by Richard Ford
“What about him?” she said.
He glanced down the list of cages. “His time must be about up?”
She giggled and pulled a cellophane bag of peanut hulls out of her shirt pocket and began feeding hulls to the coons one at a time. “His time came and went,” she said.
He looked at the girl quickly, feeling bested. “I thought you said he didn’t get hungry till the sun went down.” He walked up toward Leo’s cage.
“I can’t tell Leo when to get hungry,” she said.
“I didn’t hear nothin,” he said, looking up at the window with the chintz curtains flagging gently outside.
“Leo don’t make no noise,” she said. “Sometimes the rabbit makes a little peep, like a bird, but usually it just gives in and don’t say anything.”
Leo was lying against the back wire tearing off a piece of the rabbit’s haunch and beginning to chew it deliberately. He searched the ground, but there was no sign of a struggle in the dust, as if the rabbit might have made a dash when Leo decided his time had come. There were two skid tracks where Leo had dragged the rabbit back to his own precinct, and it occurred to him that the rabbit might just have died of fright. After sitting in the sun all day staring at Leo’s eyes, the final seconds might have been too much for him, and when he saw Leo get up, it may have been over right then. The long wait must have got him. Leo gurgled at a sinew and pawed it with his front feet, stretching it backward until it snapped.
He felt an awful anguish and looked at the girl, who was watching him, squatting in the dirt. He felt maybe somebody ought to sit down and talk to her, and tell her she wasn’t doing things right, give her an idea on how things ought to be. Except it wasn’t his business and there couldn’t be any use making it be. If she wanted to feed rabbits to wildcats, then there wouldn’t be any way on earth to make her quit, since somebody had taught her that that was a thing to do. And there wasn’t any changing that.
“What time is it?” he said.
She looked at her wrist watch. “Seven-forty. Dark by eight,” she said.
He saw the sky was steely down to the horizon. A flicker of bat slipped through the air and disappeared.
“Lonnie won’t be back till late,” she said.
“Do me a favor.” He rubbed his fingers through his hair.
“Depends,” she said.
“Tell that lady”—he eyed the window, inside of which the air was dark—“I had to leave.”
The girl got up off the ground and dusted her jeans and stuffed the cellophane in her shirt pocket. “Who’s paying?” she said.
He opened his wallet and took out a bill.
“Three dollars and seventeen cents,” she said, watching the empty Grapette bottle dangle off his finger.
“Keep the rest for the favor,” he said.
“She ain’t sick, is she?”
“Tell her I said I had to take off. She won’t care.”
“She ain’t going to like it,” the girl said confidently, rocking on her heels.
“She won’t care,” he said.
“What you say,” the girl said, and glared at him. “You ain’t foolin nobody.”
“I know it,” he said, moving toward the truck.
The girl stared at him coldly.
He could see the last stippets of gold in her hair. He took a look at the window and saw the curtains swell into the breeze, and started for the truck. He dropped the bottle in the oil can by the pumps, and the girl watched him a time, then broke for the house, her ponytail licking her shoulders as she disappeared in the store, the screen door whacking shut. He could hear her hit the inside stairs. He let the truck idle, watching the door as if he were waiting for the woman and the girl to come boiling out like bloodhounds. But no one came, and he let the truck idle out onto the road. He watched the house in the mirror while it sank, and it satisfied him to think that when the woman woke she could as soon feel kindly toward the world, and toward herself, and toward Larry and maybe toward him.
At eight-fifteen it was dark. He passed Tucumcari, a strip of dairy bars and gray stucco buildings with lights frozen in the darkness. He watched the drive-in lots and along inside the lighted cafés for someone that might be the girl’s brother, some kid standing up against a building waiting to get sober. He watched for a flat-bed truck parked back in the gravel lots, but there was nothing to fit what he had made up in his mind, a boy holding a bottle by the skinny neck, staring cross-eyed at the sky as if he hadn’t figured out some mystery that plagued him. He stopped at the east edge of town and ate Mexican food and a bowl of custard and drove the thirty miles into Glenrio and from there past the signs into Texas before midnight.
