The Decoding of Lana Morris (5 page)

Lana kneels to look through a box of women’s clothing, white cotton chemises and petticoats and drawers, inset with lace and layered with dust. She holds up a full-length gown—it is far too short—and when she glances back toward the register, the woman quickly looks down at her knitting, a dead giveaway that she’s been watching, not that Lana cares. She folds the gown and sets it aside.

And then, at the bottom of the stack of clothes, under a heavy wool skirt, Lana sees something: three wide, flat black boxes covered with black leather, pebbly yet soft to the touch. Her hand is drawn to the box at the bottom, and with that first touch a sudden expectant feeling moves through her.

She slides the box from beneath the other two and turns a tag that’s been strung from a side-buttoning flap. In tiny print it says,

She unsnaps the side flap, and as she lays open the cover of the box, a pleasant musty smell blooms into the
air. Lana feels light-headed, and then that same pleasant hopefulness she’d felt earlier in the day comes over her again.

The loose sheets of paper are thick, coarse, even, with particles of red and pink embedded in them, and Lana loves the feel as she lifts one and runs her palm across its surface. Something is embossed along the top of each one, and when she holds the paper to the light,
Morpheus & Co., St. Louis, Missouri
appears as an imprinted shadow. The set comes with a bundle of sharpened charcoal pencils, tied with a leather thong.

It is truly beautiful paper, more beautiful than anything Lana has ever seen, and though she’s not especially acquisitive or covetous by nature, these sheets of paper take hold of her and don’t let go. She wants them. She wants them more than she’s ever wanted any object in her entire life.

Except she can’t pay for even one box of the paper.

She thinks of stealing one, but the old woman is just down the aisle, knitting for the world’s largest human, and besides, the woman’s never done anything to her.

But Lana can’t set the box of paper down. It’s under her arm. It’s meant to be hers. It feels like hers.

And then a sudden thought:
Borrow from your father, borrow from your mother
.

Lana touches the two-dollar bill rolled behind her ear.

She goes to the cash register and sets the drawing kit beside it.

She unrolls the two-dollar bill worn soft as cloth.
I’ll come back
, Lana thinks.
I’ll pay now and then come back with two dollars and exchange it,
an idea she explains to the old woman. “Could I do that?” Lana says.

The woman looks at the bill with her keen and young-seeming blue eyes, then shifts her knitting to one hand and slides the bill under the cash drawer within the register. “I don’t see why not,” she says.

It’s not a foolproof plan—and Lana knows it—but it’s enough of a plan that she can savor the pleasure of knowing this leather case and the paper inside it is hers. Not somebody else’s to look at or even somebody else’s to borrow, but hers.

Hers.

The woman’s blue eyes are on her. “I’m glad you came in,” she says, and Lana can tell she means it.

“Me too,” Lana says.

“Come back now that you know the way. Your two-dollar bill will be waiting.”

Lana says good-bye, but something occurs to her as she reaches the door, and she turns back. “You are Miss Hekkity, right?”

The woman smiles at the question. “I am indeed.”

And then Lana has one last question. “So, are those mittens you’re making for the Jolly Green Giant?”

“No,” Miss Hekkity says, laughing. It’s the laugh Lana likes most. It’s a laugh that makes her feel amusing. The old woman holds up the mitten and regards it. “They’re not going to be as big as they look now,” she says. “At least, I hope not. The pattern tells you to wash them afterward so they’ll felt up tight and not let the snow in.”

Lana thinks this is going to be all, but then Miss Hekkity says, “They’re for the nephew I told you about. I was making them for him, and he died before I could finish. I couldn’t even look at them for a while, then about a week ago I picked them up and I had a very strong feeling
that he would’ve wanted me to finish them and give them away. He was always giving things away. ‘Here,’ he would say, sometimes to perfect strangers. ‘Take this free.’ ” She smiles. “Once he gave a set of my prize china thimbles to a little girl down the street, and by the time I caught up with her, she was using them as seats for a mouse’s tea party and I couldn’t bear to ask for them back.” Miss Hekkity stares off toward the windows that overlook the street. “Sometimes I thought Quinn was turning my life upside down, making a complete chaos of it, but now I think he was just trying to
reorganize
it.” The blueness in the woman’s eyes gleams as she turns to Lana. “I mean, which is the better place for a set of china thimbles—gathering dust in a curio cabinet or providing seating at a mouse’s tea party?”

