Devil's Oven Read online

  “I thought Bud didn’t let you out of your coffin until after eleven,” Tripp said.

  “Hell, my day never begins, never ends. Son of a bitch is out of town again for some truck lease thing. G.D. trucks. More trouble than women.”

  Dwight never took the Lord’s name in vain. When Tripp had had enough beers to ask him about it one night, Dwight hadn’t even looked up or paused as he wiped down the bar with the wet rag he kept next to the coach gun beneath the counter.

  “Some things you just don’t screw around with, man,” Dwight had said. Then he had launched into a rant about Monroe Consolidated’s losing football team.

  Among the men who kept regular hours at the bar, Dwight, with his paint-white, indoor pallor, looked most like the one who should be running the place. He was only about five foot five and whip thin, not from any love of exercise, but from a habit of constant, anxious movement. The nails at the end of his splayed fingertips were yellowed, and he wore gold-framed aviator glasses that—along with his coal black hair—made him look a little like Elvis. He wore elaborate cowboy shirts, with thin braid and pearl-covered snap buttons, straight-leg jeans, and canvas basketball shoes. On those days when he came in just after waking up, his shirt snapped wrongways, he reminded Tripp of someone who might live at the group home for mentally challenged adults that had been built right next to the hospital. Lila told him he had the wrong idea about Dwight; Bud considered him to be some kind of financial genius.

  That Bud was out of town was news to Tripp. Lila hadn’t said anything, leading him to believe she had gone with him. Bud took her away to nice hotels and glitzy shopping malls, plus the casinos. She was always standoffish for a few days after they got back from a trip. He worried when she took off with Bud.

  “You look all disappointed,” Dwight said. “You miss Bud?”

  “Yeah,” Tripp said. “I miss Bud. We had a date.”

  Dwight blinked behind the thick lenses of his glasses, silent, as though he were trying to decide whether to believe him or not. Tripp knew Dwight’s glasses must be pretty old to be so thick. What in the hell did Dwight spend his money on? It couldn’t all go to those stupid shirts.

  He didn’t actually dislike Dwight. Dwight was just unpredictable, what locals called “squirrelly.”

  They both turned at a shout from a guy in the crowd.

  “Oh, man. Now what?” Dwight said.

  Up on stage, the dark-haired girl was on her knees. Though her hair hung in her face, Tripp, along with everyone else, could see she was vomiting.

  Dwight gestured to one of the cocktail waitresses to go and help the girl. But the waitress, the one who had brought Tripp his beer, pretended not to notice him and walked toward the back of the bar. Tripp had heard that the waitresses and the dancers at The Twilight Club didn’t get along well, but this seemed particularly harsh.

  “Aw, screw me,” Dwight said. “It’s always up to me.”

  The other two dancers paused, but as Dwight trudged toward the stage, he made a circular motion in the air to indicate they should continue. He hustled up the metal stairs closest to the sick girl and leaned over, his face averted from the mess, to take her by the arm and help her up. As they left the stage, a couple of men in the audience gave her desultory applause, as though they were encouraging an injured player on the field.

  Tripp decided it was as good a time as any to use the bathroom, and when he got back, the dancers had moved on to another song and the busboy was mopping up the mess.

  Because the waitress had been such a bitch to the new girl, he ordered another beer directly from the bartender and wandered into the poolroom. There was a silver cage in the corner where Bud liked to have a girl dancing on weekend nights, but it was empty now. The guy sitting in the upholstered chair in the corner was getting a lap dance from one of the two dancers named Crystal, though this one spelled her name with a “K.” She had told Tripp that more than once.

  When Dwight found him again, Tripp said, “How’s the girl?”

  “Jolene? These girls never eat right. It was all nacho chips and beef jerky. Nasty shit,” Dwight said, shaking his head.

  “Maybe Bud should start a cafeteria or something,” Tripp said, putting the eight ball into a side pocket. He hung the triangle on a wall peg and put the cue on the rack. He couldn’t help but be neat. It was in his nature.

  So, she’s called Jolene. The only other time he’d heard that name was in the Dolly Parton song.

