by Larry Brown
Now that she was so close, Amy looked older than him. By a good bit.
Fay peeled at the label on her beer and then made herself stop. Little fritters of paper to pick up.
“I was afraid of him when he first stopped,” she said. “I was afraid he was gonna arrest me or somethin. I’d done walked a long ways and I was wore out. But he give me a ride and bought me a hamburger. He’s a nice man.”
“Yes,” Amy said uncertainly. “A very nice man.”
“How long y’all been married?”
Amy picked at something on her shirt and looked back up.
“This year makes twenty-one years,” she said. “We got married right out of college and he went to work for the highway patrol. We’ve lived all over but we’re from Verona, over close to Tupelo. He got transferred a couple of times and we lived in Natchez for a while, stayed in Lucedale for a couple of years, had a house in Grenada for a year or so. We had a house in Batesville for eight years and then we built this one. He loves it out here, fishes every day it’s pretty. You want to see his boats?”
She got up and walked over to the rail and Fay followed her. Amy was pointing down into a cove where there was a wooden dock. Two boats drifted on their ropes. One was a big shiny thing with a big outboard motor and the other one was a scratched and dented old metal one.
“I gave him that old one on our first anniversary,” Amy said. “He still uses it to crappie fish. You like fish?”
“I’ve eat it some,” Fay said. She leaned up against the rail and set her beer down carefully on top of it and unpinned her hair and shook it loose. Amy turned and looked at her.
“You’ve got pretty hair,” she said.
“It always looks awful. I can’t do nothin with it.”
She felt Amy’s hand come out and touch the ends of her hair, turned her face just a bit and nervously took another sip of the beer. She wished she had a cigarette.
“It just needs a trim is all,” Amy said. “I could trim it if you want me to. That’s what I do for a living.”
“You do?”
“I’m a beautician. I’ve got my own shop over at Batesville. Sam bought it for me a long time ago. But I’ve got all the stuff in the house to do this. I could do it before supper if you want me to.”
The hand lingered for a moment and then she pulled it back, reluctantly it seemed. And she moved closer and looked into her eyes.
“Tell me something, Fay.”
“What’s that?”
The glass door slid open and Sam stepped out onto the deck in blue jeans and a black shirt.
“Y’all having a conference already?” he said. He was happy, though. He looked smaller somehow without his uniform on and Fay began to see now that he was different at home. He pulled out a beer and twisted the top off and put his cigarettes and lighter on the table and then came over to stand beside them against the rail.
“So what you think?” he said. “Is this a little piece of heaven or what?”
“It’s nice,” Fay said. “It’s the nicest place I’ve ever seen.”
“You want to go for a ride in my boat? It’s fast, now.”
“I don’t know.” She looked kind of worried. “That water looks deep.”
“I’ve got some life jackets. I won’t let you drown.”
He turned his beer up and took a big drink from it. Amy was leaning against the rail, looking toward the house.
“She just got here, Sam. Maybe she wants to rest.”
“Oh. Yeah.” He nodded and Fay saw something pass across his face, saw something too in the way Amy spoke to him that was just a bit too hard, a bit too weary. He nodded. “Well. Maybe after a while.”
Amy walked around him and reached up to touch Fay’s hair again with her fingers.
“I told her I’d be glad to trim her hair for her. And I thought she might like a nice hot bath.”
“I would like to go for a ride,” Fay said quickly. “I sure would like to get this messy hair of mine fixed, too.” She took another drink of her beer. “And a bath sounds good.”
It didn’t seem to bother him a bit. He stepped over to the table and shook out a cigarette.
“Okay, sure,” he said. “I’ve got some things I can be doing. It’s pretty hot to be out in the boat right now anyway. Maybe we can take a ride when it cools off some. Then we’ll come back and fix those steaks. How does that sound?”
“That sounds real nice,” Fay said. “Can I get a cigarette from you?”
“Help yourself. There’s a carton in there on the kitchen table, too.”
