she said, still eyeing him suspiciously. The sun sparked off her blue-black hair. She wore one large ringlet at the front of each ear. After a few seconds she smiled, showing small, even teeth with delicate spaces between. ‘Yeah, you can do something for me,’ she said, still smiling. ‘You can carry me someplace where I can set my feet down on solid land. I can’t get these goddamned shoes dirty.’ She pointed with her cigarette at the high-heeled red pumps, the same color as her blouse.
Matthew, his breath constricted with love, knowing the color was rising up his neck like mercury in a thermometer, stepped forward, his own shoes sinking uncomfortably deep in the mire.
‘I won’t have to carry you far,’ he said. ‘Your trailer’s parked in a low spot.’
‘We’ll see who does what,’ Maudie said defiantly as she stepped carefully down the rickety steps and deposited herself in Matthew’s arms. He carried her across the lot and fifty yards up an embankment to the edge of a cornfield.
‘Thanks,’ said Darlin’ Maudie, looking carefully at her benefactor for the first time. ‘What’s your name?’
‘Matthew.’
‘Your friends call you Matt?’
‘No. They call me Matthew.’
‘I might have figured,’ she said, making her eyes large again. Then she spotted a wide, squat tree about a hundred yards into the cornfield. ‘Let’s go in there,’ she said. ‘It looks so peaceful.’
The corn was armpit high and the field smelled fresh as dawn. Darlin’ Maudie tested the earth with one crimson shoe.
‘I told you it would be dry up here,’ Matthew said, and taking her hand he led her toward the tree.
The tree sat like a party umbrella, trunk sturdy, branches gently arching. Wild grasses grew around the base of the tree, where roots ridged above the soil like exposed veins.
They sat down on the grass, Matthew picking away twigs and pieces of fallen bark so Darlin’ Maudie wouldn’t dirty her exotic costume.
The corn swaddled the noise of the carnival. They could feel the rhythm of the generators, thumping away like distant music.
‘This is so quiet,’ Maudie said, looking tiny and frightened, a ragamuffin of a girl lifted out of her noisy and reverberating environment and deposited amid the silent corn. ‘I ain’t been anywhere quiet for months and months, since we left Florida in the spring.’
Matthew could see her shoulder blades chopping at the material of her blouse. As his gaze flashed across her black eyes, he saw that she had a beauty spot on her cheek, about an inch to the right of her mouth. He couldn’t tell if it was real or painted on, but he felt himself salivating. He was mad to caress the mysterious spot with his tongue. Maudie smiled again and he counted the spaces between her lower teeth. He held out his arms to her, tentatively, afraid she would laugh rudely or ridicule him. She moved close, there under the canopy of leaves, but with her head down so there wouldn’t be any kiss. She rested her head on his chest as he put one hand on her upper arm, which was so thin he felt as if he were holding a paper girl and not a real one.
But he could smell her. Her hair held the dusky, musky odors of soap, perfume, and smoke. If Matthew bent his neck at an odd angle he could just manage to kiss the top of her head. Her hair was a tangle of black velvet; and the sun rays, about the same height as the corn, made every tenth hair or so look as if it were on fire.
While they embraced, the sun vanished as if it had been switched off. Thunder grumbled and a sudden breeze set the leaves trembling and rustled the corn.
Maudie remained absolutely still, light as a kitten against Matthew’s chest.
‘If you’re lucky, in a lifetime you get one moment in which you’d like to live forever,’ my father said each time he recounted the story to me. ‘One moment when you’d like to be frozen in time, in a landscape, a painting, a sculpture, or a vase. That was my moment. If I had it all to do over again, Gideon, I’d do it the same way. Even if I knew then what I know now.’
Back then in the cornfield, Matthew said, ‘We’d better leave, find someplace to get out of the storm.’
‘No,’ the bird-light girl replied emphatically, pushing herself closer to him. ‘I want to stay here. I want to see what the storm is like.’
‘But your clothes … ’ said Matthew.
‘To hell with my clothes. I ain’t goin’ back. He can’t make me do it.’
To his dying day Matthew Clarke never knew what it was that Maudie didn’t want to do. It turned out that Maudie was her name. The one extravagance Gollmar Bros. Carnival and American Way Shows allowed itself each spring before the troupe hit the road was to print a new banner for the girlie show, using the name of the lead performer.
In the cornfield, the fist penny-sized raindrops plopped down.
‘We’ll have to move closer to the tree,’ Matthew said as a drop splattered on the toe of one of Maudie’s scarlet shoes. They moved closer to the trunk.
The wind gusted and the tree above them shuddered. But beneath the leaves it was eerily silent, the air heavy. Matthew thought it was strange to see the wind bending and flattening the corn just yards away, while beneath their canopy they could scarcely feel a breeze.
Lightning buzz-sawed across the sky, leaving ragged silver incisions. The rumble of thunder was followed by a bulletlike whine and a sizzling crash as lightning struck somewhere nearby. As the thunder rolled wildly, Maudie pressed against Matthew. When she turned her face up to him he saw fear in her almond-pointed eyes.
‘I didn’t know it would be like this,’ she whispered. ‘I’m not from around here.’
Matthew kissed her then, awkwardly, his lips touching her nose before covering her mouth. The rain hurtled down around them; a few drops leaked through the leaves, dripping onto the frilly grass at their feet. Maudie wrapped her arms tightly around Matthew and returned his kiss. Her tongue felt small and hot against his own.
I’m so happy I could die, Matthew thought. At that moment there was a violent, ripping, crunching sound, as if kindling was being broken right next to their ears. The tree screamed. Afterward, Maudie claimed it was her, or possibly Matthew. But Matthew knew it had been the tree, a long, shrill sound like a rabbit’s death cry.
The tree was struck behind and above them. The lightning ripped off a huge limb. Matthew found himself on the grass, staring up at a fresh white scar where the limb had been. The fallen branch lay beside him, some leaves brushing one arm.
He was nauseated; his left arm and leg felt full of pins and crawling ants. When he tried to blink he realized his left eyelid was paralyzed. In another second or so he discovered that the only part of him he could move was his right eye, and it was full of Maudie.
Darlin’ Maudie stood in the drenching rain at the edge of the corn, her arms raised above her head, her legs braced as if she were supporting a monstrous weight on her upturned hands. From where he lay, it looked to Matthew as if she held lightning in each hand, bolts the color of molten silver, crackling like cellophane, long as the sky. They stretched from her hands clear to the clouds, which were wild and black and rolling like locomotives.
Matthew
