A Piece of My Heart

by Richard Ford

  He kept his arms outward like a giant bird soaring in the gloom. “Everything I think I know is ambiguous,” he said. “I’m flying apart a mile a millisecond for that very reason, which you’d notice if your attention span were long enough.”

  “I don’t think so,” she said. “You do have dandruff things in your eyebrows.” She gave him a disapproving look and began examining her cuticle.

  He moved out of the dark and back in again, making the floor squeeze.

  “You must be cold with no clothes on,” she said. “Why don’t you get in with me? I’ll make you nice and toasty.” She smiled and raised an arm, opening the spot he could occupy.

  He frowned out of the shadows. “So what am I supposed to do with the stuff I can’t tolerate?”

  “Let things work themselves out,” she said quietly.

  “Like you,” he said.

  “I have some things put away,” she said, turning on her back and letting her breasts subside. “If it were so wonderful down there I’d live there, wouldn’t I?”

  “If what were?”

  “Mississippi, all that foolishness.”

  “I couldn’t say.”

  “Of course I would,” she said. “I love to live where it’s wonderful. I’m whimsical and fey. I don’t like to think ugly thoughts. You’re very proud to live here, that’s perfectly apparent.”

  “Of course,” he said. “I’ve been waiting my entire life to live in this goddamn lazaret. It’s wonderful here with the whores and the geeks and the murders and the filth.”

  “Does it ever seem to you that fucking me lets you get back sneakily at your past?”

  “It crossed my mind,” he said. “Except it’s not good enough.”

  “I was only teasing,” she said. “Whoever heard of such a thing?”

  “Passions have to come in from someplace,” he said.

  “Then where do mine all come from?”

  “I couldn’t say,” he said.

  “I bid an Amsterdam flight tonight. Would you like it if I bought you a graduation suit? I can buy linen very cheaply.”

  “I’m not attending,” he said.

  “But you need a suit. Isn’t your behind frozen?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then come get warm.” She spread the horse blanket until he could see her thighs in the shadows.

  “I’m testing myself,” he said.

  “Against what, dear?”

  “Against ambiguity. I’m testing my tolerance.”

  “Fine.” She was silent. “But how will you know if you passed?” She put her hands behind her head and lay so that the ellipses of her underarms shone in the darkness.

  “That’s a good question, too.”

  “I really don’t think it matters, though, do you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, I don’t. I couldn’t care less. You’re such a serious boy, Newel, and you’re only twenty-eight.” She reached her fingers back until they touched the chill window glass and her body shone luminously in the vacant moonlight.

  3

  In 1947 they had had a black Mercury and his father had a heart attack and couldn’t call on his accounts alone in the summer months. So his mother drove them. And in the black hot summer they had gone into Louisiana and spent a July day across the river in Vidalia, the first day. And when they had worked as far as Ville Platte the Mercury broke down and they had stayed in the Menges Hotel that had ceiling fans and snake doctors in the rooms. He remembered walking out of the hotel into the still street at noon and going with his father to the agency building, and a woman behind the glass cashier’s in a beaded dress and red lips and short hair, and then back to the room holding his father’s hand. The ceiling had covered over with grease that came out of the still air, and over that a covering of fluffy dust like a sycamore leaf. And the whole time the nine days they were in Ville Platte, he was afraid of the snake doctors and believed they would sting him and kill him though his mother told him again and again that they wouldn’t.

  4

  She lay against the window wall, moistening the hairs of his belly with her lips.

  “You’re very happy with yourself,” he said.

  “Of course,” she hummed. “Aren’t you pleased?” She turned on her stomach and smiled at him.

  He was quiet.

  “That’s good enough,” she said softly, examining his stomach more closely, as if she had discovered something unnatural. “It wouldn’t damage you to be pleased. I don’t punish myself with things I can’t remember.”

  “What do you do?”

  “I don’t let myself become bothered.” She smiled again over the horizon of his stomach. “You have a stevedore’s chest, Newel. How did you make it so big? I admired it from afar when we were children.” She piloted her finger along his ribs until his flesh drew.

