The Center of Everything Read online

“Will you have a nap before dinner and visiting Harry?” asked Polly.

  “I will,” said Maude. “Hans and I each had a gimlet or two.”

  Polly went back to her garden, picking up dog toys and shovels and everything that took away from the new blast of color, this moment of perfection. Despair was a default setting in this climate, but this time of year was the best Polly could hope for. Nine-tenths of the year it was too hot, too dry, too high, too cold. Spring brought floods, high summer brought fire and smoke. Dee’s ratty green taped-together garden notebook said the same thing: flea beetles, HAIL, wind flattened corn. Polly wrapped it in scrap silk they’d found in the attic, and she took it out once a year or so, usually in the dead of winter.

  Polly wanted to hear certain voices. She wished, ferociously, that Dee could see this new world in her old yard, even Helen covered with mud from the neck down. Polly was tempted to use a hose but splashed her clean with a bowl of warm water. “Did you remember what you wanted to show me?”

  Helen handed her two pieces of greenhouse glass and a rock, a gouged marble. “See how pretty it is?”

  Polly rolled it around in her muddy fingers. She hadn’t seen one of these since she was eight, and Dee allowed her to paw through her jewelry box. They carried the stone inside, and Polly scratched the side of a canning jar, then the side of the stainless sink. She explained the hardness scale—Merle would have been proud—and put it in a bowl in the window, trying to imagine Dee dropping rough diamonds around the property like so many bread crumbs.

  Polly’s drifty afternoon ended when Ned, marooned at the restaurant, called needing grocery items. Polly threw the kids in the car and shopped for Peake’s, for the memorial, for what she remembered of Maude’s party. The phrase “threw the kids in the car”—what percentage of most post–World War II childhoods was taken up by inexplicable errands? Polly was treating Helen like a sack, Sam like a dog. The actual dogs hid in the corners of the yard as she pushed her children toward the Civic.

  At the liquor store, the owner couldn’t look at her directly. At the grocery store, the clerk, who had gone to school with Ariel, burst into tears when she saw Polly. A moment of confusion when she got back in the car—where was the clutch and the gear shift?—and as she felt her children watching her, she broke into a sweat, and turned around to buy time, looked at her bags, and realized she’d forgotten to buy the brisket for the memorial, the primary reason for going to the fucking store to begin with.

  She ran back in, dragging her whining, exhausted children. Another checker, seeing that Polly had been crying, patted her hand, and Polly started crying again, ran back to the old Civic, slammed it into reverse, and crunched the bumper against a concrete signpost.

  Helen and Sam made no sound whatsoever. Polly hauled herself out of the car. The damage to the post was invisible, and any new dent on the Civic was indistinguishable from the last dozen years of abuse. Polly started to get back in.

  “Hey, lady,” said a man. “I saw all that. Hold up.”

  There was always some such fucker. He was snub-nosed, overly groomed with ironed jeans, her age, not a local. Polly could tell her appearance did not impress him, nor did her car.

  “I haven’t damaged a thing that doesn’t belong to me,” she said.

  “Someone should make sure.”

  “Really?” asked Polly, warming up at the same time she started to shake. A sunburnt man trotted toward them with alarming speed.

  “Can I help?” asked Drake, sweaty from working with Harry at the dig. He touched Polly on the shoulder—nice, not proprietary. “I came down for food and water.”

  The man, uneasy, looked at Drake’s clothes, not his face. “She backed into that.”

  “I saw!” said Drake. “Awful! Clearly she’s having a difficult time!”

  Polly managed the trick of weeping while enraged. It probably saved the man, who finally focused on Drake’s face. People were sometimes overwhelmed by a weird sense of familiarity. Did they know him? Maybe when he was twenty and saving a battalion or a city or fucking the girl, rather than being dressed like a guy who might dig up bodies in a field.

  Maude would enjoy this, thought Polly. Were she to know.

  “No harm done, I think,” said Drake, wrapping an arm around Polly.

  “No,” said the man, retreating.

  Drake got into the Civic and drove them home. By the time they turned into the alley, Polly was shuddering.

  “I’m not rescuing you, I’m saving that asshole,” Drake said. He parked, carried both Helen and Polly’s groceries, gave the kids ice cream sandwiches, once again sifted through the photos on the table. “You’re not getting anywhere with these.”

