Rock Island Line

by David Rhodes

  “Here, let me see it,” said Wally. “Hell, this ain’t sharp at all. They ain’t sharp unless you c’n lay ’em up against your thumb-nail like this here . . . and without pressing on it, if it’ll keep from slippin’ off when you tilt it forward, then it’s sharp. If it won’t, then it ain’t worth a shit for anything. This is cheap steel.” He tossed it back. “I wouldn’t never carry a blade so dull as that’n, not if I had me a knife. Automatics is more my style. Always has been.” And he stared out of the window as though reviewing all the numerous wild things he had done in his life. Leonard came back with three ice-cream bars and a tin of sardines. They were eating them when Mal walked out the large automatic doors and past their car carrying a small bag of groceries and wearing her waitress uniform. She climbed into the old Chrysler and pulled slowly out of the parking lot.

  Without saying anything, Wally started the Mercury and got onto Highway 1, heading out into the country behind her.

  “Hey, where you goin’?” asked Leonard.

  “Di’n’ you see that waitress? Hell, they’ve always got a lot of money lyin’ around. We’ll just check it out where she lives. Most of ’em works at night. Probably get a hundred or maybe two.”

  “Waitresses don’t have any money.”

  “Shit they don’t. Hell, where you been anyway? You talk like you haven’t been around. Sure they got bread. Most of ’em fuckin’ whores ‘n’ shack up with their bosses. Jesus, don’t you know nothin’? There ain’t hardly a waitress that ain’t a whore.”

  “She probably lives out here on some farm with ‘er folks, I bet. Can’t nobody break into a farmhouse. They got dogs, ‘n’—”

  “I just said we’d check it out. We got nothin’ better right now. We already sat almost all afternoon in the parkin’ lot.”

  “It wasn’t such a bad place.”

  “Cops get suspicious after a while. Besides, who c’n tell, we might be on ta somethin’.”

  The green Chrysler made a lefthand turn onto a gravel road and they followed from a quarter-mile back.

  “You think she fucks, Wally? Could you tell by lookin’ at ’er?”

  “I could tell. It’s the way they walk, sort of loose like. She’s a whore, you c’n bet.”

  “You’re gettin’ too close.”

  “Shut up.”

  “Put that away, Billy Joe. We’ll hit a hole in the road and you’ll rip open your finger.”

  Mal pulled the Chrysler into the driveway. They slowly stopped, opened the trunk, took out the jack and lifted the back bumper—Leonard’s idea to look as though they had a flat while inspecting the house. The girl was inside. A three-legged dog began to bark at them from the corner of the yard.

  “See?” said Leonard. “Come on, let’s get out a here.” But no sooner did he say this than the waitress stuck her head out of the front door of the house and hollered at the dog to stop. And when it kept on she came out, grabbed it by the fur around its neck and dragged it off toward the house, around the side and put it in the basement. Then she went back inside.

  “There’s other people livin’ there,” said Leonard. “Let’s go back to the parkin’ lot an’ you’ll think of somethin’ else. We c’n get us a gas station tonight. This place gives me the creeps.”

  “There ain’t no way we c’n know for sure. What we should do is go on up there to the door—hell, dumb bitch put the dog in the basement—’n’ pretend we wanna use the phone ‘cause we got a flat ‘n’ no spare. Then, see, we get a chance to look around, ‘n’ if there ain’t nobody there but her, then we c’n wait until she gets off to work ‘n’ go in then.”

  “But she’ll let the dog go again. He’s big.”

  “Dogs c’n be handled with . . . ‘n’ maybe she’ll leave it down in the basement anyway.”

  “No girl’d be livin’ out here alone.”

  “I just said we’d check it out, you jackass.”

  There was an anxious silence while all three of them stared at the house.

  “OK, let’s go,” said Leonard. “Billy Joe ‘n’ I will stay behind you.”

  At this point Wally seemed to freeze from the center of his eyes outward and he turned his head. Leonard and Billy Joe had already stepped forward and were waiting for him in the middle of the road. His pale hands shook and curled up unconsciously.