9
In the night he had driven over the flat husk of Texas to Oklahoma. After two o’clock his legs cramped and his eyes got tricky, framing figures on the fringe of the road caught in the headlights, then vanishing when the truck got into them. At two-thirty he hid the truck in a pecan orchard, slept an hour on a sawbuck table and woke in the cold odor of green pecans, pressed dew in his eyes and started into Arkansas.
The letter in his shoe said:
Robard. I have me a plastic bag and a way to use it once I see you in your flesh. It can’t wait forever. You have got to come and get it. This here is me. Beuna.
Underneath her signature was a mark on the paper where she had pressed something wet, then allowed it to dry before folding it in the envelope so the paper was wrinkled and blotched a fishy yellow shade, but wasn’t stuck together. Around it she had drawn a circle in ink with an arrow pointing down from the words “This here is me.” It made him feel hot inside. Though it was true enough that after that hotness expired nothing else was certain. The best he could remember, Helena was a weedy cotton plant on the skin of the delta. He had stayed around in 1959, working the Missouri Pacific in Memphis and deadheading down to save rent, boarding with his mother’s cousin two days a week, and whomping Beuna both nights in the attic, then spending the day slipping around waiting for dark. All of which added up to maybe fifteen days sum that he had ever spent in Helena, Arkansas, which made him nervous when he let his mind play on it. Since fifteen days was almost too little an acquaintance to hope to come back after twelve years and carry on what he was hoping to carry on in the midst of everybody and have it work out the way he wanted without there being a slip-up somewhere and somebody noticing some irregularity. And he figured the only thing to do would be to be fast enough and cute enough when the time came to get out before the shooting started.
He had gone about settling some things before he left Bishop, standing at the screen, explaining to himself that in behalf of being smart, he couldn’t afford any reliances, since there wasn’t anybody to rely on and since there wasn’t any reason to believe the place or anybody in it would turn out any better or kinder or any more understanding than they had been when he tried to make it honest, working for old man Rudolph, and had gotten squeezed out by the innate stinginess that infested the place and everybody in it like an air that you couldn’t breathe, but couldn’t live without. He had just told himself that very thing over and over standing at the door waiting for good dark to settle, and by the time he left Bishop, he had it fixed in his mind.
Except that back behind whatever little plans he had was at least the reliance that the place would hold him up long enough to do what he came to do, pay him, in a sense, for having been born there and having put a good-hearted attempt into staying when it was clear nobody like him ever should stay. And the moment he figured he had kept that reliance, in spite of all he had schooled himself to believe, he had had the strongest unfaltering feeling he had made a mistake somewhere, and that the thing he ought to do was turn around and go back without another say-so. Except it was way too late by then, and he couldn’t ever turn around now, not after getting this close. And it would all have to be worth it.
10
In Little Rock he ate breakfast and got back outside in the chill to the phone booth. He took off his shoe, got the let
ter, and flattened it on the shelf where he could see. He got Helena and wrote the number at the bottom of the letter just below where it said “This here is me,” and dialed the operator. The phone started ringing a long way off. Morning traffic came slowly. He watched two policemen saunter out of the café and stand looking at the truck, talking like they thought they wanted to buy it, then laugh at something and drive out of the café lot.
The phone was answered by a voice several feet from the receiver. “All right,” the voice said.
“Beuna?” He could barely get the word audible.
“What do you think?” she said. He heard the receiver strike something hard as if she were trying to hammer more words out. “Who is this?” she said, her voice drifting away then reviving. “W.W., it better not be your asshole trick.”
“It’s me,” he said, feeling the words stop up in his throat.
“I’m hanging up,” she said. He could hear her pounding the plunger. “Get the sheriff,” she said.
“It’s Robard,” he whispered. And everything seemed to slide back, like a whole panoramic world had moved into the background, leaving him in the calamitous center, alone and unprotected. A fishy sweat crept up in his palms, and his short hairs got stout.