  “I know,” said Polly. She wished she could go to bed.

  “I’ll get them enlarged. Will you give me the Delgados’ address for a note?”

  Polly fished through her purse. “They appreciated the fact that you were a gentleman,” she said. “That you wanted to help with tuition, that you were sweet to her.”

  “Well,” he said, “I liked her. Very much.”

  He was flushed and blinky. Drake was not a demonstrative man, at least about sad things. Sometimes this amused Polly, but Drake had grown up in a shitty, run-of-the-mill abusive family, and he kept things tight. He was good at looking impassive—he and Ned and Harry and Vinnie played poker all winter—and having a subtle listening face was not a bad thing for an actor.

  Right now he looked almost as ruined as he might have if he hadn’t retired. During two years of working for him, Ariel was often the only person he’d see in a day or even a week. Everyone in their own world of sadness.

  “I’m sure she didn’t like that little shit Graham,” said Drake. “I’m sure she wouldn’t willingly touch him.”

  No one can be sure, thought Polly.

  “Harry didn’t want the kid around today. He didn’t want to look at him. He says she has rope burns, like she caught up with the kayak and wrapped the rope around her right hand and was holding on with her left. Like she tried to save herself.”

  Despite the risk of maiming the car again, Polly decided to take the groceries to Ned herself, because all she could see were Ariel’s hands, outstretched, bloodless, mangled.

  She found Ned in the office, working on the calendar. He’d already heard. It wasn’t the sort of thing he would have told her over the phone. It was a horrible detail.

  “How could Graham not have seen her reaching the rope?”

  “Who knows what it’s like when you’re at water level, drowning.” Ned slammed things around, trying to get out of Peake’s to go help Harry on the hill.

  “I hate him,” said Polly. “I can’t bear to think of this.”

  “We’re done after the party. I’ll talk to Vinnie.”

  In the kitchen, Graham was folding napkins again. She took her time looking in the walk-in for the stew Ned had made, but Graham folded on, placid and careful.

  “How are you doing? Is it upsetting, or are you relieved?” asked Polly.

  “About what?” he asked.

  Polly went back into the walk-in and nibbled on some pecorino, thinking about narcissism, thinking about how a person who was truly nuts would likely fail to recognize this fact. When she could no longer feel her nose, she grabbed the containers she needed for dinner, cracked the door, and saw to her relief that Graham was gone.

  Polly was sliding down the hall when she heard him laugh through the doorway of the closed bar. There he was, with a new waitress named Emily: laughing, pink-cheeked, human, holding a corkscrew just out of reach, teasing her.

  Graham didn’t have Ariel in his brain, anywhere. She was gone.

  “Jump higher,” he said, corkscrew in a cocked hand, at the end of a strong, long arm, just like Connie said he’d held a life preserver high above another head. He could have knocked Emily to the ground like a feather. Polly wondered how he dared to breathe. She shouldn’t think he should have saved Ariel, but she did think it. He shou
ld have made sure she was wearing her preserver. He should have to see Ariel now.

  Emily saw Polly and stopped hopping. Graham handed Emily the corkscrew and gave Polly as pure a look of hatred as she’d ever seen. Blink and miss it, but it happened. She wanted to kill him. She wouldn’t, but it was a pure, honest desire.

  Polly topped Ned’s lapin à la moutarde, a bullet on Maude’s list, with some fresh tarragon and served it with new potatoes and the first green beans. The children ate without irony or comment. Polly made a plum cake with last year’s frozen Mount Royals, another Dee recipe. Everything was Dee, for Maude, at the beginning and end.

  Maude and Jane were still arguing about the guest list, though it was silly to bother: They’d bought four extra pork shoulders, doubled the sides, chilled another case of Champagne.

  “But I won’t see these people again,” said Maude. “Whether I like them is moot.”

  “How can you say that?” asked Jane. “Has there been some diagnosis?”

  “I know,” said Maude. “I just know.”

  “We’ll see you in New York in October, for Papa’s tribute.” A big shindig on the seventy-fifth anniversary of Myths and Variations, his seminal book on myth and archaeology and how the two didn’t always coexist comfortably. They were all going, and Polly intended to walk half the blocks of the city and try four restaurants a day.