  “You fools,” he said, in a fast, whining voice. “You fools, we can’t all go in. Only one or two got to go in. It wouldn’t seem right all of us goin’ in.”

  “Then you go,” said Leonard.

  “You dumb fuck, how smart do you think that would be? The cops drive by and you’re in the car, so they get out and ask you some questions while they call in your description on the radio. Go ahead, try to answer as if I was a cop. ‘Where’re you goin’? What’re you doin’ here, kid? Let me see the registration for this car. Where’s your license?’ ”

  “There’s no police goin’ a come way out here.”

  “ You want to take a chance? You want to? Now get going. Take Billy Joe with you if you want to.”

  “What’ll we say, I mean for using the phone?”

  “Just say you want to call to a station, dial some phony number and pretend to talk.”

  “Then what’ll I say?”

  “Then I don’t know. Say something.”

  Wally got into the car, though the jack still held the back tire off the ground.

  “Why don’t you come up then and say you got it fixed? Then we c’n leave.”

  “Sure, sure. Go ahead.” He gripped the steering wheel to calm his hands.

  The two half-brothers went up to the house. Wally watched them knock on the door, then step inside. His stomach knotted up like an old tree. Breathing through his mouth, he stared up and down the gravel road and threw the wet comic book into the ditch. Three or four minutes later Leonard came out with something in his hand. He carried it through the yard and came to the car. It was a glass of ice tea.

  “She give us some tea and says ta come inside to wait for her husband to come home. They ain’t got no phone.”

  Together they went to the house.

  TWELVE

  July was just getting off work. He rode in the back of the truck with four others, bumping along toward where their cars were parked. Though not actively engaged in any conversation, he listened to Jack and Bonesy and the Bontrager kid talking. “They say you can eat ’em. Pull ’em in the fall. The Indians used burdock roots as a potato substitute.”

  “Couldn’t’ve been a substitute, ‘cause they never had potatoes. Potatoes come from Ireland.”

  “Don’t be too sure of that.”

  “Well, I guess I’m not, but those Indians could make use of about anything. They made paint from bloodroot, I know.”

  July felt an uneasiness stir within him, but he couldn’t identify it and tried to push it out of his mind.

  “We used to rub that all over us when we was kids,” Jack continued, “and pretend to chop off our fingers.”

  “Can’t you find something better to talk about?” said July.

  “Boy, but ain’t you touchy today.” Then they went on talking about race-car drivers. “I’d like to have one of those Ferraris. You know, if you buy one of those, take it out and it won’t run two hundred miles an hour, you can take it back and they’ll give you another one.”

  “Some of those guys can make nearly a million dollars a year driving in races across the country.”

  “They’ve got races all over the world.”

  “It’d be the glory I’d want rather than the money,” said Bonesy.

  Despite all his power over his emotions, July turned yellow with dread. All his rationality told him that today was like any other. There was no cause to be alarmed about anything. It was a long time ago that he’d played that foolish game. He was much older now.

  But his key would hardly fit into the ignition because it shook so much, and he nearly collided with a milk truck because of fish-tailing around a loose corner.
The Chrysler was in the driveway, but Holmes wasn’t anywhere to be seen. Oh God, he thought. Something’s happened to Holmes. He sat in the car trying to prepare himself for how he would respond when Mal told him, made a solemn promise to himself that if he’d imagined everything and the dog was all right, then he’d never worry again, ever, got slowly out of the car and went into the house.

  Mal was on the sofa, one hand dangling down to the floor. She was dead. Her fingers had begun to stiffen. There was blood everywhere.

