The Mask Keeper

Chapter 8: No Promises

Voss got him at ten past eight and put him at a table.

"Eat something," she said. "I'll bring you a plate." Then she went back up toward the trailer.

Two folding tables had been pushed end to end under the awning. Behind the spoil heap the pump was running. The tarp over the hole was held down at the corners with cinder blocks. Theo poured himself a cup from the thermos at the near end of the table, which had a strip of tape on it that said COFFEE, and the coffee had been made at four in the morning and tasted like it. He sat down at the far end with his weight on the right side, because his hip had stiffened overnight and worked at one angle now, and the scrape on his cheek pulled every time he opened his mouth far enough to get a fork in.

At the other end of the table, the contractor with the tape on his boots was telling it again.

"So we're in the antechamber, and I say to Hollis, I say, there's a snake in here."

Mr. Hollis, at the corner, not looking up from his plate: "You said, 'There's a smell.'"

"There was a smell. The smell was the snake."

"You said, 'Do you smell that,' and then you asked me three times if the door was supposed to be that size."

"It wasn't the size it was supposed to be."

The contractor put his fork down and made a shape in the air with both hands, a rectangle, the way a man does when he intends to be believed. "All right. But we're in the coffin room. Twenty minutes, maybe more, all of us standing in there, and not one of us feels a thing wrong."

"Except the singing," one of the state men said.

"Except the singing, which was beautiful, and which I want on the record came from the wrong place."

"You wanted to keep going."

"I did want to keep going. I felt great. That's the point I'm making."

Theo drank his coffee and listened. He had been in that room with them. He had watched the contractor stand in front of a wall and argue with it politely, and at the time he had not known there was anything wrong with that. That was the part he kept turning over. Not the snake. The fact that he had stood in the dark feeling fine.

"And then," the contractor said, "I put my hand down on the oilcloth."

"It wasn't the oilcloth."

"It was in the inventory. Oilcloth, one, wrapped, undated." He held his hands out flat, palms down, a careful man setting down a tray. "So I'm being gentle with it. I'm being the most careful person in that room. And it comes up in my hands in pieces, and it's one whole skin, and the pieces were—" he flapped one hand. "Scale. Flakes."

"That's when you cut Quarles' rope."

"I want it on the record that I swung first."

"You swung at a rope in a room with eleven other people standing in it," Fox said from the end of the table, without heat.

The contractor thought about that and ate.

They had all come up. All of them, counted out loud at the top of the slope by Quarles, twice, in a voice that got thinner the second time.

A plate landed in front of Theo. Eggs, toast, two more slices of scrapple. The eggs had been in the pan long enough to go rubbery at the edge. The scrapple was cut thin and fried hard.

"Thanks," Theo said. "One of the crew's already getting me something."

"Who."

He looked along the table. Everyone had a plate. Nobody was carrying anything. The pump ran. The woman standing over him had her own plate in her other hand and was waiting.

He tried to place her. Boots: mud dried gray, laces double-knotted. Hands: a page folded in quarters under her thumb, creased along every fold. Hair: down, dark, wet at the ends, which changed the whole shape of her head. Voice: flat, and from north of him, up near the lake, where the vowels closed.

"You're the county," he said. "You took my name at the gate."

"State," she said. "The county has enough on its hands."

"The one with the clipboard, then. You wrote it down."

"I wrote it down once. You said it twice."

Theo opened his mouth.

"It's Voss," she said. "Delia Voss. In case you were going to keep going."

He looked at the boots again, then at what he could see of her face. "You had your hair up. And the jacket."

"I took my hair down and I put on a different jacket, and that's the whole of it. One night. We were underground for one night." She set her plate on the table and sat down across from him. "I've had men in this county not recognize me after six years. But one night is a personal best."

"I'm sorry."

"Eat first. Then I'm driving you home."

He ate. She ate. The pump ran. The contractor started telling the state man about the shovel in a lower voice, and the state man said something about how it had been a good shovel, and the contractor said it had been Quarles' shovel, actually, and both of them looked down the table, and Quarles raised one hand about an inch off the tabletop without looking up and left it there.

"So," Voss said, when her plate was more or less done. "Nye."

Theo put his fork down.

"He's at the hospital in Bellwood. He's been there since four this morning. He's awake. He doesn't speak, he doesn't track the room, he hasn't moved his hands. They've got him on fluids and a monitor and they're not doing anything else, because there isn't anything else to do."

"He's not—"

"He's not dying. Not today. He's also not getting better." She turned her coffee cup a quarter turn. "Quarles and I talked about it on the way in. We want him here. Tonight. In the trailer, in the bed we've already got set up in there, under the lamps we've already got, and we want you to undo it."

"Here."

"Here. I can't run an operation out of a hospital corridor. I can't photograph a hospital corridor and get it into a file."

"You could photograph a hospital corridor."

"Not the one he's in."

Theo turned his cup a quarter turn the other way. Two more slices of scrapple had gone cold on his plate and he ate one of them, because it was there.

"One job, one hand," Voss said. "You tied it. You untie it. Any other arrangement has two people working blind in the dark."

"I want to know three things first."

"Go."

"What this unit is. What counts as done. What counts as not done."

"Two of those are conditions, not questions. I'll take the question."

"Office of Unfiled Phenomena," she said. "Division 404 is the part of it that answers the phone at three in the morning and decides who gets out of bed. Oversight, enforcement, dispatch. We don't have a church. What we have is a filing system and a van."

