“Where to?”
“Over there. Behind the fire station.”
“What fire station? Out by the mall?”
“The one downtown.”
“Shit. That station’s been shut down five, six years. Don’t reckon they care if we burn to the ground down here. Gotta sit next to all the new shit, I guess. Make sure some insurance man don’t get all worked up. The station down here is apartments now. You believe that? Couple of gay dudes bought it and fancied it up. Think it was even on some TV show. You sure you in the right spot?”
“I’m sure. It’s been a while. Over behind the place you’re talking about. Michigan Avenue.”
“That’s better. Street names are still the same far as I know,” the man said and he flicked his cigarette out the cracked window. “So what was that back there? You get on that guy’s wife or something?”
“Nah. Nothing like that.”
“Just old blood.”
“Old bad blood.”
“They seemed pretty damn serious. Weird looks on their faces. Especially that tall one.”
“Yeah. Especially,” Russell said.
The Toyota weaved through downtown. Women in heels leaving their bank jobs for the day and walking to their locked cars with black purses hanging from their arms. An OPEN sign shined in a café window and a pack of grayhaired men stood outside its door smoking. They passed the old fire station and the flagpole was gone from the front yard and a dogwood stood in its place. A wrought-iron balcony stretched across the upstairs floor and plants hung from hooks and their vines leaned lazily across the balcony railing, swaying in the late afternoon breeze. The red brick had been painted dirty gold.
“Pretty, ain’t it?” the man said. After the old station they left the downtown buildings and came upon a neighborhood. At a four-way stop Russell pointed right onto Michigan Avenue.
“About four down, I think. On the right. Or the left.”
“Yeah, I’d say it’s one of them.”
It was five down on the right. Russell lifted his hand and said stop.
“Don’t look like nobody lives here,” the man said.
“Nobody does.”
The man looked at the house and he looked at Russell. “You sure you okay? I see a lot of weird shit get on and off that bus but I never seen a guy jumped before.”
“I’m fine.”
“Want me to run you over to the doctor or something?”
“Hell no.” He shook his head and then the man’s hand and he opened the door and stepped out onto the sidewalk. He tossed away his cigarette and then he lit another one and he dropped the duffel bag to the ground. Stared at the house. Well, he thought. Home sweet fucking home.
8
THE HOUSE WAS LIKE THE OTHER HOUSES ON THE STREET. A CARPORT on the right, a porch in front, a porch in back, a thin walkway leading from the sidewalk to the door. Hedges under the front windows. An iron handrail up the front steps. Russell finished his cigarette and stood and opened the mailbox and took out an envelope. His name was scribbled on the front and he opened it and took out a house key.
Under the carport sat an old Ford pickup that was once red but only patches remained, as it had mostly faded to orange. He walked over to it and ran his hand along the truck bed. Patted her like she was a horse. A single crack spread across the width of the windshield and there was a small dent in the tailgate. The tires were worn and the truck bed was rusted in each of the four corners. A spare tire lying in the back. He opened the door and sat down behind the wheel. The bench seat was split here and there, slithers of foam sticking through the splits. A note was on the seat and he picked it up and read She’s gonna need some love. He folded the note and tossed it down on the floorboard. The key hung from the ignition and he pushed in the clutch and gave it a turn and the engine strained but hit and he gave it the gas. It paused, gave a quick backfire like a popgun, then roared and in the rearview mirror he saw a gust of gray flow from the tailpipe and out across the driveway and he let it run for a couple of minutes.
He walked up the steps of the front porch and dropped the bag and he unlocked the door and walked in. The hardwood floors had been refinished dark like espresso and the fireplace in the living room had been bricked up. He walked from room to room and saw that all the walls had been painted a fresh coat of white. Random bits of mismatched furniture appeared in each room—a bed and a dresser in the bedroom and a coffee table and a beige couch and a bookshelf in the living room. In the kitchen he found a table with two chairs and on the counter sat a coffeemaker and a microwave. Next to the microwave was a new pack of cigarettes. Then he opened the refrigerator and found a six-pack of beer. Dear old Dad.
He took a beer and he opened the back door. The backyard grass was high and a wheelbarrow was overturned in the middle of the yard. An empty five-gallon paint bucket and some rollers and brushes were in one corner of the porch. A white plastic chair in another. He sat down on the steps and held the cold beer bottle to his eye and he tried to relax. Closed his eyes and breathed the heavy, free air. A bead of water trickled down the bottle and along his cheek and disappeared into the two-week-old beard he had begun as part of his new world. He then opened his eyes and opened the beer. Tiny insects danced across the tops of the high grass and oak trees kept out the lowering sun. On each side of the narrow yard the neighbors had erected six-foot-high fences to keep their cookouts to themselves. He rubbed his eye again. Felt the knot on his head. Felt his ribs. Then he lay back on the porch and stared at the cobwebs surrounding the porch light. A butterfly was trapped. Fighting but losing. A dog barked from somewhere and then another joined.
Eleven years, he thought.
