Death of the Black-Haired Girl by Robert Stone Page B

of the Second World War. Patton’s Phantom Army. Choosing the beaches for Overlord. He read his book until he heard Maud come out of her room.
    “Hi, kid,” he said. “You didn’t say you were coming. I didn’t think you would.”
    He asked her how things were, how school was, as he had when she was in high school.
    “It’s all good,” she said. “It’s fun. It’s interesting.”
    “Did you bring some poetry with you? Because I never read as much poetry as I should.”
    “No,” she said. “Sorry.” She stood for a moment with him and started up the stairs.
    “Hey,” he said, “I could take you out to dinner.”
    “No. I’m like invited.”
    “Another night while you’re here?”
    “That’d be good.”
    “I don’t go out much,” he told her. “I gotta save my energy. For serenity, you know. ’Cause you don’t give me much.”
    Is he kidding? she thought. He wasn’t, but he was hoping for a smile in return.
    “Hey, Dad, is there anything to drink in here?”
    “No,” he said. “Sobriety in here.”
    He was lying about there being nothing to drink. He was keeping a bottle of Jameson, out of defiance of the devil as it were, not drinking it. This was dangerous work, but an admired friend of his had done it. Maud happened to know where it was.
    “Mind if I smoke a joint before I go?”
    He didn’t answer for a while. He had put up with her marijuana before. He had smoked it in the job. Coke, too, sometimes.
    “You know,” he said, “that crap is blood on your hands. Just like cocaine these days. A lot of poor people in Mexico get killed over that.”
    He sighed and told her to smoke it upstairs. When she was upstairs she made her sneaky way to the attic, to where her father’s self-challenging liquor was. The bottle was in its box, untouched. He never went up there and she could replace it the next day. On the way to her own room she passed what had been her mother’s small office, pretty much unchanged since her death almost four years before. Inside was a bulletin board on which her parents had tacked up her drawings and various printed writings, articles clipped from school papers and poems she had decorated with colored inks.
    Under the board sat an ancient computer that Maud had updated so her mother could go online. The print on the screen could be enlarged. Dad had propped her mother’s picture on the machine and Maud, clutching her stolen bottle, tried not to look at it. Still, she had paused too long not to hear the house of her childhood. His wise-guy voice; Mom, her story voice and laughter. The TV, her own footsteps on the stairs, her parents and her own kiddie ghost.
    To get over all that she had to weepily light up her weed and break her nails on the whiskey cap and drink it raw. Poor guy, the hero he was finally trying to be. Because whoever the hero cops were, her dad had not been one of them. She felt terrible about the bottle. The weed was excellent. Dumbing-down weed. No one in this place but me, and I’m not here. She put the dope away and hid the bottle.
    “You look nice,” he said when she was going out.
    “Really?”
    He looked depressed. She laughed at him. She could not stand his company for another half minute. If she could laugh at him, she thought, she could laugh at fucking Brookman.
    “Have fun,” her father said.

11
    “H OW DID YOU WASH dishes up there?” Brookman asked his daughter. “In the river? With your hair?”
    He was helping Sophia wash dishes while Ellie worked in her office, catching up on the mail. Sophia sang Mennonite hymns as she worked.
    “The river was frozen, Daddy. I mean, that’s so silly.” She seemed at least as disapproving of the silliness as amused by it. It took her a second to laugh. “With my hair?”
    She’s a pocket-size Bezeidenhout, Brookman thought. He thought of saying it to her, but he did not want to render her too perplexed in the process of cultural reentry. The twice-a-year trips between White Lake and