Lana knows this isn’t a question meant to be answered. “Bye,” she says softly, and Miss Hekkity says, “Thank you, and come back,” and her gaze drifts again to the windows.

Lana is halfway down the wooden stairs with the Ladies Drawing Kit under her arm when she hears hard raucous laughter from somewhere on the street and then, ahead, between two buildings, she sees K.C. streak by. Lana hurries out to the walk and nearly collides with Chet, who’s loping along and doesn’t stop.

“C’mon,” he yells back, and his face seems a strange mix of excitement and fear. “We’re being run out of town!”

Following Chet are Spink and Trina, who’s holding her breasts to keep them from jouncing so much, and although Spink’s face is its usual blank, Trina’s is manic with merriment. “Little Betty coming through!” she yells.
Lana has no clue what this might mean, but Trina finds it hilarious, and even Spink breaks out a reptilian grin.

Behind them, maybe fifty yards up the walk, an old man half trots, half stumbles after them wearing a big white apron and waving a piece of paper. His face is red and bulging with anger, and he’s yelling so loud and fast that it seems like a foreign language and then Lana realizes it
is
a foreign language. The red-faced man is shouting in German. No translation is needed. It’s like the buzz of an angry hornet.

A sound from the other direction: K.C. has started the LeSabre, and Chet is opening the doors.

Lana takes one last look at the old man—his red face seems about to burst into flame—then she turns and sprints off to the car as fast as her legs will take her. She’s the last one there, and she knows it’s only because Chet stands outside the car waiting with the door open that K.C. doesn’t just drive away.

Chet steps aside, she jumps into the backseat, and, before Chet is fully in beside her, K.C. has the car squealing and fishtailing down Main Street, past all the locked-up shops, past the statue of the giant Hereford, and out of town.

U
p front, K.C. drives, grins, and occasionally whoops. The car is loud with excited accounts of their experience—from which Lana learns that the old man who chased them is the very same Friedrich who keeps his café open every day of the year and who Miss Hekkity called a misanthrope and who, today, while serving them cheeseburgers, fries, and lemon Cokes, kept sliding glances at Trina’s cleavage and talking about someone called Little Betty, who, he said, “was big in the
Büstenhalter
” and was “the kind of Fräulein who keeps Herr Doktor jolly.” Friedrich didn’t go away either. He kept hovering close and saying weirder and weirder things to Trina like, “Little Betty knows all about it, don’t you?—all about the big bouncy
Büste
?” and Trina kept saying, “She does, she surely does,” and then when they all finished eating, Trina went to the bathroom in the back and came out in a rush yelling that there was a live kangaroo rat in the ladies’ room and when the old German went back to investigate was when K.C. and the rest of them all ran for it.

“I didn’t stiff old Friedrich,” Trina says. “Little Betty did.” Which gets a laugh from everybody in the car except Lana, and so does Trina’s mere repetition of
big in the
Büstenhalter or
the kind of Fräulein who keeps Herr Doktor happy
.

“I thought you said
jolly
,” Lana says, the first words she’s spoken, and all at once Trina swivels her eyes to the backseat. “What?”

Lana says, “I thought you said he said Little Betty was the kind of fräulein who keeps the doctor
jolly
. Not keeps him
happy
.”

As she stares at Lana, Trina’s pupils shrink to small stones. She says, “Chet, you better tell Foster that if she forgets the policy again, we’re stopping the car and she’s taking the long walk home.”

Lana glances outside. It’s hot, and there isn’t a cloud in the sky or a tree within miles.

Chet nods but doesn’t speak.

“Tell her,” Trina says in a seething voice, and Chet does.

Then, from up front, not loud, but loud enough to hear, Trina says, “Jesus. No wonder nobody wants to be around her.”

A minute passes in silence, and it’s clear that the party mood has slipped from the car and isn’t coming back anytime soon. Trina gives Lana one last withering look, then lays her head in K.C.’s lap and curls for a nap, and before long a kind of communal sleepiness overtakes the car. Spink, in the back at Lana’s left, leans against the door and is soon asleep. On Lana’s right, Chet stares ahead with drooping eyelids. Up front, K.C. yawns and leans forward over the wheel. Occasionally he gives his head a quick shake to keep from nodding off.

