slammed her sedan door and started the engine, he stepped to the window. Stella, like most of them, thought he didn’t see things simply because he looked at a slant. He did see things—he saw that Mondragon’s was in trouble. And there was something unsettled about Ward’s marriage to Stella. They never seemed to fight, but an air of struggle between them was palpable, and the conflict was about more than just the dead nephew. Stella had driven toward the old county road quite often in recent months, and there was only one place she could have been going: to her stepsister, Rose. Rose the estranged, Rose the thorn.
Ward reemerged from the Emporium and stood in the doorway watching his wife pull too quickly onto Main Street. His eyes met Scottie’s. Ward waved and called something, gesturing into his store, and then he raised his arms toward the cloudless sky like a conductor before his orchestra. The sound of Stella’s car engine filled the street and black feathers rustled overhead. Dogberry wound between his ankles. Time for breakfast.
At nine o’clock, as Scottie flipped the sign to Open, Nina Brown sailed by in her old tan station wagon. Nina was going to the bank, most likely, radio tuned to the Christian rock station, mind elsewhere, on her sullen husband or her irascible father-in-law, or their pale-faced teenage girl. Not so long ago, Nina’s pregnant teenage belly had pulled Perry Brown out of the community college, where he’d been studying auto mechanics, and back to the Brown Family farm. The Browns’ place was big and sprawling, confident, encroaching on Rose’s much smaller acreage. The Browns were the salt of the earth, people liked to say.
Nina Brown sailing by in her brown station wagon, cross hanging from the rearview. As she passed he saw them both clearly—the younger Nina and this current one, framed together in his store window. A quick snapshot. He watched Nina drive straight past the palimpsest of her scared, hopeful, pregnant former self, too busy now to stop and chat. The younger Nina pulled a blue jacket closer around her shoulders and her burgeoning belly. She checked her watch and looked overhead, and started walking east at a brisk clip. No fool, that one, even as a girl.
It wasn’t only Nina he saw this way. The past and present often intersected outside his store window. Two cars rolling through an intersection: kids in the back waving and shrieking, oldsters in the opposite lane watching the horizon with tired eyes. One heading east, one heading west, sliding past, treating the whole journey like a jaunty straight line rather than a spiral. Don’t they recognize themselves? Sometimes the past lingered while the present hurried by: the former selves pulled up to the curb in old junkers, got out, and stood along the street in ill-fitting coats, gathered at intersections, squinting and asking each other for cigarettes.
Scottie touched his fingertips to the window then dropped his hand. It was early yet, the sky clear. He suspected quite reasonably that he wouldn’t have a single customer today. Out of habit, he checked the change drawer in the cash register and turned on the store’s fluorescent overheads. He clicked on the radio and heard that silky-voiced buyer of wingtip shoes, former traveling salesman turned weatherman Ted Waite, talking about storm conditions. A thunderstorm likely on the way, friends. Stay tuned and I’ll have all the latest developments. We’ve got your back here at KA—He clicked Ted off, uninterested.
In the stockroom Dogberry waited on the cot, sphinxlike. The shelves were stacked high and tilted inward toward a small clearing in the center where Scottie stood, sipping his coffee. Towers of shoeboxes teetered, arranged in an order that wouldn’t make sense to anyone else. Some that dated back to 1964 should have been donated or sold for scrap long ago but here they stayed, little cardboard coffins. Tiny x and o ciphers marked their sides. Stacks of old newspapers and magazines sprouted under and around his cot, narrowing the pathways from shelving to sink. His worktable was an old door resting on two sawhorses. Next to his cot, a small trunk held clothes and books. A hot plate rested on a shelf right above it. Reconstructed bird and mouse skeletons perched between shoeboxes and along the metal shelving edges. Here, where there was no single place for a person’s eye to rest, he was at peace, more or less.
