by Larry Brown
He got up.
“Well, I’ll let y’all get on with your stuff. Have you had anything to eat?”
Amy didn’t even look up.
“We ate at the Red Lobster in Tupelo. Have you had anything?”
“I can make me a sandwich or something,” he said.
“I could fix you something,” Amy said, and then she did look up. “We didn’t mean to stay so long. We just got to talking and having such a good time. I figured you went fishing or something anyway.”
“Yeah, I did,” he said, and turned and went back up the hall. He stopped in front of the refrigerator and looked at the television. The movie was still on but he was hungry now and he wanted something to eat, so he opened the door on the refrigerator and started looking through there. He found some salami and bologna and cheese and built a huge sandwich with tomatoes and lettuce and lots of mayonnaise, sprinkled some salt and pepper on it and found some chips in the cabinet. He poured himself a glass of milk and took everything back over to his chair and turned the volume back up on the television and started watching the movie again. He knew they’d be tired now, would probably want to go to bed early. He guessed he could watch the movie until he got sleepy. But sleep came hard some nights. Amy always drank herself into a deep slumber, but many nights he lay awake beside her listening to her snore.
He had finished about half the sandwich when Amy came into the kitchen and fixed herself a drink. She moved in there with him and sat down on the couch.
“You tired?” he said, and picked up another potato chip.
“I am,” she said. “But I feel pretty good. I bet she thanked me twenty times for those clothes. What’d you do all day?”
“I had to go work a wreck,” he said. “Then I just messed around on the lake. Rode around some. I started to bait up my lines again but I never did. What y’all got planned for tomorrow?”
“Nothing I don’t guess. You didn’t care for me taking her over to Tupelo and buying her some clothes, did you?”
“Why should I care?” he said, and took another bite of his sandwich.
“I just felt kind of bad about keeping her away from you all day.”
“You tell her about Karen?”
She got quiet and still. Took a sip from her drink and then looked at the television screen.
“Yes I did. We talked all day.”
“And?”
“She felt real bad about it. She feels bad now about staying in her room.”
“Ain’t nobody using it. She might as well.”
“That’s what I thought, too. We need to talk about her sometime.”
“About Fay?”
“Yes. About Fay and some other things, too.”
He picked up his milk and took a drink of it.
“Anytime you get ready,” he said. “How about now?”
“Not now,” she said, and got up from the couch with her glass. “I’m going to read.”
“What’s Fay doing?”
“Taking a bath. Please lock the house before you go to bed.”
“I will,” he said. “I might make me some coffee and go out on …” She was already going down the hall and he wondered how she could do him that way. Maybe she knew something after all. She was so cold. He wondered if Fay had noticed. Be hard for her not to probably. He looked down at his sandwich and suddenly didn’t want any more of it. He got up and scraped his plate off into the trash and rinsed it off in the sink and left it there. He drank the last of his milk and fixed some coffee.
A good breeze was blowing out on the deck and now there was nothing to see out there but blackness, nothing to hear but a soft lap and swish of waves gently breaking on the shore down below. Distant white lights winked through the trees on the opposite side. He leaned against the rail and felt the wind on his face until enough time had passed for the coffee to be ready, then went back inside and fixed a cup. The movie was over now and the news was on. He didn’t want to watch that or another movie either. He could hear a radio playing at a low volume in the bathroom down the hall. He was glad Amy had bought her the clothes. He figured she was probably trying them all on, so he went back out on the deck with his coffee and sat down to listen to the wind.
He pulled a chair back from the table and eased down in it and set his coffee down. He put his feet up on a low stool. Amy was probably under the covers already. And Alesandra lying in her bed across the water was probably still wide awake, her distant eyes staring up at the ceiling while the air conditioner hummed a low noise to help her sleep. He didn’t know if she was dangerous or not. Sometimes he thought she was. Other times she seemed only glad to see him. Her eyes when he’d left tonight, he remembered them, vacant and filled with something like hate or maybe just disgust with herself for not rocking his boat a little. And they’d settled nothing. They never did. They just kept on like they’d been doing while her demands got more regular and she seemed to grow fingers that could reach out and get him. And something inside Amy had just up and died. That joy inside her, it didn’t live there anymore. He’d seen a brief flash of it when they’d been bringing in Fay’s new clothes, and when they’d been sitting on the bed opening the shopping bags, but by the time she had come up to the living room it was gone again. Maybe if Fay stayed with them for a while she could bring it back for good. And if that happened, he’d know what to tell Alesandra: Stay in Clarksdale.
He just had sat back down with his second cup when he heard the sliding door open. He looked over his shoulder to see Fay closing it. She had on some pajamas, a silky top and bottom with teddy bears sleeping on haystacks. She grinned, looked like she was embarrassed or blushing.
“Hey,” he said. “I thought maybe you’d went to bed.”
“Not yet.” She walked over and leaned against the rail to look out over the water. “Amy went to bed a while ago. Can I bum a cigarette? I know you get tired of me bummin.”
“I don’t care.” He pushed the pack and the lighter across the table to her. “You want some coffee? There’s some fresh in there on the counter.”
