by Richard Ford
In two weeks a letter came postmarked Helena, Arkansas, with a message written on Holiday Inn stationery. It said:
Robard:
lam home. W. W. says he will pitch at Oakland again and is still at Tacoma playing kid games. His mind will change. I love you more. B.
He had sat on the steps of the post office thinking about W. W. set up in a strange little bungalow in Tacoma, W. W. wondering what could happen to a man’s whole life in the space of one week and how he could get it all back on track and pry Beuna loose from her stepfather’s house and get her back where he was so he could have a chance at Oakland again, where somebody could see him.
A week later a letter arrived that simply said:
Robard:
W. W. has seen the light I knew. . . . Beuna.
He figured she must have made a bet with herself that she could treat it all like she was the victim and he was the culprit for wanting to stay and pitch baseball, and she had won it.
And after that a letter every week from Helena pleading with him to come, always on the same rose onionback, with loud promises and whatever smells she felt were useful to what she was asking. And he had stayed and stayed and put each letter in the grate and tried to forget about it.
Though he wondered just what it was he had seen years ago and seen up in Tulare the instant he said, “All right,” when she was hoping for something richer, and what it was that made her strand W. W. out in some strange foreign country, just so he’d quit doing the one thing he knew to do. Twelve years ago he might have believed it was just some act of girlishness she played at, brought along by the fact that she liked mingling with her own cousin ten feet out of reach of her mother’s headboard—and that that right there had caused enough private turmoil to make some show of remorse creditable. And the only thing like remorse that she knew then was to make herself look cast down by something mysterious she couldn’t explain and that in all the commotion going on at 3 A.M. there wouldn’t be time to talk about. Except that didn’t work out. It had gone on too long to be just girlishness. And when he had seen her in Tulare, she had fixed on him with her pale flat eyes like a specimen she was studying, and there had been again the same forlorn miscalculation he had always seen, just as though it marked a vacancy she was beside herself wondering how to fill.
3
At five-thirty he had gotten up, dressed, and driven up the Sierra to Mammoth and sat in the truck while the light got darker and turned green just as the rain commenced through the fog. At six-thirty the foreman drove up in a company truck, climbed up into the bed wearing a yellow rain suit, and read off a paper that said the job was closing because the state had to make a study. The foreman said a job was open at Keeler laying pipe for a feeder to the aqueduct, and anybody wanting to sign ought to make the noon list. Men started moving off even before he had finished, heading for their trucks, anxious to get out of the drizzle and down to Keeler before the list filled and they had to scrounge. When the foreman had finished reading the paper, he stuffed it in his pocket, climbed back in the truck and drove off.
He walked back to the truck thinking he could drive back and eat breakfast with Jackie and think about going to Keeler when he’d slept.
He drove out from Mammoth back to the highway south. Up the Sierras the rain was pulling apart, opening gaps to daylight. He was beginning to think that there were some things he hadn’t understood. From the first, eight years ago, when he had left Hazen and transported himself and her across the country, and had started to pick work where he could up the Sierras, he had been as desperate as anybody, and every bit as panicked when a job shut down, and had gone off to wherever there was another one opened. And he had felt the same panic starting, listening to the foreman, the same creepiness the others had disappeared with to Keeler to patch into whatever was there. Except he couldn’t go off and start opening ditches and pitching pipe without having made a choice. When the first job closed in Lone Pine eight years ago, in 130-degree heat, he had panicked. And the first thing he remembered seeing was men rushing like they were bolt out of a cannon. And he’d gone with them because he’d gotten caught up and couldn’t resist. And all that rigmarole, he thought, had just given the panic something to work on, and switching jobs up and down the Inyo had come to seem like the best solution because it was a solution, and that was better than nothing.
Though after eight years now, he thought, he ought to wonder if it was the best solution anymore, and in fact if it had ever been. If he wanted the job he could just drive down in the morning and stand at the site until somebody goggled over in the heat, and step in without any questions.
So that what he was thinking about, of course, was Beuna. All those years of running desperation and internal commotion getting jobs and being anxious might have been just a lot of useless barging around, like a man with his sleeve in a thresher. And that whatever she had infused in him back in Helena, twelve years ago, hadn’t been dormant, given all the activity it seemed to have sponsored, but just misunderstood.
The rain had spread out into a silver sheet below the fog. The truck struck out from under the clouds to the light and started off the long grade toward the desert, where he could feel the air already hotter, two thousand feet up off the flats. The road he could see down below bent across an oval meadow demarking the edge of the Sierra and the desert. A file of poplars divided the meadow along the shoulder connecting the toenail of mountain to the outskirts of Bishop, which sat off a ways in the purplish mist halfway down the horizon.
But what happens to you, he wondered, worrying already—what happens when she manages to infect you with something dangerous, keeping it alive for years on the strength of gardenia odor and a few flourishing letters? What happens when you recognize it’s important—what you did and what she did and would do, and when and how and to whom, and that it’s left you with a kind of ruinous anxiety that just one thing will satisfy?