On his worktable, a pear and his dirty soup bowl from dinner the night before sat atop a pile of outdated issues of ARTnews. There was one pair of leather shoes, Ward Mondragon’s, that needed resoling. The table also held a bird skeleton, a rat skeleton, two pairs of sneakers, and a messy stack of index cards with Scottie’s perfect, tiny block print running along the lines, occasionally veering off to form circles, loops, and animal forms.
He sat and worked for awhile on the bird bones, using a tiny blade to separate the joints, brushing the individual segments clean, and taking care to set each piece in the correct spot on a waiting piece of paper, laying the segments out like a blueprint. He would refer to his bird book when he put the pieces back together. This bird, a red-wing, had flown into his net by Johnson’s Creek forty-seven Sundays ago, time and date recorded on an index card. Now the bones were bleached clean, and so delicate he scarcely felt them between his fingers.
Dogberry leapt onto the table and perched with his front paws on a sliding fan of index cards, meowing. He was intrigued by Scottie’s skeletons, and if he got the chance he’d bat them to the ground and pounce. “Red-winged Blackbird,” Scottie said, shoving Dogberry to the floor. The cat, irritated, stalked around the crate that held Scottie’s lamp and alarm clock. His tail gave the merest flick: Caution. Look.
When Scottie had heard the news that Rose’s son Lance was killed in the war he’d had no reaction. Ward told him in a nervous whisper. Stella was all broken up at the loss of her nephew and home in bed, Ward said, and Rose, presumably flattened by grief, wasn’t responding to their calls. Scottie listened and replied, “That’s very sad,” as he had been taught to do whenever someone died. Then he’d gone back to his store and sat on his cot. Vomit rose in his throat so quickly he didn’t have time to make it to the sink. He was sick down the front of his shirt, stunned with the speed of it, bile seeping into the cloth. After a while he removed the shirt and washed his damp torso in the sink. He squeezed the soiled cloth into a ball and shoved it to the bottom of the trashcan. It was wasteful and unlike him, but he had to dispose of it.
He had watched for the boy’s ghost since but seen it only rarely. Through the town’s intersections Lance slid, unmoored, shifting meaning, cueing one memory after another. Lance. Everyone knew him.
But what had Scottie known of him? Lance’s feet were big. Rose had brought him in to buy sneakers about a year ago, the last time—and one of the few times—Scottie had talked with him. He had written a message on the soles of the boy’s new shoes, of course. That wasn’t unusual. More unexpected was that Lance had seen one of Scottie’s messages that no one else bothered to notice.
Now Lance was most apparent through the space he’d left behind. Sometimes he stood on Mondragon’s porch, a too-bright glow coming off him. Nina Brown’s daughter, Sill, almost ghostly herself, held constant vigil, and Lance trailed after her, occasionally reaching out to glance his hand across her shoulders. Scottie recognized him by the silky hair and the baseball cap and the way Lance seemed to lose texture based on where he stood, his outline fading into the old wood, or a street lamp, or a passing car.
Scottie imagined Lance, those long legs, that rectangle of a youth in the war and wearing Scottie’s hidden message on his shoes—carrying the words into battle, into mess hall and tank and Humvee and dank prisons; into the morgue. Perhaps the sneakers were on his feet now, turning in the quiet earth. The boy wouldn’t really have worn sneakers purchased at Dunleavy’s to war. Scottie knew this. Yet it was the way he chose to remember Lance—it put the kid in context. Which, when you think of it, is the only way to understand anything.
Working, Scottie lost track of time. It was close to the lunch hour when the bell over the front door tinkled.
Louise Logan stood staring out his front window, clutching her purse to her body.
“Can I help you?”
She held her purse closer. “Hi, Scottie. Do you have sneakers?”
“Why, yes!” He saw what she’d been watching. Rose’s blue truck was parked across the street and there were two heads inside Mondragon’s, standing together in a center aisle. Rose shorter and lighter, moving in one direction and then another as Ward followed.