  As he began to go into shock July imagined that he was having no reaction at all; he seemed to himself to be perfectly adequate, perfectly numb. At one time he noticed he was sitting down holding a piece of the waitress uniform that was ripped away from her collar and was saying out loud, “Nothing could be farther from the truth. No.” He didn’t know how long he’d been there or how much else he’d already said. Or what he was talking about. The sound of the voice was without any emphasis: dream language. Then it was as if his senses would black out at different times, reviving for an instant here and there and he would be completely aware of the sound of the clock—nothing but the regular sound of the clock. The little ceramic pot on the table was all that he saw for a long time. The hours in between were filled, so far as he could tell, with nothing. Later he could remember thinking, I’ve got to . . . I’ve got to . . . but he couldn’t quite grasp what it was. Then he heard the dog bark in the basement, and though it took him nearly ten minutes to walk outside because of the porch swing grabbing his unpredictable attention with its little chains to the ceiling and holding it long after he wanted to get away, he went around to let her out into the yard. Together they wandered aimlessly beyond the fence and onto the gravel road. In the ditch he picked up a comic book. On the cover was stamped Property of Riverview Courts. He carried it down the middle of the road, then threw it away. He walked until it was almost dark and someone took hold of his arm and said they’d been honking at him and was he all right and he said, “Call the police,” and kept walking, going off into a large hayfield, not having any idea where he was, who he’d spoken to or what he’d said.

  The only presence he was at all aware of was his dog.

  Long after dark he’d gotten back onto the road, and that’s where the patrolmen found him and coaxed him into the car and back to the house.

  “I know what’s in there,” he told them when they pulled into the driveway. “Don’t think you’ll be showing me anything. You think perhaps that I’m just coming home now for the first time. You think I was walking home from work and now this is the first time. But, see, I already know what’s in there.”

  And he climbed out of the car.

  As they came in the police photographers were still taking pictures, though Mal’s body had been covered over. As the ambulance men began to pick her up July wondered if he might rush forward and push them away—telling them not to touch her. It seemed that he might and might not at the same time. He didn’t, and acknowledged in not doing so the fact that since he’d first seen her lifeless form on the couch there had never been even a suspicion that its ugliness and vulgarity could represent his wife; and though at one time it had had a great deal to do with her and been very much involved with even his own feelings for her, it was still such a minor part that when the other, larger part had gone, there was no resemblance. He was glad to have it out of the house.

  As they carried her past him, he noticed that he was answering questions put to him by a sympathetic yet persistent young lieutenant.

  “Now, when was it you said you came home?”

  “I don’t remember. I got off work and came home. About six or six thirty, I guess.”

  “Only a few more questions if you don’t mind. I’m sorry about having to do this all now, but it saves us from having to keep bothering you later. Say, do you have some family you want me to call and get over here?”

  “No.”

  “Then why don’t you come with me? We can talk on the way to town. I think we better get you to a doctor, or somewhere you can be looked after.”

  “No.”

  “Of course it’s up to you, but if I were you I don’t think I’d want to stay alone. Christ, man, you don’t even have a phone out here.”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “OK, now just a few more questions. When you left this morning—”

  July’s memory stopped recording here, and three hours later, according to the clock, he found himself alone with all the lights in the house on, sitting on a kitchen chair in the middle of the dining room. He reviewed his circumstance and then forgot everything until the beginning of the next afternoon, when he was in the barn lying in the hay. Through a crack in the side he could see his Aunt Becky’s car, and so ascertained that he must be hiding from her and kept doing it until her car was gone.

  He promised himself that in the morning he would eat something, and found that promise written out to himself and taped to the refrigerator, signed. He ate a fried egg and threw up; but he did feed the dog and cat.

  Within a week he was suffering no more blackouts, and could think as clearly and bitterly as his grief would allow.

  With all the powers of his rational mind, he resolved, I’ll not accept this. I won’t stand for it. I refuse to accept it.

  He was consumed with thoughts of violence and imagined the things about him exploding. When he could sleep he dreamed of people and buildings blowing up, of his arm swelling up without warning and popping.

  It’s this death business, he thought. All along it’s been this death business. I’d’ve been all right if it wasn’t for this death business. But then as the days drew out into weeks, it wasn’t that so much as the violence of it—the bitter resentment he felt about there having been persons who caused it. It wasn’t necessary, or natural, or even a quirk of fate. It was caused.