“Who?”
“Robard.”
“Oh, shit!” she said, as if some foulness had happened where she was.
“Beuna?”
“Where are you? God!”
“Little Rock,” he said, switching hands and wiping his face.
“I’ll come meet you,” she said, all out of breath.
“No,” he said. “I’ll be there. Don’t do nothin.”
“Robard, I’ve been so awful,” she said, sobbing. “It’s giving me the shakes to hear you.”
“Don’t do nothin,” he said. His hands started trembling.
“Robard?”
“What?”
“I’m gonna come on the phone.”
“Don’t now,” he said.
“I’m going to, it’s just doing it.”
“Don’t, just don’t do that, goddamn it now!”
“I can’t help it, things comes on you.”
“No!” he yelled at the receiver.
“Robard?”
“What?”
“Can we go someplace? It ain’t got to be far.”
“We’ll see,” he said. His mind sunk into gloom, as if he were caught in some commotion he needed to control but couldn’t quite make slow down.
“Robard?”
“What?”
“I got my little bag?”
“I remember.” He could see the little bag, without knowing exactly what could happen with it.
“We’re going to have to go to Memphis to do it. There’s these rooms in the Peabody Hotel that’s got shower baths with eight nozzles that shoots you everywhere at once.”
“All right,” he said, gasping.
“Robard?”
“What?”
“I want to do it in that thing with you.”
“We will,” he said, wondering what you did. “I’ll call you.”
“W.W. ain’t here days. He’s workin at the BB plant and playing ball at Forrest City. He don’t come back until late.”
“All right,” he said, his mind whipping. “I can’t come today.”
“You got you some girl?”
“No,” he said, pressing his head against the window glass and leaning until the booth started to groan and he had his entire weight concentrated on just one cold spot of glass.
“Why can’t you?”
“Look, I’ll call you,” he said.
“You ain’t got to bite my head off,” she said.
“I got to go.”
“Do you love me?”
“I can’t talk about that.”
“You said ‘All right’ the last time. I remember.”
“What else you want me to say?”
“I don’t know,” she said in a small voice. “Say ‘All right’ again and that’ll be enough.”
“All right.”
A silence opened through the line.
“Just think about that,” he said, “and them shower baths.”
“God,” she said, moaning. “You’re going to make me come.”
“I’ll be there,” he said, wanting to get out.
“Robard?”
“Huh.”
“Is something the matter with you?”
“Nothing is,” he said. He folded the letter with one hand and stuffed it in his shirt pocket on top of the Butterfinger wrapper.
“I thought something was the matter,” she said.
“Everything’s wonderful,” he said.
“It is,” she said. “Don’t you think everything’s wonderful?”
“Yes, hon, I do.”
“I do,” she said sweetly. “Now that you’re here, I do. Everything’s been so awful.”
“I’m hurrying,” he said, unable to get his breath again.
“Oh, good God,” she said, and hung up.
11
He stopped in Hazen to buy cigarettes and walked toward where the old man kept his rooms. Hazen was fifty miles from Little Rock, a rice prairie town along the Rock Island, a white stone grain elevator by the tracks, a few cages and poultry houses catering to duck hunters, and a smatter of houses and mobile homes in the oaks and crape myrtles, and all the rest save a pecan orchard given up to the rice, planted in tawny, dented fields to the next town, twenty miles in all directions.
By the time he had come up from Helena eleven years ago and gone to work for Rudolph, watching his sluice gates in the summer and sitting out winters in the little shotgun house the old man had built as a warming house for the duck hunters, Rudolph’s troubles were all over with and there wasn’t anything left for the old man to do but sit up nights and wonder about it.