  “Yes,” said Maude, but she didn’t seem sure. “But I can’t just sit around in the meantime, counting on it. We should go see Harry’s project.”

  “When?” said Polly, opening one eye. She was in a lawn chair, daydreaming.

  Now, apparently. Maude was intent on a trip to the Poor Farm on Harvat’s Flats. For the view and to change the day’s mood, and to support her poor grandchild, she said. Perhaps they’d see a bird.

  It was only eight in the evening on one of the longest days of their lives.

  “We’ll watch the fireworks,” said Merle. “All good.”

  It was not all good. In the car, a Suburban they’d borrowed from Vinnie so that they could fit everyone at the same time, everyone was irritable. Helen drew on Sam’s leg with a purple pen, and Polly climbed into the way back to divide them. They bumped on, Maude and Jane still squabbling about the party, Maude pointing out markers: the lane where a beau had lived, the house that served as a sick ward during the flu epidemic. They passed the ranch on Ferry Creek where Papa and Dee had hidden a still with some friends, as a hobby and a way of using Dee’s grapes and plums and apples. Mostly, Maude said, people would make a run up to the Canadian border for whiskey; she showed them a ravine that had been a drop point.

  As they neared the site, they could see Harry’s skinny frame. Ned was fifty yards downhill, holding a survey line, while Drake dug farther up the slope near the flagged road, the flags vibrating in forty-mile-an-hour gusts. This was what people meant when they said “high plains,” and Harry did seem to be starring in his own Sergio Leone movie.

  “Well, this is lovely,” said Maude, who was one of the few people who could remember the ruins of the first poorhouse, lost to a lightning fire in 1916, and the life of the second, abandoned in the fifties and gone to arson in the early sixties. “I distinctly recall Mother dropping a drunk off here in 1926 or so. And food, surplus apples and potatoes and beef for the inmates. Some of the wardens were criminal.”

  “Not very birdy,” said Merle.

  “It’s about poor Harry and the tour, dear,” said Maude, as Sam pointed to a bird, at least trying. “Only a crow,” she said, the huge papery eyes turning to him. “You know they have funerals, don’t you?”

  Sam shook his head. Papa told us, thought Polly, head swimming. But of course it wasn’t this “us.” She slapped herself on the top of her head and Jane stared at her. “Bug,” said Polly.

  “You’d do well to be as smart as a crow,” said Maude to Sam.

  They spilled out toward Harry’s field of stakes.

  “I don’t believe her,” whispered Sam, struggling with Maude’s tripod, her binoculars, her five-liter purse. Helen carried the cane.

  “It’s true,” said Polly. “Or at least I heard the same thing when I was your age, and I did see some crows standing in a circle around a dead magpie, once.”

  From the Poor Farm, perched between the Absaroka Mountains and the river below, you would have had the best view possible of the town that didn’t want you, the thousands of people who didn’t care, the whole world you didn’t own. The landscape bowed around them in three directions: the river and the Crazy Mountains to the north, Livingston to the west, the Beartooth Mountains and Big Timber to the east. The mountains behind them still had snow, but the lupine and forget-me-nots near the poorhouse’s ruined foundation were giving way to silvery artemisia. From town, the domed flats looked as if they were covered in rich gold grass, but it was really orange lichen on gray rock, the soil blown away in the Depression. There was nothing lush about this place, and almost nothing standing of the buildings that had housed hundreds of unhappy people. Poor farms had been a gentle Victorian response to the extremes of the past, streets and debtors’ prisons. If you had no money and no way of making it, if you were ill and had no relatives to care for you, you were given to the care of the county, which fed you, clothed you, gave you a bed, and did its best to tend to your medical and psychological needs. In practice, this meant a catchall of orphans and withered alcoholics and widows, tubercular miners and paralyzed cowboys, the simpleminded and the harmlessly insane. Once an orphanage opened in Gallatin County, and a mental hospital opened in Warm Springs, it increasingly meant the elderly.

  Up close, Harry and Ned and Drake had a vague look, a kind of padding over grief and fatigue, and Polly guessed they’d been smoking. There were shot glasses on the hood of Harry’s truck next to half a bottle of tequila, and Polly poured herself one.