Enough time for the people he had known to get married. Maybe more than once. Maybe more than twice. Time for them to have kids. To have jobs that they would now be doing well in, enough time for promotions and titles and offices with windows and maybe even company credit cards in their pockets. Enough time for the bookshelves in their living rooms to be filled with photo albums of snapshots from summer trips to Pensacola and Gulfport and when the kids were old enough a weekend at Six Flags or maybe even Disney World. Enough time to be in the second house because the first house wasn’t big enough anymore. Enough time to have them driving vehicles they swore they’d never drive, vehicles with sliding doors and roof racks and enough cup holders for everybody. Enough time to forget about people who weren’t there anymore. Enough time for their bodies to change and their faces to change and their hairlines to change and their personalities to change and enough time for the construction of the new stores and the new restaurants to cater to the needs of the new people.
He sat up and then stood and freed the butterfly from the cobweb while it still had a flutter in its wings. He held it between his fingertips, its wings veil-thin and chalky. Then he let it go and it tried to fly but instead swirled straight down and fell at the toe of his boot. He knew that if he left it there the ants would come and what a wicked way to die so he put his foot on the butterfly and ended it and he washed it away into a space between the boards with his beer. He walked over and sat down in the plastic chair and began to talk to himself.
She’s one of them now. You know that.
Yeah, I know it. Known it for a while. Just seems different sitting here free instead of holed up. It all right with you if I pout about it for half a damn second?
Fine with me.
Good. Then leave me alone.
He sat and finished his beer and then he set the bottle down on the porch. He stood and walked back through the house, admiring the attention to detail of the paint trim. Noticed the consistency of the floor stain. Smiled at the notion of his dad who was too old to do it himself anymore but who was no doubt standing ten feet away from whoever was doing it and making sure they did it right. And he knew that his dad was sitting there. Waiting. And he didn’t want to keep him waiting any longer.
9
HE REACHED DOWN INTO THE BAG OF CATFISH FOOD AND GRAB
BED a handful and threw it into the pond, the food spreading and floating and before the ripples had died the mouths came up from the bottom wide and eager and slapping at the surface of the water as the food disappeared. Mitchell Gaines watched for a minute with his hands in his pockets and then he sat down in his lawn chair on the pond bank. He opened up the can of crickets and baited his hook and with a flick of the wrist he sent the hook and sinker halfway across the pond. The pine trees on the other side of the pond gave a long shadow across the gentle swaying of the brown water. He leaned back in his chair though he knew this wouldn’t take long with the catfish already stirred by the food. It was cheating but it was his pond and his fish so he was easy on his own rules. He wore a cowboy shirt with its sleeves rolled up over his elbows and he wiped his hands on the already filthy pants that he’d been wearing for the last three days.
He had two more lawn chairs and on the ground next to his chair was a Styrofoam cooler filled with ice and canned Cokes and a halfpint of whiskey on top of the ice. By the afternoon the drinks and whiskey would be gone and the healthiest of the catches would be nestled in the melting ice. He had figured he’d spend the late afternoon skinning and filleting the fish and by tomorrow they would be sitting around the kitchen table with fried fish and hushpuppies and he’d get the woman to make coleslaw and then they could sit on the back porch with coffee and look out across the land that always seemed more vast to him under the night sky. The line hit and he reeled it in and a catfish that needed a few more pounds flapped at the end of the line. He twisted the hook from its lip and walked to the edge of the water and he set the fish into the water gently and the fish squirmed and stirred up the mud and then disappeared. He sat down again and baited another hook with another cricket and let it fly.
It’s finally come on, he thought. It’s finally come on though it didn’t seem like it ever would and I didn’t think I’d be here to see it anyway. He looked at his watch and knew his son should be coming along any time now. If that truck cranked up.
He looked around the place. He spent most of his time sitting now after a lifetime of getting up and doing. Buying small houses nobody else wanted and painting them and replacing rotted floors and gutting kitchens and gutting moldy bathrooms and doing the roofing and tiling the floors and whatever else had to be done. Whatever he could do with his boy. Teaching Russell how to run wire and swap plumbing and how to measure twice so that you made damn sure you cut it right the first time. Making these little houses something he was proud of and then renting them to people who sometimes paid the rent and sometimes disappeared but no matter if it was good people or bad people living in them, there was always something to do. Always something dripping or an outlet not working or a dishwasher not running. Always something to do and if there wasn’t something to do there was always another little rundown house somewhere that nobody wanted that was sitting there like a fallen tree in some forgotten forest and he would buy it and bring it back to life. There was hardly a neighborhood in town that hadn’t been touched by him and Russell. Hardly a day had gone by since he had to give it all up that he didn’t wish with the next sunrise that his back and legs would let him do the things he used to do. And not a day had gone by since his boy had been taken up into the Delta and put behind those walls that he hadn’t prayed at night that God would keep him alive until Russell came back home.
And here it was.