"Which one are you?"

"Strictly speaking, I'm clerical. I take the pictures. I keep the chain of custody. I write the report." She nodded at the paper under her thumb. "You were in that hole five minutes and I will be writing it for three days. That's the work."

Theo looked down the table at the others, at Quarles' hand still an inch off the table, at Fox with his head bent over his plate. "There's a thing people say," he said. "Around here. My mother says it."

"Table-setters serve the living, wardens serve the dead."

"That one."

"It's about who gets the phone call," Voss said. "When somebody's grandmother starts leaving the oven on and talking to the hallway, the family calls the church, and the church calls us, and we call—" she tipped her cup toward him. "You, now. Or somebody like you. There used to be more of you."

"There's still plenty of us. It's just nobody can make a living."

"Yes," Voss said. "That's the part we're supposed to fix."

"The part that counts as done," Theo said.

"He sits up and asks what day it is."

"And not done."

"He doesn't." She set her cup down with a small sound on the tabletop. "Then I write a different sentence, and the different sentence goes in a different drawer, and Mr. Quarles and I have a conversation about what we say to a man's family."

Theo was quiet a moment. "This has been done before. Here. By somebody like me."

Voss's hand stopped on the cup. She moved the salt shaker two inches to the left and left it there and did not look up.

"We've had this county a long time," she said. "There's a drawer."

"That's not an answer."

"No." She picked her cup back up and did not drink from it. "You know what the Falling is?"

"No."

"Nobody does. Sixty years." She said it without any weight, the way a woman says the truck needs brakes. "Three nights from now the moon comes in closer than it has any business being, and for about six hours everything with a root in this county gets an idea it wouldn't otherwise have. It's a work order. By the end of the week my desk will have a stack on it and I'll be asking people I don't like very much for help."

Theo reached over and pulled the county paper out from under Fox's elbow. Fox let him have it without comment. He turned it to the weather page, past the high school football roundup, and found the little box with the moons in a row, and put his thumb under the one for the eighteenth, which was a filled circle.

Voss slid a clipboard out from under her arm and turned the form around. "Name. Address. Date of birth. And a number I can call at three in the morning, because I will."

He gave her all four. She wrote them down in small upright handwriting, and he watched the pen make the shape of his number, and when she was done she turned the clipboard face down on the table and put the cap back on the pen.

"Does this go anywhere?" he said.

"It goes in a drawer."

"And if I say no?"

"Then it goes in the same drawer with a note on it, and I go back to the hospital and sit in a corridor." Voss stood and stacked their plates. "You're not the only person I've asked this month. You're the only one who said yes so far."

"He hasn't said yes yet," Fox said, to his plate.

"He'll say yes," said Voss.

He said it in the car, three streets from his mother's house, with the heater going and the sun coming in sideways off the wet windshields of parked cars. "I'll do it. I'm not promising it works."

"I don't need you to promise. I need you indoors at six." She pulled up at the curb and did not turn the engine off. "Text me when you're home so I know where to come."

Theo looked out at the front of the house. The gutter over the porch had filled and was dripping in a line, and the sun had gotten into the wet siding and turned the whole thing a hot pale color. There was a red-and-white county notice zip-tied to the lamppost, the kind that says IF YOU HAVE BEEN ASKED TO PAY FOR A BLESSING, and next to the door, screwed into the brick, three plaques in a row.

"Settings by appointment," Voss said.

"She likes the sign."

"Do people come?"

"They used to. She's not taking anybody this month. She's out scouting."

"Scouting what?"

"Dance." Theo got the door open. "She's a choreographer. That's the other thing on the sign."

"Which of the three is yours."

"None of them. She collects them." He got out. "Thanks for the ride."

"Six o'clock," she said, and pulled away.

Mrs. Kincaid was on the sidewalk with her garden gloves on and a bag of mulch against her hip, and she straightened up the moment he got to the gate.

"Theo Marsh."

"Mrs. Kincaid."

"Your mother's been gone three weeks."

"She's scouting."

"Scouting," Mrs. Kincaid said, in a tone that suggested scouting was a thing people did in her day and it did not take three weeks. "Well. When she gets back, and you tell her when she gets back, we need her. The snake dance is a mess. We've got eight of us and the two in the middle can't turn."

"The Snake Walk."

"That's what I said. It's the second turn that does it. She's got us going in two lines and then a spiral, and the spiral is the whole thing, it's the reason people come out, and half the group can't find their way out of a spiral." She hoisted her mulch. "We open the Founders' Weekend with it. On the green. The whole parade stops."

"They don't stop."

"They stop," said Mrs. Kincaid. "You tell her the spiral."

"I'll tell her the Snake Walk."

"That's what I said."

Theo got the door open and got inside before she could start on the mulch.

Inside it smelled the way the house always smelled, dust and the cold fireplace and, under it, faintly, the sweetish smoke of the last thing his mother had burned in the kitchen sink. The mail was in a heap on the mat, the calendar was still turned to the month she had left it on, and somebody had left a mug in the sink with an inch of coffee petrified in the bottom of it.

He got his phone out and stood in the kitchen with the refrigerator humming at his back and typed: I'll be there at six. I can't promise it works.

He sent it to Voss before he could make it shorter.

Then he turned the calendar to the month they were in, found the eighteenth, and wrote 18 in the box in figures big enough to read from the stove. He drew a circle around it. Then he pressed the pen flat against the refrigerator door and let the magnet take it.