She got one of the cigarettes and they stood around and talked some more. He was still standing there drinking his beer at the rail when they went into the house. Fay looked back at him and he turned, gave her a wave with the bottle, and then she saw him go back to watching the water move under the wind, and the limbs of the big old pines swaying in the breeze.
Amy brought her another beer after she was in the deep tub, stretched out with her toes spread beneath the faucet and her head resting on an inflatable pillow and a mass of fragrant bubbles almost spilling over the side of the tub. The warmth of the water had seemed to soak into her bones and now she was half asleep and wanted nothing more than to lie here forever.
She sat up when Amy came back in and set the beer on the edge of the tub.
“You want some more hot water?” she said.
“No ma’am.”
“Stop calling me ma’am. I’m not but forty-one. How old are you?”
Amy put the lid down on the commode and took a seat on it.
“Seventeen,” Fay said. “I’ll be eighteen in September.”
“So you’re not out of school yet.”
Fay picked up the beer and looked at it for a second.
“I don’t go to school. I ain’t in a long time.”
“Why not? Did you not like school?”
“I liked it fine when I got to go. But we’ve moved around a lot. And we all had to work. The last school I had was in the fifth grade. My daddy wouldn’t let me go no more after that. Said it was a waste of time and I needed to work and help the family. So that’s what I did.”
She leaned back against the pillow and sipped on the beer. Amy had crossed her legs and she sat watching her with her hands in her lap.
“Do you still want to go to school?”
“It’s too late now. I’ve done missed so much.”
“How’s your reading?”
“Not too good. I needed glasses a long time ago but I never did get any. Daddy said they cost too much money. I can read somethin way off like a road sign but it’s hard for me to read a piece of paper. I have to hold it way out. Like this beer bottle. I can read what kind it is but I can’t read these little bitty words down here.”
She felt like she was talking too much so she slumped back down in the water and looked at the tile wall in front of her. She didn’t even know these people and she was telling them all these things. But it was hard not to. Already she knew it was going to be hard to leave here, get back on the highway. Biloxi didn’t sound like such a great idea now, now that she’d found this place. Amy was drunk but it was a kind and a soft drunk.
“I’ve got some clothes I want you to try on after while,” Amy said. She got her drink off the sink and turned it up. She lightly stroked her lip with two fingers. “Some things that belonged to my daughter. I bet they’ll fit you. I bet they will.”
“Thank you,” Fay said. “I could sure use some more clothes. What, did she just outgrow em?”
“She doesn’t need them anymore,” Amy said. She got up from where she was sitting. She had already hung some clean underwear and some jeans and a blouse on a rack on the wall. “I’ll lock this door on my way out so Sam won’t accidentally walk in on you. You stay in here as long as you want. Then you can take that boat ride with him before we eat if you want to. Okay?”
“Okay. Thank you.”
Amy stepped out. Fay leaned back into the warm wat
er and lifted the beer again and tilted a long cool drink down her throat. Oh yeah, it was going to be hard to leave this place.
The hull slapped at the water and bumped her in the seat. Then it lifted very high and she turned to wave at the figure of Amy growing smaller and smaller on the dock and then the hull came down and the boat leveled out and began to plane and the wind began to bring tears from her eyes. She huddled in her life jacket on the seat and crossed her arms over her stomach. Sam was smiling, guiding the boat toward the open water, and sheets of white spray plumed out and she looked back to see a wide trough of rolling waves left quickly behind them. In only a moment the boat was skimming at the very top of the water and she could hear the muted roar of the big outboard behind her and she could feel the vibration of the water on the hull in her bare feet.
They came out from behind the red dirt of the bluff and he turned the wheel to the left, and then growing out from the rough sand beach was the long looming shape of the distant levee and the spill of white rocks she had looked down on a few hours before. There were some stands of dead white trees off to the right where fishing boats were grouped and she could see people sitting in them. He eased off on the throttle just a bit and then he turned loose of it and steered the boat with one hand, casually, as if he were back on his highway again, and he watched everything around him just the way he did when he was driving the cruiser.