“I believe I’ll go get me some.”
She went in and then came back out and set her cup on the table.
“Pull you up a chair. I was just sitting out here looking at the stars. Saw a shooting star while ago.”
“It’s a pretty night,” she said. She shook one of the cigarettes loose from the pack and lit it, then sat down and sipped at her coffee. “I bet you come out here a good bit, don’t you? I would if I lived here. I’d be out here all the time.”
“I sit out here a lot. It’s pretty peaceful and all.” He stretched out in his chair and lifted his cup. “It’s really nice in the springtime. All the trees are budding out and you can smell it.”
“I always hated summertime,” she said. “We was always in some hot place workin. That sun’s so hot in the middle of the day. Just blisters you so bad and then it hurts at night. Just makes you wish you could sleep in a tub full of water all night or somethin.”
He nodded but didn’t say anything.
“Was that a bad wreck you had to go to this mornin?”
“Pretty bad. Killed one man and hurt this lady. I reckon he was drunk. We had to get the cars out of the road and all.”
She nodded at this and pulled her feet up in the chair and wrapped her arms around her knees. Out of the corner of his eye he could see her rocking her body slightly in the seat. She kept looking out toward the water.
“How’d you learn all that stuff?”
Her question surprised him and he turned his head to her. She was still looking out past the rail.
“What stuff? You mean my job?”
She leaned over and flicked some ashes into the ashtray they were sharing and sipped at her coffee again.
“Well … yeah. Like how to get cars out of the road and stuff. And don’t you have to learn all them laws?”
“Yeah. They send you to school for all that. You go and stay about two months with a bunch of other gu
ys and then if you pass everything you graduate with your class and then you get assigned somewhere and then you might have to move for a while.”
“You ever had to shoot anybody?”
In a flash he remembered the shotgun in his face at the Greenville bridge and knowing he wasn’t going to be able to get his revolver out in time and then how the man’s face had disintegrated in a bloody mist from a deputy sheriff’s rifle shot. How his hands had shaken that sunny afternoon leaning against the steel beams high over the Mississippi River and how the traffic had gone on by the body covered with the white sheet on the center line and the dark blood soaking into the white cloth.
“No,” he said. “I never did. Came close to it a couple of times. I chased some folks who’d robbed a bank at Winona one time. But they wrecked.”
“Would you if you had to?”
“If I had to. If it was me or him or if somebody was fixing to hurt somebody … wouldn’t you?”
“Yeah,” she said. “I reckon I would.”
His coffee was growing cold in the cup but he didn’t want to move. Didn’t want to disrupt anything. She was talking to him again and he saw now that she was nothing like Karen, didn’t sound or look like Karen.
“Amy told me about your daughter,” Fay said, quietly. “I sure am sorry.”
He set the cup on the table and folded his hands in his lap. She had turned her face toward him and was watching him.
“It was a long time ago,” he said. “Over five years now. Did she tell you what happened?”
“She just said it was a accident.”
He coughed in his throat to keep himself talking.
“Yeah. She’d slipped out of the house one night when I was on duty. Her mama had gone to bed and I was out on the road over close to Water Valley. There was this boy. I blame myself every day. She … Karen wanted to go out with him and I didn’t much like his looks. He wouldn’t look me in the eye. We’d had a lot of bad arguments about him. I guess I thought I was trying to protect her. Turned out there’d been a lot of times she’d already slipped out of the house to meet him. He’d park his car up here on an old road and walk through the woods over here. There was friends of his I went and talked to after Karen was dead.”
He picked up the coffee again and drank some more of it even though he knew it was cold. And then he just held the cup in his hands.
“But usually they wouldn’t go anywhere. Karen knew when my shift ended and he’d always be gone by then. And her mama in there in the bed asleep, she didn’t know nothing was going on. Neither one of us did. But I got a call that night about eleven o’clock while I had somebody pulled over writing em a ticket and the dispatcher said there was a wreck at the intersection of Three-fifteen and Six. Just right down the road here six or seven miles. And I was clean down in Yalobusha County. Took me a while to get over there but I was the closest one that wasn’t tied up with something else. Big crowd of people already there when I got there and an ambulance too so I knew it was bad. I got up and walked up the road there, I could see it turned over in the ditch. Old Plymouth Duster, I don’t remember what year. He was outside and she was inside, both of em dead. I recognized her blouse.”
Fay turned her face away from him again and looked out over the black void beyond them and she was still rocking in her seat. He saw the tip of her cigarette glow when she pulled on it. She seemed so much older than Karen now, seemed not a child at all.
“Lord have mercy,” was all she said.
He studied his bare toes and set the cup back on the table. He could have stopped when he saw that she was crying but he had to get it out, tell it to somebody one more time. He knew he’d done it enough already, with troopers he knew in the passenger seat of his cruiser, prowling the midnight highways, the chattering of the radio an undercurrent to his story.
“I crawled in there with her. Somebody finally handed me a blanket in through the window and I wrapped her up in that. Wasn’t a mark on her nowhere but her neck was broke. She just looked like she was asleep.”