He took the long curve down into the stretch of shaded road toward town. It worried him, because he knew that things in your life didn’t disappear once they were begun, and that your life just got thick with beginnings, accrued from one day to the next, until you reached an age or a temperament when you couldn’t support it anymore and you had to retire from beginnings and let your life finish up on momentum. And he wasn’t to that point yet! So that whatever she had fostered inside him couldn’t be counted on simply to retire, but to protrude into the middle of everything indefinitely and give everybody a bad time, unless serious adjustments were made to transform her and it into something he could live with, in the way everybody lived with things.
He drove into town to the front of the post office and stopped, thinking, in the heat, that seeing Beuna as an impediment or as something to be survived was only one way of looking at her, and not by any necessity the way she was. He stepped in where the air was cool and dry. The lobby was a long empty arcade with wired-up skylights that clouded the room with submerged shadows. He picked up the letter at the registry and walked back out into the sunlight, looking up the street to see if he saw anyone he knew. He thought about breakfast and decided to let it slide.
He stuck the letter under the visor and started back toward the mountains. He drove out across the meadow until he crossed the Works Progress bridge at Inyo Creek and stopped and got out and walked back to the railing. The breeze stiffened and flicked the page, and he read the words over and over, poring over them, his lips forming the words each time. And after a while he walked down in the yellow and green checkered light and stepped into the sedge and laid the envelope on the surface and watched it turn and dance away until it snuffed like a flicker of light. He puzzled for a moment at the letter, the page fluttering in his hand, and suddenly folded it into quarters and backed out of the wet grass. He climbed the bank and crammed the page down inside his instep and started back toward the truck.
He thought again that to see Beuna as an obstacle was only one narrow-minded way of looking at her. And not the on
ly way. Since another was to think that he was not finished with this part of his life yet, wife or no wife, this part left with Beuna, and with women in general, and that there was still this much left, this much of an opportunity to do with the way he wanted, and that thirty-four was still young, inasmuch as you only got to live one time and this was his time right now.
4
He drove down into Arizona and slept in the afternoon behind a motel in Flagstaff. He got up at four o’clock and drove straight until dark, and slept on the truck seat outside Bluewater, New Mexico, and woke up in the high sunshine and drove into Grants to eat breakfast. At Grants he stepped out in the breeze, between the highway and the Santa Fe yards, and watched cattle cars being switched onto the main line from south Texas, the cattle asleep on their feet in the cool tinted air. He watched the train get made up and disappear out to the east, then drove to Albuquerque and up again across the purple lip of the Manzanos back into the desert.
Out of Santa Rosa a Buick convertible was pulled down off the road and a blond woman in white pants was standing beside it in the sun, shielding her eyes with one hand and waving the other hand lazily as though she were signaling someone up the road. The Buick had had its left taillight bent in, and the warning signal was flashing dimly in the sunlight. He looked up the highway to see if someone was standing back up on the shoulder, but there was no one, only the black imprint of Santa Rosa quavering on the low table of the desert.
When he stopped, the woman quit waving and rested her hand on her hip, but kept her eyes shielded with her fingers. He got out and walked along the car, looked down in the back seat and saw it strewn with beer cans, some with beer spilling out.
“Sun’s real bad for your features, know that?” the woman said indifferently, removing her hand so he could see her small face.
“What’d you do to it?” He motioned at the car.
“He says the pump’s busted, but I don’t know nothin about it. I know it stopped.” She pinched up a piece of her blouse and pulled it away from the skin.
“So where’s he gone?” he said.
“Variadero, building a hamburger palace.” She shaded her eyes again and studied him as if she had heard something she hadn’t liked. He slid in and waggled the key.
“It wouldn’t do me no good to go turning nothin.” She stepped up into the shade of the car and plumped at her hair.
He tried the key. The motor turned over nicely, but quit short of starting. He held the accelerator down and twiddled the key back and forth trying to spark it, but it wouldn’t fire, and he finally stopped and squinted at her standing outside in the heat. She looked a lot like a lot of women he’d passed up, little blue-star ear studs, hot skin that made her look older than she was. It made him just want to slide away.
She stiffened her mouth. “Half them’s Larry’s,” she said, flicking her eyes away, “He drinks his breakfast on the way to work, I drink mine on the way home.” She laughed. “I don’t pick up no hitchikers, though.”
“Nobody said you did,” he said, staring at the big chrome dashboard trying to figure if one of the gauges was measuring what was wrong with the engine.
“I don’t, either,” she said.
“That’s good,” he said, and climbed out. “Look here, I can’t get your boat fired up.” He flicked the sweat off his chin.
“What the hell am I supposed to do?” she said, glaring out at him.
“I’ll take you down the road,” he said.
“Curvo,” she said, raveling her mouth into a smirk.
“How far is it?”
“What difference does it make if you’re going that direction?” she said.
“None,” he said, and started back toward the truck.
She reached inside, yanked up a split package of beer, and came behind him. “I got my valuables out,” she said, and laughed.