It was too loud for any talk, the rushing wind and the sound of the motor, and there was too much to see, the sun beginning to lower in the sky but still bright enough that she had to shade her eyes with one hand to study the levee and the distant shore where other landings jutted out into the lake. Everywhere boats pulling skiers towed white fans of water that crept across the surface of the reservoir.
It seemed to take a long time to get any closer to the levee, but whenever she looked back she could see how far they had come, and after five minutes the red dirt bluff was just a patch of color among the trees and the rocks and she couldn’t see the dock that Sam had built with his own hands.
When the sun fell behind the levee he slowed the boat and made a gentle sweep to the right and raced along its length for a while. He took his sunglasses off and stowed them in a pocket beneath the console.
“What you think?” he yelled, and she nodded and smiled and pulled her hair out of her face again.
“We better get back,” she heard, and he turned the wheel away from the levee and pushed down on the throttle again. Most of the wind had died by now and the lake had started to slick over. The water seemed darker now and it was as if they were skidding across a plate of black glass, the boat driving like an arrowhead with hardly any spray coming out from the hull, just the clean smooth nose aimed at the red bluff and the trees flashing by on the right side, boys and girls in water up to their necks off the beaches and their dogs splashing in the shallows and the last rays of light in the tops of the woods and already the small coves back in the smooth fingers of water growing dark with night.
By lamplight he speared the marbled slabs of meat onto the grill and small yellow flames leapt up, the grease sizzling when it fell into the coals. She helped Amy bring out plates and napkins and a garden salad they had fixed in the kitchen together with the stereo playing. Fat potatoes wrapped in foil and piled on a dish in the center of the table, a loaf of brown bread slashed with cuts and butter dripping from the shining crust.
They sat and talked and she felt that she had never been as hungry as she was now, watching the steaks cook in their own juices and smelling them while the charcoal glowed red beneath them.
When the steaks were done, he brought them on an iron platter to the table and he turned on an overhead floodlight and they sat down. When she cut the first piece of meat and lifted it to her mouth she could feel them watching her, and she closed her eyes and chewed and let out a small moan and Sam laughed and then all of them were eating and talking.
“Oh hell, I almost forgot the wine,” he said, and he got up and went inside and brought it and stood it on the table, left again and returned with three crystal glasses and a corkscrew. He opened the wine and poured it and they held their glasses to hers, and they leaned forward and clinked them softly, and she could see the light from the lamp shining on their faces.
She ate slowly. She was enormously hungry and somehow she restrained herself from eating too quickly. She took her cues from Amy, kept her elbows off the table, her napkin in her lap, and after the first few times she didn’t talk with her mouth full.
It was only nine o’clock by the time they finished. She helped Amy stack the plates and carry them in to the sink and then they sat out on the deck with the bugs and he lit a citronella candle and the mosquitoes left them alone. She could tell it when the wine and the beer began to get to her and she slowed down, took small sips, and sometime during all that conversation she woke in her chair alone. Amy was just stepping back onto the deck.
“I’ve got your bed ready,” she said. “Come on.”
She didn’t argue. She asked her where Sam was and she said he had already gone to bed, that he was going fishing early in the morning and that he’d wanted Fay to go with him, but that he’d wanted her to get some rest, too. Amy helped her undress in a room papered with roses, a bed with pillows trimmed in lace, a child’s dolls sitting in a toddler’s rocking chair and lined in rows against the walls staring with their dead dolls’ eyes.
From somewhere Amy brought her a nightgown and Fay held her arms over her head and let her pull it down over her shoulders, her waist, and then the covers were pulled back and she crawled in beneath a comforter that smelled of flowers in the spring. She closed her eyes and felt one soft kiss on her cheek. And then the door was closing and the room was dark and out there past the window in the night somewhere she could hear an owl hooting, but it was old and familiar, a song from deep woods, something she had heard before.