  Dwight pushed his glasses up on his nose.

  “Screw me,” he said. “Like I need some other shit to do.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  On his way out of the club, Tripp checked his cell phone for the tenth or eleventh time, hoping to see a text from Lila. On the phone’s screen was a picture he had taken on Devil’s Oven a few weeks earlier, after she had fallen on her butt trying to walk up the long, ice-covered driveway leading to his cabin. He had stomped and slid his way down the frozen gravel to help her, but soon they were both falling and laughing. In the picture, she was leaning on one arm, trying to stay in one place. Her nose was a brighter red than her hair, which the frigid wet had coiled into tight curls. She was smiling like a kid, looking more than ever like how he remembered her in school.

  The parking lot was more crowded than when he had come in. The threat of serious snow was pretty much over for the year and folks were ready for some relief, though they would still be getting snow showers at the highest elevations of Garrett’s Mountain and Devil’s Oven through mid-April.

  Flicking on the headlights in his truck, he saw Jolene near the club’s front door. Her hair was twisted into one of those looped ponytails that aren’t pulled all the way through, and she wore sweatpants and a white jacket that looked like it wasn’t much protection from the cold. She had a cell phone to her ear and looked frustrated.

  As he watched, she threw the phone so that it slammed into the asphalt and broke into several pieces.

  There were times in Tripp’s life when he chose to do things that he knew would get him into trouble, and even before he got out of the truck he knew this was one of them.

  He stopped to pick up the pieces of the phone on his way across the parking lot. The only piece he didn’t see was the phone’s back cover. He fitted the battery into its empty slot.

  Jolene leaned against the concrete wall as though she were too tired to stand.

  “You might want to turn it on and see if it works,” he said, holding the phone out to her.

  She looked from his face to his outstretched hand. “Sure, thanks,” she said. She took the phone and stuffed it into the jacket pocket. “I know that was stupid.”

  “Feeling any better?” His voice cracked like a teenager’s. Embarrassed, he cleared his throat to cover it.

  Now that he was close to her, he saw she was much younger than she looked onstage. Without makeup, her skin was as clear as a child’s. If it weren’t for the half-moon shadows beneath her eyes, she wouldn’t even look old enough to drive.

  “I need to go back in and find a ride,” she said. “The cab people said they can’t get me for another hour.”

  Tripp laughed. “You know they only have two cars,” he said.

  “Figures,” she said, without any hint of suspicion or annoyance. For a local girl, she didn’t have much of an accent. She smiled. “Not much call for cabs here, I guess. Maybe you could run me home?”

  As they walked toward his truck, Jolene moved slowly, telling him she thought she probably had the flu.

  He was surprised to find she trusted him to take her home on the proof of his DNR badge and his word that Dwight knew him well enough. He tossed her backpack into the backseat of the king cab and helped her in, reminding her to buckle her seat belt. Shutting the door after her, Tripp found himself smiling, but the smile quickly faded when he saw Lila’s white SUV jerk to a stop in front of his truck.

  Shit.

  He walked up to the SUV’s passenger window, which came down.
/>   “Hey,” he said.

  Lila was wearing her favorite oversize sunglasses even though it was pitch-dark outside the glow of the parking lot lights. Her face was turned toward him, but because of the glasses, he couldn’t tell if she was looking at him or past him and into the cab of his pickup. Something about the set of her well-lipsticked mouth told him she had already gotten a good look at the girl.

  “Missed you,” he said. “I wish you’d called me today.”

  She didn’t say anything.

  “Bud out of town? Want to come up to the cabin?”

  Lila took off the glasses. Sometimes she wore them when she had been drinking, but now she looked dead sober. The coyote collar of her jacket nestled against her jaw, and she had her hair clipped at the crown of her head so that just a few curls spilled down. She definitely hadn’t been sitting at home all evening, but her silence was starting to get to him. Despite the presence of a teenage stripper in his truck, he hadn’t actually done anything wrong.

  “You going to talk to me, or what?” He was getting cold standing there. It was warm in the truck and the kid was waiting, sick.