He saw her wiping at her nose and he hushed. The wind had picked up again and it had turned cooler. He began to wish that he hadn’t told her because he didn’t want her to feel sorry for him. They sat there for a long time with neither of them saying anything. She leaned over and put the cigarette out, rattled the ashtray. When she got up he thought maybe she was going back into the house but instead she came over and leaned over him and put her arms around him. He wanted her to understand what he had been through and as she held him tightly he felt himself drawing strength from her.
“It’s all right,” she kept saying. “It’s all right.”
NOW BRIGHT DAYS in the sun followed. On the lake she learned birds and trees from his pointing finger and began to study how he watched the weather and fished accordingly. Most times Amy wouldn’t go, but she didn’t seem to care that they spent so much time together, and they prowled the backwater. They would pull up into a shaded stand of cypresses and he would bait a cane pole for her, taking thrashing minnows from a foam bucket and threading them onto the hooks. She liked fishing and was good at it and he taught her how to dress them, how to cook them.
He would pull up close to a sandy bank and throw the anchor over the side and then help her out of the boat into water that was only shoulder deep. She was afraid of it but he was always right there beside her and he kept telling her that she needed to know how to swim. It was a long time before she could even dog-paddle around a bit but he was patient with her, and convinced her that he wouldn’t let her drown. He would stand in the water and hold her in his arms, supporting her legs and her belly, and she would kick and splash while he guided her around. The water was warmer now from steady days of sun and she began to get browner and she was happy with the way she looked. Nobody said anything about her ever leaving.
They would stay out in the water for hours sometimes and if he ever got tired of it he never said anything. Then one day she suddenly started kicking with her feet and pulling with her hands and abruptly she was swimming. After that, he was firm in letting her know that she could not swim by herself. There were days when he had to work over, special details he sometimes got assigned to, always the wrecks on the highways, and on these afternoons Amy would come in from work and she and Fay would put on their suits and take a few blankets and towels and walk down the stairs behind the house with a small cooler and they would lie in the last weak rays of the sun while the water lapped at the red sand just below them, while the breeze blew over them. They talked about what they were going to have for supper that night or clothes and movies they liked, Amy almost always drunk. She only talked about Karen a few times, and Fay didn’t tell her about being with Sam on the deck that night. She’d seen some of the pictures that stayed propped on a dresser in Amy and Sam’s bedroom, a slightly smiling black-haired girl who looked like Amy. She never heard any sounds come from that bedroom at night. They seemed to get along. But what she had noticed was that they didn’t touch. She never saw them kiss or hold hands. She was afraid to ask about these things.
Amy took her to an eye doctor in Oxford and she got a pair of glasses. At first she didn’t try to read much of anything, but there were times when she was by herself in the middle of the day and she would pick up some of Amy’s magazines and start going through them, reading the captions under the pictures, slowly and haltingly, touching the words with the tip of her finger, saying them out loud. She was rusty at reading and it was hard. But she kept at it and gradually she began to get better.
Some days she would fix a big glass of lemonade and retreat to the deck in her swimming suit and lie propped with her cigarettes and her drink and absorb the words, and work on the bigger ones she didn’t know. Finally she began to read the articles themselves. How to Care for Your Baby. Ten Tips to Put the Romance Back into Your Marriage.
Amy would help her at night, the two of them on her bed and the door closed while Sam piddled around outside or washed the supper dishe
s in the kitchen. Amy was a good teacher and she said once that when she was a girl she had wanted to be one.
But Fay’s favorite times were with Sam out in the boat. There was nothing that could compare to that feeling of freedom when the blunt nose of the rig lifted and the spray started flying from the hull and the slap slap slap of the waves rolled under quicker and quicker until there was only the smooth cutting of the boat through the water, and the wind in her hair and the warm sun on her skin. Every day she thought of that other life that had been hers and she missed her mother and her brother and her sister. But she had no desire to go back to that life. She wondered how they were doing, but she figured they were probably doing about the same. One day when she was better and had plenty of money and a car she would go back. That’s what she told herself: she would just go back and check on them. But it was easy to push that to the back of her mind when she was with Sam and Amy. There was always something to talk about, always something to do, another meal to fix, another trip to take, another afternoon of riding the water or swimming or fishing. The days grew in number and after a while it began to seem that she had never had any life but this one of friendship, good food, and a nice bed to sleep in at night.
One Saturday afternoon he took her to a beach that was screened from the lake by a stand of willows in a cove. She swam back and forth while he fished from a lawn chair on the sand and drank beer from a cooler beside the chair. She came wading out of the water and leaned into the boat where it sat drifting on a rope and reached in for a towel to dry her hair. He had already put down a quilt for her to sit on and she dropped down on it, rubbing the towel over her hair, drying her legs and arms. He pitched her a cigarette and a lighter without asking. There was a rod and reel stuck up in a holder nearby but he didn’t seem to be paying much attention to it.
“Where’s all the fish at today?” she said.
He pulled at his ear and crossed his leg. All he had on was a pair of blue jeans and they were wet to the knee, his feet covered with sand. Gray hairs on his chest that looked like wire.