He had prayed twice as hard after Liza passed. Hated like hell that she never got to see him again. Died with her boy locked up in that place. Paying for what he had done. Mitchell had come home one evening and found her lying down in the backyard next to her tomato garden. Work gloves on and sleeves rolled up and lying folded like an old doll. Eyes shut. A tranquil expression on her face. Gone. He hadn’t thought much of death until then but after she was buried the thought of death seemed to follow him home from the grave site. It sat with him on the porch as he smoked a cigarette. Sat with him in the quiet of the house as he read the newspaper. Sat with him at the kitchen table as he drank coffee in the morning. Sat with him in his truck as he went about doing what he had always done and as his knees began to go as he knelt down to paint and as the strength in his arms began to go as he lifted ladders in and out of the back of the truck the thought of death seemed not only to sit with him and follow him around but also to take root in his mind and spread into his heart and his dreams. His muscles ached and his joints ached and his spirit ached and though he prayed that he would see Russell come down that driveway again he didn’t much believe he would see it happen. Could tell by the way he felt. On several occasions he had written letters to Russell, trying to convey things to him that he didn’t anticipate being able to say to him in person but he had never mailed any of those letters. Had ripped them into pieces and burned them on the dirt floor of the barn. Didn’t want Russell to have to carry around any more than he was already carrying around.
His despair strengthened with time and with the emptiness of the place and with nothing to fill his hours and in his despair he had driven down to Bogalusa, Louisiana, to see his only brother. Hoping for some kind of reassurance. Some kind of revelation. And he found it. Found her there standing barefoot in front of the shack she lived in, which was in line with the long row of shacks they all lived in. Dark hair and caramel skin and dark eyes like the rest of them. The men and the women and the children and the babies. All of them there to work the fields and the machines for half of what Clive used to pay for the fields and the machines to be worked. She was standing there barefoot. Her skirt down to her ankles, made for a taller woman. Her arms folded across her chest and she followed him with her eyes as he walked with Clive past the row of shacks out toward the edge of the sugarcane where Clive aimed to show Mitchell the bright red tractor that had replaced the dull red tractor.
And after they had inspected the tractor and were walking back she was still there. Her arms still folded. Her eyes still following him. And he had nodded to her and she had smiled at him. As he and Clive sat on the back deck and finished their second cup of coffee, Mitchell asked if he could hire her. If she was willing.
“Hell. I don’t know,” Clive said. “You’ll have to ask her yourself.”
She was willing. Her husband dead before she had followed her sisters and their husbands to the sugarcane farm. A grown daughter somewhere back in Mexico. She had put all her belongings into a pillowcase and then she had gotten in the truck with Mitchell and they had driven back to Mississippi with the sun falling down a clear sky behind them, shades of soft pinks and reds seeming to push them toward home. A quiet between them. But a different kind of quiet. A shared quiet.
Not a damn thing wrong with it. That’s what he’d come to after the first days and weeks of the strange woman in his house. It was something he had to come to so that he could fend off the guilt, the feeling that he was somehow being unfaithful to the life he had known with his wife. He’d finally shaken off the guilt as he and the woman came to figure each other out. He couldn’t understand a word she said and she couldn’t understand him. Not at first. They had pointed and nodded mostly until they began to figure it out and now if he wanted a glass of water or if she needed a blanket there were words. Larger pieces of something real that hadn’t been there before.
He looked at his watch again. Something hit at his line but he ignored it.
He expected his son to understand but he didn’t know and he’d soon find out. Not a damn thing wrong with it. Liza had passed and Russell was gone and a silence had fallen over the place that kept him awake at night and the woman had put an end to that silence. He looked at the house and Consuela walked toward him. She carried a basket and her wide hips swayed and he admired the shine of her black hair even from far away. She approached and sat down in the lawn chair beside him, stretching out her legs and crossing her bare feet. In the basket were purple hull peas and she began to snap and shell them. He had arrived at a point in his life when he could more clearly imagine the end tha
n remember the past and it didn’t matter where she came from because there wasn’t a goddamn thing wrong with it. He smiled at her and she smiled back.
He heard the Ford when it turned into the driveway. He couldn’t see the highway from the pond with the gravel road going up and then down between the highway and the house but he knew the sound from twentysomething years of driving it. From twentysomething years of fixing it. He watched the road and then the truck appeared and eased along the gravel. The truck had been so much a part of his life for so long that for a moment he felt as if he were watching himself drive toward the house. He smiled to himself and then the line hit again and he reeled in a big one. But he didn’t want to mess with it right now and there was plenty more time and plenty more fish so he unhooked the fish and put it back and then he sat down in the chair. He set the rod and reel on the ground and he crossed his legs and waited on his son to get out of the truck and walk on over.
I made it, he thought. It finally come on.
The house was a modest one-story that Russell had helped his father paint the year before the wreck. It sat at the front of twelve acres that was wooded with patches of pines and oaks that had become less dense over the years with each passing hurricane or tornado. There had once been cows and a few horses and a couple of acres of corn but Mitchell had given all that up after Liza died. He’d sold everything but the tractor he used to bush hog and the two-man boat he used to sit in out in the middle of the pond when the sun was low and the sky was lavender and there was that particular kind of loneliness that came with a fading day. The small pond was a hundred yards behind the house and had been stocked with catfish when Russell was a kid and had spent summers sitting on the same bank that Mitchell sat on now, drinking orange sodas and eating oatmeal pies. And now there was a new roof and a different porch swing and he wondered how much of this Russell would notice.
Desperation Road Page 4