  “I’m cold,” he said irritably.

  “Of course you are.” She laughed out loud. “You don’t have any dirt on you. Get under the covers.”

  “I want to tell you a story.”

  “If you’ll get warm. You need some dirt on you. I’m sorry, I don’t tell jokes very well.”

  “Do you want to hear it?”

  “Of course.”

  He sat up straighter and rolled his head against the invisible window. “I went out one time, when I was seventeen, rabbit hunting with Edgar Boynton, out the other side of Edwards, Mississippi, in a silage field he knew about. And we’d been out for about an hour and hadn’t seen a rabbit, and I went off by myself walking down the back of a hedge fence, and just kept walking until I heard somebody shoot. And quick as I heard it, I ran back up and around the hedge fence to where he was. And he was standing there looking at something I couldn’t see until I got close up to him. He wasn’t saying anything, just standing gaping. And when I got to where he was, I looked down in the grass and there was a big barn owl, pushed back up in the silage weeds staring at me and Edgar with his big heart-shaped face and some kind of awful fear in his eyes, and his talons bared and his beak stretched open like he was about to claw us to bits. And Edgar never said a word, he just stared at the owl like the owl had a grip on him, though he had shot one wing off completely and it was lying on the ground between us and him, all white on the bottom without any blood showing. And he had such an awful look, I just stared at him and couldn’t take my eyes off of him. I was being terrified and attracted at the same time. And I just couldn’t move. And right then Edgar’s dog came sniffing up and got a look at the owl and made a lunge at him and Edgar grabbed him by the ear and yanked him back, because the owl would’ve killed the dog if he hadn’t, one wing or not. And I couldn’t help, I was so dumbstruck. The dog was barking and Edgar was yelling at him, jerking him, and the owl began to shove back an inch or two in the silage and his eyes got big and dark, like he was gathering himself for a last burst. And all of a sudden Edgar just shot him full in the face with his shotgun and the owl disappeared, or at least anything that might’ve made you think it was an owl there, just went away in half a second and left a big mess of blood and feathers all matted and stuck together in a clump. And I just sort of got faint, I think, because one second I was looking at the owl, and one second I was looking straight down at something else that was different. Neither one of us knew what was coming until it was over, cause Edgar was behind me and was having a bad time with his dog, and just figured the owl was the easiest thing to get rid of since he’d already blown his wing off, and it was hopeless. But it all happened too fast for me and I guess I fainted, though I never did fall down. He just obliterated him. The owl lost everything in one instant.”

  He slid below the window glass.

  “That’s an awful story,” she said in a bad temper. “I’m sorry you told it to me. It doesn’t make any sense.”

  “What difference does it make?” she said.

  She climbed out onto the bare floor.

  “But you understand it, don’t you?” he said.

  “Of course. B
ut I’m not responsible anymore. Neither are you.”

  She stepped out into the moonlight for a second, and disappeared.

  5

  Out the double window he could see smoke rising against the humped moon, flooding the Illinois sky with the soft luff of corn-plain haze, spreading east in the night, taking the rain off into the Wabash valley, leaving the sky clean and stiffening in the cold.

  At four-thirty he woke in the dark. The train passed onto a long trestle. The palings drummed between himself and the distance. He could make out the mauve exhalations of a river, coiling like a ghost of itself in the gloom. The rest was dark.

  He had sat on the bed watching her put on her uniform.

  “This would be easier to do with the lights,” she said, groping into her overnight case.

  “I like you better in the dark,” he said, studying his abdomen lolled between his thighs.

  “Why is that, Newel?” she said, hunting another piece of clothing on the floor.

  “I don’t like watching women getting dressed,” he said. “I used to watch my mother get dressed, and it embarrassed me. It seemed clinical to me, like talking to her about my penis.”

  “Did she let you watch her undress?”

  “Did Hollis wiggle his zub in your face when you were teeninecy? I’m sure he didn’t.”

  “No,” she said, flicking a comb through her hair, and stepping noisily in the darkness.