“You going to leave it blinking?” he said, looking unhappily at the beer.
“Hell with it,” she said, and climbed in the truck.
She sat high up on the seat, her hand flounced out the window letting the breeze flit between her fingers. She was different the first moment she got in the truck, a little more fragile a framework, he thought, than she had been standing outside beside the car. She had a small round bruise underneath her ear which she worried with her fingers, and every time the wind stripped her hair back against her temples, he got another look at it.
“Air temp makes a difference,” she said, watching the hot air through her fingers. “They put ’em in trucks.”
“Is that right?”
She looked at him, then turned her face into the breeze.
“What is it your husband does?” he said.
She cranked the window up and gave him a stern look. “Hod carrier. He’s eight years younger than I am.” She reached forward, ripped the package of beer a little more and set a can on the glove box door. “California’s the other way, ain’t it?” she said, pulling the top.
“Is that right?”
“You done stole something, ain’t you?” she said, letting her head roll against the window frame.
“Off.”
“You ain’t stole nothin, then. I steal off every day, but it don’t get me anyplace.” She laughed. “You think I look old?”
He looked at her short neck, and he tried to make out he was estimating. “How old are you?” he said.
“That ain’t the point,” she said, having another drink of the beer and setting the can on the armrest. “That ain’t the goddamned point. Point is, how old do I look? Old? You think I look old?” She watched him carefully to see if he was thinking over telling a lie.
“No,” he said.
She raised her head slightly and widened her eyes. “I’m thirty-one. Do I look like it?”
“No,” he said, thinking that if he had one guess out of a hundred possible ages, thirty-one would’ve been second after forty-one. “That means the old man’s twenty-three.”
She gave him a surprised look. “I ain’t worried about that,” she said.
“Nobody said so.”
She took another drink of her beer. “I take him to work in the morning and come get him in the evening. Them little town bitches come wherever he’s at and switch their asses in his face, but they know I’ll be pulling up there in my white Buick at six o’clock holding a sack of beer in one hand and something better in the other, so he don’t have to go nowhere to have fun but with me. I’m the goddamn fun,” she said.
“Where is it you live?” he said, snuffing his cigarette.
“Rag-land.” She pointed off into the desert, where he could see the gauzy pancake hills in the south.
“How far you drive every day?”
“Seventy there, sixty back,” she said. “I mix it up.”
He started figuring miles and looked at her and added it up again, and looked forlornly down the highway. She took a last long gulp of beer and let the can drop between her legs, pinching her mouth in a hard little pucker, as if she had just decided something.
“That’s a hell of a ways,” he said. “I’d let them switch their ass if it was me.”
“You worry about you,” she said. “I own the Buick. If I want to drive it to the moon, I will.”
She turned away and stared at the desert. He figured he’d just get out of it while he had the chance and make a supreme effort to keep his mouth shut.
“I just don’t want to lose him,” she said slowly, speaking so softly he had to look at her to see if she was talking to him. “I’ve had about as much trouble as I can stand,” she said. “I’d just like to have things easier, you know?”
“Yeah,” he said.
She pulled another beer out of the package and peeled off the top. “We ain’t been married but four months,” she said, taking a tiny sip and rotating the rim against her lip. “I had a husband to die on me seven months ago. TB of the brain.” She looked at him appraisingly. “We knew he had it, but didn’t figure it would kill him
quick as it did.” She smacked her lips, looked at him again, and wrinkled her nose. “Flesh started falling, and I had him in the ground in a month.”
She gradually seemed to be taking on appeals she hadn’t had, and he decided just to let it go.
“In Salt Lake, see?” She was getting engrossed and tapping her beer against the window post. “We was in the LDS, you know?”
He nodded.
“I was the picture, you know, the whole time we was married.” Her face got stony. “And after he died they all came around and brought me food and cakes and fruit and first one thing, you know. But when I tried to get a little loan to buy me a car so I could go to work, they all started acting like somebody was callin them to supper. And I had been the picture of what you’re supposed to be. I let ’em have their meetings right in my house.” She drew her mouth up tight. “Raymond was born one—see? But I was raised on a horse farm outside of Logan.”
She took another sip of beer and held it in front of her teeth and stared at the desert. It was past midday. The sun had turned the desert pasty all the way to where the mountains stuck up. He watched her while she looked away, watched her breasts rise and fall, and maneuvered so as to see the white luff of fabric between her blouse and her shoulder showing the curve of her breast, and it made him feel a little shabby and a little bad and he disliked himself.
The woman let her breath out slowly. “I had a friend that had that Buick, just sitting in his garage.” She kept looking at the desert. “I told him if he’d let me pay it off a little bit every month, I’d buy it. I always wanted a Buick, and it never seemed like I’d get one. It’s queer to have to get down before all your dreams start coming true.” She looked at him and her nostrils got wide. “Anyway, I quit the LDS right there,” she said, “and got the hell out of that Salt Lake City. Let me just tell you, don’t be fooled by them. They’re cheap-ass, I swear to God.”