He crossed the Rock Island tracks and walked down the right of way through the suck weeds and across the gravel path to where he could see the white plank house with the old man’s rooms recessed in the dark corner under the south eave. He could remember the old man slumped on the broken shingle of his mattress, his undershirt catching the pale light in the room, coughing and snorting and staring across the empty floor, trying to think of something to say by way of important instructions, before he sent him back to the pump house to tend the gates. He could hear the landlady downstairs, rattling the tiny trays she used to coddle the old man’s eggs, while Rudolph rested his belly on his thighs, drifting in and out of sleep, waiting for the word to come into his head that he could give and that might make sense to somebody. Finally he would murmur something low out of the cavity of his chest, some gate to close or spillway to wind open for an hour or a ditch to inspect for seepage, anything to keep the help moving water from place to place. The old man would stop and snort and gaze out in the dark, and he would slip down the stairs, through the hot kitchen, and take out across the cold fields. Like that.
When he had first come up from Helena there had been, he remembered, a man named Buck Bennett who had worked for old man Rudolph, hired to run local fishermen off the reservoirs, patrol the roads, and see over the property when he wasn’t too drunk to find the deputy’s badge the old man paid for, or too drunk to keep his old jeep out of the bar ditches, where the old man promised it would remain, since he wouldn’t let a wrecker come on the property to pull him out, though he said Buck could come and look at his jeep whenever he wanted to if he had any doubts about its still being there.
Buck would come down late in the evening, drink a pint of whiskey, and sit on the one claw-toed chair the pump cabin had and talk about the old man.
Buck said that the old man had come down sometime in 1941, from Republican City, Nebraska, had sold his half of his father’s pig farm to his brother Wolfgang and moved himself and two steamer trunks on the train to Little Rock and put himself up in a commercial hotel at the foot of the Main Street bridge and bought himself a Buick coupe and drove all ov
er the country between Little Rock and Memphis looking for cheap land. And after not very long, Buck said, he bought eight hundred acres of swamp fifteen miles back out of Hazen, land that no farmer had even thought to abandon, much less cultivate, since La Fourche Creek ran straight through the middle of it and flooded every spring, leaving a solid counterpane of silt and randy water on top of the entire parcel so that even the rice farmers had given up on it and just kept it for duck hunting. He said that Rudolph, who was in his thirties and strong as a bulldog, had gotten hold of the land and practically gnawed every tree on it with his own teeth and built up a maze of bar ditches and ramparts and iron sluice gates to channel the water out of the lows and into an old dead-tree reservoir he dug out with three World War I scoopers. In a year’s time he had gotten the land set up to be a farm, built a two-story shingle house and a metal windmill, and transported an Austrian man and his family down from Republican City to live on it and run the farm, and promptly moved himself out of the commercial hotel and into the R. E. Lee on Markham Street and fell in love with the lady who owned it and six more like it in Memphis and Shreveport, and whose husband had been drowned falling out of an inner tube on Lake Nimrod, leaving it all to her.
Buck said that before very long Rudolph had communicated his feelings to the lady, a small wiry red-haired woman named Edwina, and that they were married in the hotel lobby with a bang, and that right away Rudolph moved up to her suite on the eleventh floor and started ordering baskets of fruit and cases of whiskey and running the bellboys up and down the elevators bringing him one thing after another, until Edwina had to tell him the hotel was for other things than just to make him happy.
When the farm started making more money than he could count (though not more than he could save), Rudolph began carrying Edwina’s friends to shoot ducks on the big reservoir or back in the woods where he had left the water standing in the winter. Though, Buck said, every time he did it he arranged to get mad and raise hell with everybody for driving too fast on the gravel roads that he had graded personally, or for killing suzies instead of greenheads, or for some infraction of the rules that he was making up as he went along, and finally ran all her friends off entirely when they wouldn’t do things the way he wanted them done, though Buck said it was hard to figure out just how that was. He began carrying an old steel-barrel 12-gauge across the seat of his car as a convincer when he came on somebody he didn’t like or wanted to run off. And all the time living in Little Rock like a caliph and staying up in the suite drinking Evan Williams and eating fruit and ordering people around including Edwina, and making everybody wish they had never seen him.