  “So,” said Maude. “Show us the problem, darling.”

  “I have a surfeit of bodies, Grandma. Dead in the middle of the road.”

  He was definitely stoned. “Well, move the road,” said Maude.

  “That’s not an option. By contract, I need to relocate them and identify them.”

  “Idiocy.”

  Harry’s whole life was a fight for exactitude, for something beyond reasonable doubt. He showed them what should be where—the poorhouse proper, barns and an orchard, the potter’s field. He waved an open notebook, and when he put it down, Polly flipped through.

  The sight of Ariel’s handwriting was a smack in the head, but as Polly paged, the girl’s handwriting shifted back to Harry’s and growing confusion, question marks and rectangles. Harry, meanwhile, was trying to explain ground-penetrating radar, its uses and its issues on boulder-laden heavy clay. The machine looked a little like a large-wheeled lawn mower. Sam and Merle were fascinated by it, but Maude’s eyes filmed over. Helen had wandered away with some old binoculars and was using them on some ants.

  Polly stuck with Maude as she stalked off toward the edge of the ridge. Livingston lay below them, on the north bank of the curl of the Yellowstone as it headed north and bent east. To Maude, the river was filled with dead people, and she pointed a knobby, beringed finger as she said their names. “Maggie Strand, only three I think, about 1924; Fred Byrne, in his teens in 1917 when the bridge went; Connor someone, a pretty Irish kid, in a car like our girl, sometime before the war.”

  The dogs chased curlews and the kids chased the dogs. Cruel little shits, all of them, and all of them ignoring Ned’s warnings about snakes. Normally Polly would have been worried, but it was almost dark, burrow time, and she was now on her second shot. Merle tried to point out a golden eagle and Maude showed no interest. She was back on the dead, a local history of drowning, and her toll had reached the Korean War.

  Harry fidgeted.

  “You can go back to your gizmo, if I’m so boring,” said Maude. “I won’t bother with irrigation ditches. The Schmidt boy fell in down there near old Clark City, the Gallianos’ drunk father ju
st downstream. Mostly boys, of course, poor idiots. But there is the road our beautiful girl followed to the old bridge.”’

  “Don’t forget our beautiful Ariel,” said Drake, walking back to his shovel.

  It was as close to a criticism that Polly could imagine him doling out.

  “Don’t you want to see the bodies?” said Harry.

  Of course they did. There were four tarps. Polly, looking at the outlines of the coffins, was horrified. “You have four bodies that shouldn’t be here?”

  “No,” he said. “Four bodies in the wrong place, though the tags match the records. I think the gravediggers ran into some rock and went with the easy solution.” He flipped tarps off to show them half-excavated, half-crushed pine boxes. “We have a Marjorie Pince, aged sixty-two, dead of apoplexy; S. Oditz, an alcoholic; Ferdinand Zapruder, bowel cancer.”

  Polly looked for the children, but they were still chasing the dogs or curlews, whichever came first.

  “Here’s the problem,” Harry said, lifting the last tarp.

  They saw a fully excavated skeleton, facedown on top of a crushed coffin, arms outstretched. The right hand had been the one taken by the grader. “I think someone put him in here when the ground was still soft,” said Harry. “In the coffin underneath, we have Vincenzo Speri, dead of blood poisoning in August of 1940. The guy on top has a bullet in his head”—he knelt down and pointed to a hole centered above the eye sockets—“and it looks as if another is lodged in his pelvis. Tall guy, good dental work, some sort of fancy class ring on his finger—I haven’t tried to clean it off yet, and maybe I shouldn’t.”

  “My, my,” said Maude. “I wonder what he did to earn this.”

  “Maligning a possibly innocent man,” said Harry. “Did you know him?”

  Polly wasn’t sure he was joking.

  “Of course not,” snapped Maude. “Have you looked into people who’ve gone missing?”

  “I will when I get him out of here. The coroner just left.”

  “I imagine it’s been too long,” Maude said. “I imagine plenty of people are never identified, or never found. I knew a girl who simply disappeared, one day in the late twenties. Knocked up and never seen again.”