The Garden of Lost and Found by Dale Peck Page B

comforts of human association, all that touchy-feely shit, but the personal history, the stories I’d waited my whole life to hear. There she was, tapping the paneling with the kind of instrument my aunt in Louisiana used to call a lady’s mallet. My aunt, Mary was her name, or maybe it was Martha, used to come up behind me where I was curled with a book—third grade, the Chronicles of Narnia yielding to the Black Stallion —and she would smack her mallet against the soft flesh of her palm in a most unladylike manner, and I wasn’t sure if I was addressing Nellydean or Aunt Mary when I said, loudly,
    “That wall’s hollow, you know.”
    Nellydean yelped and dropped her hammer, yelped again when it landed on her foot. She jumped about so wildly I was afraid her lantern was going to go out, and I had to brace myself to keep from running back upstairs: her stillness was eerie enough, but her movement was truly off-putting.
    “Jesus Christ almighty. What the hell you doing, sneaking up on a body like that?”
    The lantern’s shadows deepened the wrinkles in her face to crevices. She took a tiny step forward, just enough to cover the hammer on the floor with the hem of her dress. She couldn’t have moved her foot more than three or four inches, but I had to fight the urge to run.
    “I—I was looking for a telephone.”
    Nellydean squinted. “Looks like someone stole your hair and left his footprint on your chest.”
    As soon as she spoke it was over, the gothic melodrama of the crone banging on the hollow walls of the basement, and I was again a twenty-one-year-old kid, bald—balded—and bearing a Rorschach blot on his chest everyone felt entitled to interpret.
    “Please,” I said. “Is there a telephone in the building?”
    Nellydean dropped the lantern back to her side. “Not down here there ain’t.”
    “Well, I tried your office—”
    “You was in my office?”
    “I was in the office,” I said, resisting the urge to call it my office, “and even though I managed to find a jack in a closet, there wasn’t a phone attached to it. Just a cord. Then I heard you banging the walls to pieces down here—”
    “The phone’s in my apartment,” Nellydean interrupted me. “What’s that on your chest anyway?”
    “Cranberry juice!”
    Nellydean shrugged. “Looks like a key to me.”
    I looked down, saw the key hanging there like an inverted teardrop. “Oh. I found it in my mother’s desk. Do you know—”
    “You found it in your momma’s desk? What’d you do, break the lock?”
    “I used the key? The one you gave me?”
    “The door key? Well I’ll be. It was the door key all this time.” Then, without any transition: “Looks like a house key to me.”
    My hand snapped to my chest. I tried to lower my arm but my fingers refused to let go of the key.
    “My mother had a house? Besides this one?”
    “So she said, though I never set foot in it myself.”
    Something in Nellydean’s voice: her words had the taint of half-fetid meat in the middle of a steel trap, but it was all I could do not to take the bait. I managed to release the key and bury my hand in my pocket and one more time I said, “Please. The phone in your apartment. It isn’t a touchtone, is it?”
    “You mean a push-button?”
    “Yes. Push-button.”
    “What you need a push-button for?”
    Even though it was dark and I knew she couldn’t really see me I was still frozen by her eyes—like a deer in headlights, I found myself thinking. I wondered if deer made any noise in times of crisis, or if, like me, they stared their destruction in the face and whispered, Please. Not me. I imagined them, delicate limbs strewn over the bridge like twigs scattered by a thunderstorm, fur stained red with their own blood. The image was so unbelievable that despite the follow-up story in this morning's paper I began to doubt it had actually happened. What I mean is, I wasn’t sure if I wanted the slaughter of the deer to be an actual