He went in. Louanne waited. Would the woman tell him at once, or wait, or not tell him at all? She didn’t want to go back there, but she would, she told herself. He couldn’t do anything to her in daylight, not if she stayed out of reach, and Jeannie Blaylock was home, if she screamed. She saw the flowered curtain twitched aside, and the man’s face in the window, looking toward her trailer. She knew she’d been careful how she set the blinds, but she still had the feeling he knew she was watching. The curtains flipped shut. Then the door opened, and he came out, his round red face gleaming. He shot a quick glance toward her lot, then looked down before he went down his steps. He opened the pickup door, leaned in, came back out, shut the door. Then he started toward Louanne’s trailer.
Her heart was hammering in her chest; she had to take two long breaths to quiet herself. He was actually coming, almost right away. She hurried out to the living room and sat poised on the rented tweed sofa. It seemed to take a long time, longer than she thought possible, even trying to count the steps in her mind. Finally a knock at her door. Louanne stood, trying to control her knees, and went to the door.
Even a step down, he was as tall as she, a man Jack might have hesitated to fight. But he was smiling at her, holding out a grubby envelope. “Sorry,” he said. His voice was curiously light for such a big man. “We didn’t mean to cause trouble…. The money is here….” He held it out. Louanne made a long arm and took the envelope; he released it at once and stepped back. “The… the connection at our lot didn’t work,” he went on, looking slightly past her, as if he didn’t want to see her. His voice, too, had a strange accent, something Louanne classified as foreign, though she couldn’t have said if it was from the East Coast or somewhere farther away than that. “I have already taken our wire away,” he said, glancing quickly at her face and away again. “It will not trouble you again…. We are sorry…. It was only that the connection did not work, and yours did.”
The money in the envelope was twenties… more than three. Louanne looked at his gleaming red face and felt a quiver of sympathy. Maybe they hadn’t known, if they were really foreigners. “You have to pay a deposit,” she said. “To the power company, before they turn it on. That’s why it didn’t work.”
“I’m sorry,” he said again. “I didn’t know. Is that enough? Are you satisfied?”
Greed and soothed outrage and bewilderment argued in her forehead. “It’s all right,” she found herself saying. “Don’t worry.” She wondered if she should give some of it back, but, after all, they had stolen from her, and it was only fair they should pay for it. Then her leftover conscience hit her, and she said, “It was only sixty, anyway, and if….”
“For your trouble,” he said quickly, backing away. “So sorry…. Don’t worry. If you are not angry, if you are not reporting this to authorities….”
“No,” said Louanne, still puzzled. Foreigners afraid of the law? Illegal immigrants? He didn’t sound Mexican. Drug dealers?
“No more bother,” he said. “Thank you. Thank you.” And turned and walked quickly away, just as Curtis Blaylock drove in. Curtis looked at the man walking off, and at Louanne standing there with the envelope in her hand, for all the world like a whore with her pay, and grinned.
“Trouble?” he asked in a silky voice. Louanne had to stop that right where it was, or she would have more problems than a big light bill.
“Foreigners,” she said, allowing an edge in her voice. “He wanted to know where to find”—she peered at the envelope as if to read the address, and found herself reading what was written on it—“3217 Fahrenheit, wherever that is. Not in this town, I told him, and he asked me to look it up on the county records. Somebody must’ve told him I work for the county.”
“Pushy bastard,” said Curtis. “Why’s he think you should look things up for him?”
“I don’t know,” said Louanne, wondering why men like Curtis had a knack for asking questions you couldn’t answer.
“Well, if you have any trouble, honey, just give us a call.”
Louanne didn’t answer that, and Curtis went on into his trailer, and she went back into hers. It was real money, all right, all twenties, and there were five of them. She could smell a fainter version of the smell in the trailer on lot 17, but money was money. A hundred bucks. It was too much, and made her worry again. Nobody in their right mind would’ve paid the sixty, let alone more. She made up her mind to send some of it back, somehow. Probably the woman would take it; women usually did. She readjusted the blinds in her bedroom, so that no one could possibly see in, and had a cooling shower. And finally went to bed, wondering only briefly how the foreigners were getting along in their lightless trailer.
She overslept, and had to run for it in the morning, dashing out of the door, slamming into her car, and riding the speed limit all the way to work. It wasn’t until noon, when she paid the bill at the power company with the twenties, tossed the crumpled envelope in the wastebasket by the counter, and put the change in her billfold, that she thought of the foreigners again. Something nagged her about them, something she should have noticed in the morning’s rush, but she didn’t figure it out until she got home and saw lot 17 as bare as a swept floor.
They were gone. They had left in the night, without waking her or anyone, and now they were gone.
All through the subsequent excitement, Louanne kept her mouth shut about the hundred dollars and the stolen electricity, and made the kind of response everyone expected to rhetorical questions like, Who do you suppose? and Why do you think? and Whoever could have guessed? She figured she was thirty or forty dollars to the good, and didn’t see why she should share any of it with old Mrs. Thackridge, who had plenty already or she wouldn’t own the trailer park. They all knew she’d talked to the man (Curtis being glad to tell everyone, she noticed), but she stuck to her story about him wanting an address she’d never heard of, and wanting her to look it up in the county records. And she said she’d thrown the envelope away after not finding any such place, and not caring much, either, and after a while they all let her alone about as much as before, which pleased her just fine.
But she did wonder, from time to time, about that foreign lady wandering around the country without any clothes on. Brown as an egg all over, and not a hair on her body, and—it finally came to her one day, as she typed up a list of grand jury indictments when the judge’s secretary was off sick—and no navel on the smooth, round, naked belly. She shook her head. Must have been there; everyone has a navel. Unless she had plastic surgery. But why?
After a while she didn’t think of it much, except when she was wearing the red blouse… and after a while she was going with Alvin, who didn’t like her in red, so she gave the blouse to the other secretary, and forgot the whole thing.
Gifts
In the fullness of spring, with flowers everywhere and the scent of them filling the nose, Dall Drop-hand, Gory the Tail’s third son, quarrelled with his father and brothers, and went off to find adventure.
“You’ll regret it,” his father said.
“You’ll come crawling back as soon as your belly gripes,” said his oldest brother.