  Lila’s lips moved a bit and he thought she was going to speak. Instead, she spat at him. It didn’t hit him, or even make it to the window.

  “Now, why did you want to go and do that?” he said, fighting a sudden urge to laugh. Even when she was being a flat-out bitch, Lila was beautiful to him. If she had been angry before, now she was embarrassed and angry. Not a combination likely to increase his chances of seeing her at the cabin anytime soon.

  “Just so you know, Bud says those girls are always getting crabs,” Lila said. “Enjoy.”

  She hit the gas hard enough that Tripp had to jump back or else be thrown to the ground. Once she was out of the parking lot, she gunned the SUV. He hoped for her sake that the county cops weren’t hanging around, watching for DUIs leaving the club. She was pissed off now, but he was pretty certain she would call him, if not in an hour then the next day. The make-up sex would be killer.

  When the SUV’s taillights had disappeared, he went back to the truck.

  “Ready to go?” he said.

  “She was mad,” Jolene said.

  “Just a misunderstanding. It’ll blow over.” He shut the door and put the truck in gear, hoping he was right.

  She shifted on the seat so she could rest the back of her head against the passenger window. “Really? I hear Mrs. Tucker holds a pretty mean grudge,” she said.

  He could feel her watching him as they left the lot, driving west up the highway, directly opposite from the direction Lila had gone. Of course she would know who Lila was. That meant she probably knew exactly who he was, too.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Jolene stuffed the classified ad she had torn from Alta’s weekly paper into a pocket of her jeans, and shut the front door of Charity’s trailer behind her as softly as she could. Outside, she lifted her face to the sky, welcoming the morning’s misty rain. Pulling her mane of coal-black hair around so that it fell over one shoulder, she put up the hood of the white winter jacket she had bought with part of her first paycheck from The Twilight Club. Most of the rest of the cash had gone to things like toothpaste and makeup—including several sets of false eyelashes—and a card that added minutes to the pay-as-you-go cell phone she had tossed in the parking lot. She had twelve dollars left in the zippered change purse in her back pocket.

  Walking, she kept her head bowed, and stuck as close as she could to the parts of the road covered with more gravel than mud. There were homelier places than Windswept Holiday Park on and around Devil’s Oven, but few of them gave off such strong waves of despair. She remembered it as new, the dozens of trailers painted vivid apricot or robin’s-egg blue, and the cheerful, twelve-foot neon sign posted at the entrance. Now the faded paint couldn’t hide the auras of gray and maroon and brown and green that bathed the people who lived here. Almost no one was happy.

  Most of the trailer park’s residents didn’t show themselves until noon. But sleep was something different to Jolene, something none of them would understand. She had lain within the rocky flesh of Devil’s Oven for three decades, neither waking nor sleeping. Conscious but not breathing, unaware of time passing. It had been just two weeks since she had come—naked and cold—off the mountain, close to the electric co-op facility where Charity’s boyfriend, Eli, worked as a night watchman. But already she was feeling penned-in, anxious to get on with what she had come back to do. Whatever it was. Why can’t I be certain?

  Again, she was a different person. Again, nineteen. The face she discovered in the soft light of Charity’s bathroom mirror was much thinner than she remembered. Her blue eyes and hair, once as white as a snow fox’s fur, had gone dark as chestnuts, as though being buried all those years had caused them to take on the same color as the mountain’s scant topsoil.

  But how she looked didn’t matter to Jolene. She was done with that foolishness. The first time she had been released, confused and terrified, from the mountain’s heart, she had called herself Mary, unable to think of any other name. It was the name given to her by her mother, from whom she had fled over a century earlier. It was the only thing she had escaped with. This time, she had chosen Jolene, because of the song.

  She did have a mother once, and a father who called himself a preacher when it was convenient. She knew good from evil, and a hundred or thirty years didn’t change their definitions. Which one applied to her, she wasn’t sure. The choices she made, the things she did, the people she touched weren’t really choices. There was a hand guiding her. A strong hand. She was its revelation in the world.

  • • •

  The Git ’n’ Go Mini-Mart was out on the highway, a six- or seven-minute walk from Charity’s trailer. But already Jolene’s clothes felt heavy with rain. The sullen teenager behind the counter didn’t bother to look up from her magazine when she entered the store.