  He arranged his feet crosswise under his thighs and spread the sheet over his legs.

  “Tell me something,” she said, dropping her brush in the bag and tipping the lid with her toe.

  “I don’t know anything. You’re the world traveler—you tell me.”

  “There’s no need to be boorish. I simply want to know about your father.”

  “You asked about him before, remember? When I told you he sold starch, you said you didn’t really care.”

  “What happened to him?”

  He rested on his elbows and let the sheet shift off his legs.

  “He got killed in Bastrop, Louisiana, on his way to New Orleans. He got behind a big flat-haul and I guess he was going to pass, I don’t know. He was a traveling salesman and never drove over sixty, never got close behind cars. But he was behind this truck for some reason, and all of a sudden a load of corrugated steel pipe came loose and slid off down in the front seat with him. Cut his head off. Left him sitting in the front seat. He could’ve kept on driving if he’d had a head. It didn’t even bump the compass on the dash.”

  “For God’s sake, Newel. Do you have to dress it up?”

  “I have a son’s right to embellish it.”

  “So how old were you?”

  “You know goddamned well how old I was,” he said, irritated. “What difference does it make how old I was?”

  “I’m simply trying to understand what’s got you so exercised. Today you started walking with a limp in front of the A & P and turned pale as a paper, for no apparent reason. I was just wondering.” She picked her blouse up off the floor.

  “What do you think of Mississippi now? New York is someplace different. This place is certainly different from most places I’ve been in.” She glanced at the walls and continued buttoning her blouse, pausing after each shiny pearl to reestimate the room’s disposition.

  “What is it you want to know?”

  “If it’s scared you,” she said matter-of-factly. “Because your father died in that outlandish way.”

  “I see,” he said, and stationed his head on the pane and pulled the sheet all the way up over his chest, exposing himself below the waist. “It’s not any more threatening than it is out there.” He pushed his finger at the door. “There’s goddamn whores right in this building, right below us. When they’re around things can get real special, you might say, especially if they’re coons, which these ladies certainly are. There’s plenty of everything right there, if you want to be scared. Some poor Pakistani managed to get his throat cut standing in the middle of Kenwood Avenue. That’s fairly outrageous.” He sank back onto the bed.

  “Then what about the other?” she said.

  “What other?”

  “Your father getting killed.”

  “So? Does he need some sort of coda?”

  “How do I know?” she said. “I’m just trying to get you out of this dismal place, through law school, and stop your walking circles around this room like sheep. Though you seem dedicated to rotting in pure filth.”

  She sat on the edge of the bed, waiting.

  “Do you want me to say that happened to him, and I couldn’t cope with my past because it was so awful?”

  “Yes.”

  He fidgeted his brows. “Jesus. There’s more important things than that. How he died was practically slapstick, for Christ sake, compared to how he lived.”

  “So tell me. I have to go.”

  “Does it occur to you ever that you fly to Belgium like other people go down the street for a goddamn knockwurst?”

  “I like it that way,” she said, and smiled. “It’s the Netherlands. Amsterdam is not in Belgium. Someday I’ll sit down and pay attention to all your theories, but I don’t have time right now.”

  He reached his hand in under her shirttail and touched her arm and the curve of her shoulder.

  “We don’t have time for this, either,” she said. “If you don’t tell me, I’m leaving. I have to catch a bus at the Windermere, and catch a cab to catch the bus. It’s complicated.” She stood and walked to where her overnight case sat.

  “It’s not important,” he said.

  “You said it was more important than his dying,” she said, pushing bottles down below the rim. She got on her knees and tried to see inside.

  “Only to me,” he said.

  “Fine,” she said, picking her jacket off the floor and buttoning it. “Then I’m off.”

  “Telling you doesn’t make anything different, goddamn it,” he said. “You’re one of those people who thinks if you can just say something, it doesn’t matter anymore. That’s horse shit.”

  “Then I’ll be marching off,” she said pleasantly.

  “But it’s nothing,” he said.

  “So tell me,” she said softly.

  He struggled up and went and stood by the radiator, his body blue in the darkness.