  The lieutenant visited him every several days, and at one time said, “We’ve got some people who we suspect. At least we’d like to find them to talk to them about it.”

  “What’ll you do to them?”

  “That’d be up to the judge.”

  July wasn’t satisfied with that at all. He had no regard for his own life, and his only thought was that he might take a long, sweet, bitter revenge. The experience of losing her had boiled him, so to say, and for immediate fears—he had none, and would as soon fight a whole army as go outside and mow the lawn. Each second was drawn out unendurably by imagining into its tiny space the whole infinity of loneliness to come. Each first snow-flake of entering winter.

  “What are their names?” asked July, cutting off the words at the ends of his teeth. But the policeman wouldn’t tell him.

  That night he prayed to God that He make Himself known. He implored that heaven help him. In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost, my parents, and at the very cost of my own soul, GIVE ME THOSE NAMES. But the sky was as dark and unyielding as ever, and July, in an act of total abandonment and renunciation, took his Bible and fired all the bullets from his mother’s pistol through it, poured gasoline over it, burned it in the road and covered the ashes with gravel.

  THIRTEEN

  One morning July told himself he had to go to work. The baling crew would be just finishing up at Bonderman’s farm and he must go over there and try to get back into some kind of living routine. It seemed like such a futile effort, he nearly talked himself out of it. But at the last minute he went.

  He arrived a little late, and parked in the uneven line of cars along the road. The others were already walking out through the barnyard toward the machines and stopped as though a single body to turn and look at him as he came up carrying a second shirt and gloves, grief like old wounds covering his face. The foreman, Lyle Hogue, and Bonesy came forward to meet him, hanging their heads in shame at not being more at ease. The others stood and watched.

  “Hello, July,” said Lyle. “It’s good to have you back again. All of us, we’re . . . ” His voice trailed away.

&nbs
p; “We feel awful,” said Bonesy, and added, “We feel awful.”

  “So do I,” said July and motioned with his eyes, by looking away, that the interview was over. The three of them walked together into the larger crowd, who clung to July and offered short, uncomfortable condolences. But in some the interest of horror gleamed in their eyes and questioned him without words: What was it really like? I know what the newspapers said, but what was it really like? Go through it again, from the time you first came home. What exactly did they do to her?

  Immediately he wanted nothing to do with them—any of them.

  Lyle Hogue gave him the job of driving the tractor, pulling the baler and a hay wagon. Bonesy and Jack came with him to grab the bales as they issued from the chute, and they rode in the wagon down the lane to the field. The motor roared in July’s ears.

  It was a mild, calm morning. Clouds like moored ships wandered to the left and right, tethered to long ropes in the sky. A pale, pale silver moon four days from nothing hung suspended from a nylon fishing line bank-fastened to the flashing river of heaven. Here and there, diamonds of moisture twinkled underneath the leaves. The heads of the long, thin millet grasses along the fence rows, in the pastures and bunched sparingly in with the clover were red with seeds and, like old men with drooping beards, nodded and bowed to the gentle push from the ground breeze—spirits moving along the ghost trails. The color of the sky itself was blue, blue-air blue. The horizon was adorned with trees, toadstool miniatures that puffed out in animal-shaped balloons at the top. Redwing blackbirds landed on fencepoles both feet first, their black-cloaked wings and tails fanning out in a gesture of a magician flourishing his cape and singing their rolling chirp, a single wavering note played endlessly, the red and greenish blue on their shoulder like a club badge. Wrens, the witch birds, chattered from the thickets. Rabbits scurried out of their way, and pheasants in their oriental plumage haughtily viewed them from afar. July drove, caring for nothing.

  The field they worked in was the lower half of an eighty-acre section, the other half planted in winter wheat. The highest place in the hayfield was right in the middle, and from there July could see a house nearly three quarters of a mile away, standing by itself at the end of a short lane. Two small bushes grew in front. He drove in slow circles, feeding the cut hay into the baler, which chewed it and spat it back out in oblong cubes, tied with coarse unbraided hemp, into the hands of Bonesy and Jack, who stacked it up.