If you look under one of the tarps you’ll see that the roof of the house is gone — not caved in or blown over or burned to ashes, just gone. The big appliances are left, and some compact heavy objects like cans of beans or a bowling ball in a leather bag. The buildings look at once frozen and scorched. The walls are blackened as if by heat, the floors cracked as if by cold.
It’s dark still, and I’m in the mason’s pickup. We’re going hunting. It’s a Huck Finn day, and this is a little field trip of sorts — my mom’s idea. The radio plays music like I’ve never heard.
He has a place set up, he tells me, not far into the brush — a hideout. You’re supposed to ramble around the live oaks lugging a pop-up blind, he says, but today we’re going to let the gobblers come to us. “And if they don’t,” he says, “it’s just not our day.” He pulls halfway off the dirt road and stops. It doesn’t seem like there’s enough room for another car to pass. He grabs a shotgun off the rack and I carry the pack. The mason has unevenly cropped hair and he’s wearing a tracksuit that does not look new.
We round a thicket at the base of a beech tree and there’s the hideout. The mason pulls aside a flap and we crouch in and get settled. You can see a lot from the mason’s hideout and nothing can see you. It’s roofless, and roomier inside than it looked from the outside. “Thing about shooting a turkey is then you have to clean a turkey and cook a turkey,” he says. He turns his head and coughs. “I don’t have much energy for chores lately, or much appetite.”
He handles the gun and shows me how it works, and I’m impressed. There’s nothing extra to the gun. It’s beautiful, a little monument to its own function. The mason says we probably won’t have much luck with the turkeys, but he’ll let me practice on some targets later with a different gun. He likes to shoot at textbooks with that one, he tells me. He takes out a little wooden device that reminds me of the pitch pipe I use when I sing at church and he makes turkey noises with it, just a soft clucking for a while, then a series of shrill yelps. I listen hard for a response, for a garbling out in the bracken and the briars, but the mason seems more interested in his instrument than in any quarry it might draw. In the pickup I’d been waiting for the sun, and now somehow I miss it rise. There it is off to the left, an overripe grapefruit pulling clear of the scrub.
The mason keeps sipping off his thermos but his eyes look sharp. Maybe he’s not going to say anything about what’s been going on — the chosen, the incidents — and he doesn’t have to. It’s in the air we’re breathing. We’re due, everyone knows. We’re close to due.
The mason plunges his hand into the sack of shotgun shells and absently kneads them, like he’s petting a dog. He’s ready to talk, ready to lecture. He tells me the history of his pickup truck, which he bought off a man who used to collect debts up in Georgia. The pickup has been in shoot-outs. It has been rolled in a chase, and clipped on the back end by a train. He tells me about Georgia, how there are spots up there hotter and flatter than Florida. The mason is a native here, like I am. He says in the old days a sweet potato that grew right out of this yellow dirt tasted better than anything at those Italian restaurants. His mother was prettier than any of these women around here now.
“Your mom’s the pick of the current litter,” he tells me, “but she wouldn’t have been fit to carry my mother’s lipstick around for her.”
There’s a laugh in his throat, but he clears it. He does something rough but precise to the knuckles of his left hand, producing a roll of cracks, and his demeanor changes. He peers out sternly into the broad, mostly quiet woods. His voice goes even and he explains that recently a tree his greatgrandfather planted died on his watch. Among the biggest sycamores he’s ever seen. It just quit living. He’d had to chainsaw the thing down and limb it and cut it into pieces small enough to carry and burn it. Not a leaf on the thing. A couple days’ work. He wants to know why a tree would up and die like that, but he knows he won’t get an answer. He lost an infield of shade easy, but worse he lost something grand and noble that his forebears had given start to. He’d sat by his nightfire, sweating, feeling watched by black quiet eyes. He doesn’t care about getting taken; something has to take you in time. What he doesn’t like is feeling monitored. He doesn’t deserve it. He looks at me, maybe wondering if I have anything to say about it, but I don’t.
The mason brings out a sleeve of smoked nuts and shares them with me. There’s no water, but I manage to get down a few handfuls. “So,” he says. “What we got right here, where we’re sitting: this is a sanctuary inside the sanctuary. For natives only. Nobody can find you here. And I mean nobody. And you, little friend, can use this place whenever you want.”
I thank him and he nods in an upbeat way. It’s almost regular daytime now. I can see everything. I can see every stitch in the canvas of the hideout, and a black and pink bug bumbling around on a pinecone. A ray of sun is finding its way through the foliage and glinting off the barrel of the shotgun, the heat beginning to thrum in the treetops.
The sisters live together now, the ones who run the restaurants. They told my mom they don’t want to be left behind if one of them is chosen.
Before they get the tarps up the houses look like hungry baby birds. Mouths agape to the sky, like despite everything being taken away they still expect something to be given. That’s how they look to me.
PALATKA
Pauline awoke to Mal’s voice outside her window. Mal was the seventeen-year-old girl who lived by herself in the next apartment. She was always talking on her outdated cordless phone, always helping some far-off person navigate a problem. Pauline went out to their shared back balcony in her bare feet and snuggled into a camping chair. Mal, standing with her weight all on one hip, grasping a big cup of iced tea, winked at her. She was as skinny as a rail; her fingernails were painted in stripes, and her elbows were raw. Pauline never saw her come home with groceries. The girl had a look in her eye sockets like she didn’t get enough red meat, or enough green vegetables. Pauline felt a mothering urge toward Mal. She had never gone through a wild phase herself, and so Mal’s carelessness fascinated her — her carelessness about things such as nutrition and education, but more so her general carelessness with herself. She didn’t seem to realize that a cute young girl shouldn’t treat her body and soul like they were rented.
Mal hung up the phone and chugged enough of her tea that she had to recover her breath afterward. She hoisted herself onto the banister. Pauline asked what the call was about and Mal said she had a friend who, when she met up in person with a guy from online, always felt too guilty to bail if she didn’t like the looks of him.
“She feels bad about wasting the guy’s time, after they got gussied up and used gas in their tank. And she’s like, what if that happened to me? I said, nobody’s going to be walking out on you because of the way you look. She’s like, yeah, they walk out later for other reasons.”
Pauline was only six years older than Mal, yet the dating world Mal inhabited seemed foreign to her, insane. There was no normal dating world anymore, she knew. A guy wasn’t going to approach Pauline with his hat in his hands and ask if that seat was taken, then give her an elegant little compliment and ask if he could have her phone number for the purpose of asking her out on a date that weekend.