  “I’ll just sit right here,” she said, finding the bed.

  He could see her silhouetted a moment in the window and then disappear. He could see sodium lights furring the walkways in the park. He tried to imagine how he would feel inside the room, in the first moment when she had gone, and he thought that it would be awful and later much worse.

  “Newel,” she said patiently. “Are you going to tell me?”

  “Sure.” He rubbed his chest. “I have to think how, though. It’s making sense out of things that don’t make much sense. My father isn’t finally important. He’s just adhesive for everything. I puzzle about him to have somebody to puzzle about. But I still end up thinking about just parts all the time. There’s something easy about them I don’t understand, and I can’t hold them together well enough to figure out what it is. It’s ridiculous.”

  “Quit mumbling and tell me what it is you’re going to tell me, for God’s sake.”

  He stood against the rungs and watched her shadow.

  “He sold starch to wholesalers, I told you that. He’d go into Ville Platte, Louisiana, and I went with him when I was little in the summers to give my mother a rest. We’d drive to some big warehouse and he’d go inside and talk to a man and they’d drink coffee and in a little while he’d get out his order book and write up an order. Then he’d leave. Maybe he wouldn’t sell anything. That was it. Then he’d go someplace else. One hundred fifty miles a day, seven states—Mississippi, Arkansas, Louisiana, Tennessee, Alabama, Florida, part of Texas. Port Arthur.” He shoved up on the radiator and let his heels dangle between the rungs. “He did that twenty-six years. He worked for a company in St. Louis that’s gone ba
nkrupt. And he had scars after all those years doing the same thing. He had piles as big as my thumb that bled in his underwear. He had those for years. He’d have them cut out, and they’d come back. He had a spring cushion, but it didn’t help. He had bad circulation in his legs from having the blood cut off at his waist. And for a long time Mercury made a car with a door that was easy to catch your hand in. The most logical place to grab the door was right where you couldn’t get your hand out of fast enough, and you closed your hand in the door. The company bought Mercuries for the salesmen, and they were all slamming their hands in the doors. My father closed his up three times in one year, and finally had to have the finger nubbed—lost all the feeling in it. Then he got a corn on his foot from the clutch. I don’t know how he did that. It was funny, and I’d see him sitting on the commode in the hotel slicing at his corn with a razor blade, and putting Dr. Scholl’s on it. It always seemed to be funny, cause he was so goddamned big. Bigger than I am. Anyway, the corn got infected and got worse and worse, until he limped, and after a while he had to use a cane because the pain, I guess, was hideous. I think he cried sometimes. And my mother finally made him go have it removed surgically. But then he couldn’t stop limping. It was as if he thought one of his legs was shorter than the other one, though it was just a corn. Does that seem at all funny?”

  “No.”

  “It began to seem funny again to me for a second. It’s funny because he was gigantic, and all the things that pestered him were little. You’d think he wasn’t smart, wouldn’t you?”

  “Maybe,” she said. “Aren’t you tired of sitting on the radiator without your clothes on?”

  “No.”

  She sighed.

  “He had a heart murmur that kept him out of World War II. I don’t know what would’ve happened to him. Nothing worse, I guess.”

  “I agree,” she said.

  “That’s the thing, though,” he said. “He loved it so much, I think, it seemed fun to him. And that wasn’t the worst. The worst was sitting in all those goddamned rooms, in Hammond, Louisiana, and Tuscaloosa, with nothing at all in them, for years. Just come in late in the afternoon, have a drink of whiskey, go down and eat your dinner in some greasy fly-speck cafe, smoke a King Edward in the lobby, and go back to the room, and lie in bed listening to the plumbing fart, until it was late enough to go to sleep. And that was all. Five days a week, twenty-six years. Maybe he saw my mother two-sevenths of that time. They were married fifteen years before I was born, and they were friends. They loved each other. But he went off every Monday morning, smiling and whistling like Christmas, like it was fun, or he was just too ignorant to know what it was like.” He thought of it awhile, listening to Beebe breathe.