SAM WAS GOING slowly across the glassy water in the old aluminum boat when the first pale light of dawn began to show beyond the ragged teeth of the dark trees that lined the lake, steering with one hand and trying not to spill the cup of coffee on his knees. The big dead trunks stood together a mile or a mile and a half out and the boat drew steadily nearer them, wakes of lapping water fanning out and growing ever gentler and wider, where they ran to the shore and floated sticks up and down, broke softly on the red sand and receded.
Looking back he could see the lights on his deck still burning, and far off to the west he could see the lights of vehicles inching across the levee, the glow of them swirled in the mist that stood on the water like smoke. There were running lights of red and green far off across the lake, but he couldn’t hear the motors. The boats seemed to move very slowly and faint spumes of water ran along their sides. He wondered if she knew how to ski. But then of course she didn’t if she didn’t even know how to swim. Well. He could teach her to swim and ski both.
It was still almost too dark to see so he cut back on his speed even more and it wallowed back in the water and dragged sluggishly until he twisted the throttle just a bit more and pushed the speed back up and ran closer to the clump of trunks looming up out of the water. He saw an eagle rise up out of one of the nests and sail out into the darkness, just the bob of its snowy tail until it vanished into the gloom that still lay over the northern shore.
When he got closer he finished the coffee and set the cup in the bottom of the boat. He pulled the throttle back to an idle and when he was within fifty feet of his line he cut it off and let it drift closer, reached down for the long paddle and turned the motor to let the side of the boat slide gently against the tree, bumping, rising, and he pushed out with the paddle against the tree and came to a stop. Alesandra’s thighs were like velvet.
He sat for a moment with his hand on the dead wood and then looked up into the naked branches outlined against the sky. They had been here for as long as he could remember and he could imagine them as they once were, standing in a forest with squirrels c
limbing through their heavy growths of leaves and lending shade down on a hot summer day. There would have been a carpet of dead leaves beneath them, dry and crackly underfoot. Now they had stood here in this water almost fifty years. He patted the trunk like the back of an old friend. Was she watching him even now?
Waiting for the sky to lighten a bit he poured more coffee from the Thermos. The boat moved in the water, shifting slowly among the trunks. He rested the cup on his knee and watched the morning come. He could hear trucks and cars pulling into loading ramps far up the lake. Faint sounds in the dawn, the creakings the boat made, a slap and swish of something turning up in the water, a groan the trunk made as it stood in its bed of mud. Finally he drained the cup and set it down for good to tend to his business.
But he hadn’t baited his lines in two days and he doubted there were any fish still alive on them. There was a piece of pipe in the floor of the boat and he reached down for it and started unwrapping the cord he kept on it. Alesandra was asleep somewhere in a warm bed, probably. Some bent rods were welded to the side of the pipe and he got a good grip on the end of the cord and stood up carefully in the boat, it rocking some, and he swung the pipe back and forth a few times on the cord and then turned loose of it and let it fly out over the water. It made a deep plunk when it went in and the cord tightened quickly. He sat back down and started hauling the cord in hand over hand, letting it pile up between his feet until he felt the weight of his line. He hoped they were getting along okay. They seemed to like each other and maybe now Amy would feel better for a while, having another somebody to take care of. The only thing was how long. They couldn’t just keep her like a stray dog and she had a family somewhere too but she’d left that on her own and how many kids had the guts to do something like that, just strike out on their own? He stopped for a moment to see if he could tell if there was anything on the trotline, but he couldn’t tell. The line rose as he pulled, tight beads running down the slant of it back into the water or dripping to make tiny pools beneath it until he finally caught it with his hand and unhooked the pipe from it. He didn’t even know how old she was but not old enough to be out walking around after dark on the roads, or even in daylight. Too many sickos running around out there. He held the line in one hand and dropped the pipe in the floor of the boat and then by pulling with both hands on the line he turned the boat sideways so that the line could pass over his knees. He leaned forward for the bucket and pulled it closer and began to draw himself and the boat under the line, hand over hand, looking for the first hook. Something was there in the water just under the line, something that did not move.