  Jolene took a blue energy drink from the cooler at the back, and lingered in the aisle packed with chips and packaged cakes and donuts. She picked up a bag of corn chips and a pair of orange-iced cupcakes and took everything to the register.

  “Five eighty-eight,” the girl said after ringing it up. “You want a bag?”

  Jolene shook her head. “No, thanks,” she said.

  The girl went back to flipping through her magazine before Jolene was out the door.

  If the girl had acknowledged her or been the slightest bit friendly, Jolene might have said something kind to her, or suggested she get to a doctor. The girl’s aura was a sickly gray-green, and there were fist-sized spots of black hovering over her liver and lungs. But Jolene didn’t consider herself perfect, or even necessarily good. She couldn’t save everyone. The only thing she was certain of was that she was here to help Ivy, the girl-now-woman who had been her daughter for five short years.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Jolene stood in the gravel driveway, adjusting to the timbre of the land that had been her home so many decades earlier. The rain had finally stopped. Clumps of gray vapor hugged the low spots on the ground. She had expected to feel immediately better, being so close to the mountain. Being home. Instead she felt anxious, and just as nauseated as she had been the night before.

  The DNR guy, Tripp, had helped her into Charity’s trailer, even though they both knew that every moment he spent with her would count against him with Mrs. Tucker. Jolene didn’t like it at all that he had taken another man’s wife, especially Bud’s wife. She liked Bud a lot, and he deserved better. And there was something dark hanging over Tripp, a shadow that seemed to be hunting him. Waiting. But she had more on her mind now than the mistakes of a weak-spirited man.

  After she left the Git ’n’ Go, a woman in a red minivan had picked her up as she walked slowly west in the drizzling rain. She had barely heard the woman’s chatter during the five-minute drive up the state highway. Had Jolene even said thank you? She couldn’t remember.

  The Luttrell land—the part of
it that swept out from the mountainside—had long ago been cleared of everything except a few stands of oak, and a single weeping willow tree whose winter-stripped branches hung limply like skeletons’ hair. Two rows of poplar seedlings lined the driveway leading to a tidy ranch house that didn’t look more than five or six years old. A flag, painted with spring flowers bursting from a basket, fluttered from a pole attached to one of the porch pillars. In the center of the lawn, a quaint white sign painted with deep blue letters swung from a post: IVY LUTTRELL, FINE SEWING AND ALTERATIONS.

  • • •

  Let me help, Mommy! Little Ivy, usually so timid, pressed against her as she added a few final hand stitches to the pocket of the jumper she was making. She could feel Ivy’s steady breath on her cheek—honey and pretzels, the afternoon snack Ivy had made all by herself. Cartoon music streamed from the television in the bedroom, but Ivy had been drawn away from it by her mother’s work. Ivy’s small fingers, still plump with baby fat, anxiously patted the dotted Swiss cotton as though it were some kind of pet. Ivy the star-wisher, Ivy the careful reorganizer of kitchen drawers, Ivy of the solemn tears. Ivy, who would soon go to kindergarten, where her harelip would make her the object of fear and derision. Her mother stopped sewing. She settled Ivy in her own chair, laid the jumper on her lap, and watched as Ivy, her face a picture of pleasure and intensity, finished the pocket, never asking once for help.

  Not long after, Ivy had made herself a colorful, armless doll she called Lolly Dolly and carried with her everywhere. She had other toys, but her mother saw that the doll was important because she had made it.

  • • •

  The cheerfulness of the house was overshadowed by the collection of tired buildings crowded against the hillside, especially the trailer where she had lived after Byron Luttrell had taken her in.

  Jolene knew the ragged, collapsing barn and the copper-roofed smoke shack well. Their painted exteriors, once a promising red—she had picked the color herself—had dulled and peeled so that shaggy stripes of gray cedar showed through. An uprooted tree had crashed down from the mountain, making an open wound in the barn’s roof. The trailer she had once lived in was badly rusted now, and clung to the mountain in prostrate desperation.