And with that, I wiped off Charlie’s paws and grabbed my coat and purse and Charlie’s leash from the hook on the wall, and we tucked into the car. I didn’t lock the cabin door. No, I wouldn’t. There was nobody lurking out there in the woods, I told myself. Suspicion invites danger, doesn’t it? Keep the imagination soft and happy, and only good things will come. If there was somebody lurking out there in the woods, it was only Magda. And she was dead. Here is her dead body. Was that so terrible? There were dead things everywhere—leaves, grass, bugs, all of God’s creatures died, and the ones in the woods—the squirrels, the mice, even the deer and bunny rabbits—none of them were ever found. None of them were ever buried. What’s so wrong about that? Nothing. God’s green Earth, I told myself.
We drove out down the gravel path and onto the dirt road and onto Route 17. I didn’t even look up at the birch woods as we passed them. I didn’t want to. I didn’t need to. And there was nothing I needed to do that I didn’t want to do. That was why I came here, to Levant—only to do exactly what I wanted.
Two
The town of Bethsmane was ten miles from my cabin. I rolled down my window and then Charlie’s, and I stuck out my elbow and he stuck out his snout, eyes shut in what looked like ecstasy at the thrill of the wind rushing through. I swung around the lake, passing my one neighbor’s overgrown driveway marked with a rusted mailbox at a sharp curve in the road. The dark pine woods spread up to Route 17, which I took going east, past the small store with its single gas pump and signs for hot coffee, milk, eggs, live bait, and ice. I had only been there a handful of times to buy matches and basic provisions during the winter, when I’d been too sleepy and worried about driving over the icy roads as far as Bethsmane. The man who worked there was middle aged and quiet and badly scarred. The left side of his face was deeply pocked, and down the middle of his face, over his nose, which was just a little jump with two downward-facing holes, was a rectangle of skin laid over his face like a carpet. If you’d asked me to guess where it had come from, I would have said it was from the man’s forearm, since it seemed to have been shaved down and sunburnt and wrinkled in a way that men’s arms would get, if they were to shave them. That strange piece of skin was seamed up around the forehead and down both cheeks, like a ventriloquist’s doll, and ended at his mouth, which was normal, maybe a bit browner than most. His chin seemed intact, unremarkable. When he turned to the left and only his right side was visible, he looked almost handsome, despite the lump of nose that in profile looked like a cat’s. From the right, he had thick hair, his forehead and eye socket and cheekbones were finely contoured, masculine, with one nice eye, thoughtful and not unintelligent. His hair was carefully combed, I noticed, perhaps so much so because his hairline on the left seemed to have been reconstructed. There was a weird geometry to it with strands not all flowing in the right direction. I couldn’t look at his left ear, like a candle melted down to the bottom. And the nose. It was really awful. It was hard to look him in the eye as I’d paid. “Hunting accident,” he’d said. I’d wondered since then how a person gets shot in the head like that by accident. I didn’t know much, nothing really, about guns and hunting. Rifles. Buckshot. I’d heard those words. I knew people hunted deer in the surrounding areas, but it was forbidden in Levant. Nobody was hunting deer or anything else in the birches, or in my pine woods. Signs were posted. As I drove, I wondered whether it was possible Magda had been killed by accident. Not every death was a murder, after all. But was anything really done by accident? Pastor Jimmy, in attempting to soothe a caller’s anxiety, often proclaimed with utter assurance that “nothing happens in God’s universe by accident. Everything happens for a reason.” That old line.
Bethsmane was ugly. There were “For Sale” signs on every other truck and mobile home. It seemed preposterous that someone would choose to live in such a place, inhabit one of the cheap aluminum-sided factory houses, send their children to school in the mornings, drive to work—Where? To do what?—then come home at night to sit on their couches and watch television. That was a sad thought. I pictured family dinners: green bean casserole, macaroni and cheese, glasses of orange soda and cheap beer, chocolate ice cream. That was not how I wanted to live.
I parked in the lot in front of Save-Rite and cracked the windows of the car for Charlie. “I’ll be right back. Now don’t you howl.” Inside, I went quickly to the produce section. There was not a wide variety to choose from, and I always bought the same few things: one onion, two beefsteak tomatoes, which were cold and mealy, one greasy cucumber, one head of green cabbage, one head of iceberg lettuce, two carrots, two lemons, an apple, an orange, a bag of red grapes. From the chilly back end of the meat department I chose one whole chicken and a package of beef bones for Charlie. Then a carton of milk and a small container of cottage cheese. Then coffee and the half dozen bagels from a shelf by the bakery, where brightly decorated birthday cakes sat beside a fogged-up glass case of donuts. I watched a fat woman pull a small square of parchment from the dispenser, open the opaque lid of the glass case, and select what must have been a dozen chocolate-covered donuts, dropping each in the paper bag, licking her fingers and wiping them on her black wool coat, which was buttoned tight around her bulging midsection, the back flap gaping and splitting up the seam. This was one type of person I had come to recognize on my trips to Bethsmane: heavy women, big as cows, whose thick ankles seemed about to snap as they tottered up and down the aisles with their huge shopping carts filled with junk food. It was a Sunday afternoon. I wondered if that woman would be eating those donuts alone in front of her satellite television, projecting herself into the drama of her daytime soap operas, or idly wishing that she might win a new dinette set or a trip to Boca on The Price Is Right. I’d watched that show once at my dentist’s office back in Monlith.
Had Magda been one of those fat women? I didn’t get that impression. Here is her dead body. I pictured her teenaged, lithe and slouchy, with long black hair, an oversize letterman jacket with white leather sleeves, some patch on the back attesting ironically to her allegiance to a local sports team. Her legs would be long, too long for her jeans. A bit of skin would be visible in the gap from the cuffs of her jeans to her white socks. Her sneakers were black or blue and nondescript. Dirty and worn down, charmingly, I thought. She wasn’t the kind of girl to walk around in high heels, pretend like she’s some prize to be won. And yet she must have been special. A coolness, perhaps, and a rough, innate glamour. With a name like Magda, there must have been something exotic about her. I could relate to her in this way, as my parents had come over during the war, carrying with them their paranoia and strange persuasions. I could imagine that Magda’s parents were immigrants, too, or perhaps simply loyal to their heritage in a way that most people here were not. “We’ll call her Magda.” Truly American parents wouldn’t name their daughter that. I imagined that, like my parents, they were Eastern European, and cold, from a cold place with hard winters and old ladies in fur hats and shawls, cathedrals, thin soups, strong homemade liquor, a gray city world, or harsh farms and steep hills, a stray wolf that terrorized the town, et cetera. Perhaps Levant reminded Magda of home. She didn’t mind the fat ladies at the supermarket, the cheap aluminum houses. She found the place beautiful, yes, but shadowed with a sad reminiscence of her past, her homeland. Levant was like a hiding place, a resting spot. It’s very stressful to be plucked from one world and plunked down in another. One loses her roots, no matter how hard traditions are clung to. I’d seen it in my parents—traditions change. Food, holidays, modes of dress. One assimilates, or forever lives as though in exile. Poor Magda, the adjustment must have been hard. And so, I felt I knew her. I was a stranger in Levant, too.