“You okay up there?” Chet says.

K.C. in no way acknowledges the question. The car drones on.

Chet says, “You going to fall asleep and kill us all before we’re grown?”

K.C.’s eyes rise heavily to the rearview mirror. “The front-seat passengers would be a loss to society, the backseat assholes not so much.”

Chet shakes his head and gives Lana a sleepy, amiable shrug. In a low voice, he says, “So what’s in the box?”

Lana glances down at the leather box lying across her lap. “Something called a Ladies Drawing Kit.”

Chet leans over, and Lana opens the box to give him a look.

“Nice,” he says. “Wha’d you pay for it?”

Lana thinks of the two-dollar bill. “Too much, probably.”

There’s a moment of quiet, and Chet says, “That guy Friedrich scared me.”

Lana is dubious. “He looked about a hundred and four.”

Chet shook his head. “I don’t know. He was really creepy, and then when he was yelling at us and so mad he could hardly make words, he reminded me of Donald Duck.”

Lana considers this. “Donald Duck scares you?”

“Oh, yeah, totally. When I was little, whenever the Donald started going off on somebody, I’d have to hide.” He pauses. “My personal feeling is that duck could use some anger management training.”

Lana looks at him for a few seconds and says, “Chet, you’re not a normal thinker.”

Chet’s expression loosens. “That’s a compliment, right?”

“A person who thinks like you do might think so.”

Chet nods sleepily and shifts a little so he can lean into his door. Lana wants to tell him where she got the drawing kit and how she paid for it, but Chet’s eyelids droop, flicker open, close for good.

He looks peaceful and, except for the mole beside his nose, almost handsome.

Lana slips a pencil from the bundle within the box, then removes a single sheet of paper and lays it on top. She takes a long look at Chet in silhouette, and she begins to draw.

F
rom the moment her pencil touches the paper, Lana feels improved, skilled, inspired, even.
It must be the paper
, she thinks,
or the softness of the charcoal pencil
. Her hand sweeps over the page in easy, fluid strokes. At the side of the sheet a tree takes shape, a leafy friendly tree with outstretched armlike limbs, on one of which—the one extending across the length of the page—Chet reclines, natural-seeming and cozy. Lana’s hand knows where to put shadows, where to make lines. Chet’s slouchy clothes take on texture and depth, his hair shoots off in every direction, and his body seems to move with the slow, subtle breathing of sleep. The line rolls into low background hills and rises into a distant water tower, then bursts into thunderclouds and a distant flash of lightning, and all at once Lana is done.

She lays the pencil down.

She blinks, inhales, exhales. Her skin is damp, her heart is pounding, and the drawing is better than anything she’s done before, so much better that she can hardly believe it came from her own hand. The tree seems almost more than a tree, the sleeping figure on its outstretched limb seems more than just Chet, and the lightning-brightened
countryside beyond suggests a land far, far away, and all of it, together, allows you to see the enticement of sleep.

There is only one thing wrong. In drawing Chet’s left side, she’s forgotten the dark mole snugged into the crease of his nose. She wonders why she’s left it out, and she thinks of adding it now, but she’s too tired. She’ll do it later. She slides the drawing into the box and settles the box on her lap. She thinks of resting her head against Chet’s arm—she wants to—but she doesn’t. She crosses her arms, leans forward, and closes her eyes.

T
hip thip thip
.

Lana, awakening, hears the gentle rhythm of the LeSabre’s windshield wipers.
Thip thip thip
. She opens her eyes and lifts herself from Chet’s shoulder. Outside, the world is dark and the rain is steady. Low thunder rumbles and, off to the north, sheet lightning throws a crackling light over distant buttes. For a moment she thinks she’s somewhere else, and then she realizes that the storm they’re in is much like the one she’d drawn in the background of her sketch of the sleeping Chet, which is strange, she guesses, but not that strange.

The others in the car are stirring now, slowly coming to life, looking around. “What day is this?” Chet says, and Trina says, “What’s with the rain? Did any of the weather chicks predict rain?”