TUESDAY woke on the sofa,, blinking at the morning light, her shirtdress drenched in sweat. Scratching her head, which itched from the thick Aqua Net in her unraveling beehive, she stood and put her bare foot over the floor vent. She felt only a gust of tepid air. Twice in five days the air conditioner repairman had claimed to have fixed a Freon leak. She got a stomachache thinking of the expense of replacing the unit, and she began to list in her mind all the other fallibilities of her house. The unkempt branches of a tree would soon enough be scratching threateningly against the windows with any gust of winter wind. And the faulty wiring kept the house only halfway electrical.
This was something Tuesday did—she would stop a minute to concentrate on the most decrepit circumstances of her life. She’d close her eyes and immerse herself in the misery until she was druggy with unhappiness, until every obstacle seemed hazy with the impossibility of solution, and she’d drop, tired, into her sofa cushions. If it was just her, Tuesday wouldn’t care about a house hot like an oven. If she was all alone, all she’d need was a tiny corner of a cold-water flat.
When she opened the window to glance outside at the air conditioner, she saw a girl’s legs poking out from the thicket of mums planted alongside the house. Though the legs were long and thin, entirely un-Nina-like, Tuesday felt certain for a second that she’d just happened upon her daughter dead in the grass. Part of her had always been prepared
