A Piece of My Heart

by Richard Ford

  He wanted to say something to the man with the life preserver. But the man simply stared at him quizzically, looking disappointed to have wasted a throw in behalf of what he had pulled in.

  The twin returned dangling a crusty towel with “Peabody Hotel” stenciled on it. The towel was hardened with axle grease, and it smelled like diesel. The man tossed it and stood beside his brother as if he weren’t sure what he might get to see next. He draped the towel over his abdomen, and tried quickly to outline what he wanted to say in appreciation and not waste too much of anybody’s time. The men were out of their thirties and dressed in oily jeans and oily boots. The twin who had retrieved the towel had on a green cowboy shirt, but his brother wore an aquamarine T-shirt with the sleeves cut off and “UCLA Tennis Team” silk-screened on the front. He lay a few moments trying to think of something to say, letting his toes dangle in the water, and looking alternately at their long immovable faces.

  “I’ll bring you back the towel,” he said, and stared down the stone beach. He tried to stand and felt his chest sag and his back begin to burn where the pole had gouged it. He looked at the men hopefully. The brother who had gone to get the towel smiled, but the other seemed to be scowling, holding the life buoy with one hand as if thought had abandoned him but he hadn’t noticed the absence yet.

  “Thanks for saving me,” he said.

  “I wouldn’t do it again,” the unsmiling brother said.

  He tried to feel the point of the threat, then gave up and limped back across the bricks, holding the towel around his belly, the sun starting to draw on his shoulders.

  Several muddy footprints were stamped into his pants, and one of his socks was kicked to the edge of the water. He scanned the beach and up the drive, where a few cars were visible. The bus was gone. A number of drivers stared at him and made inaudible remarks, and he began picking up his clothes.

  A station wagon stopped at the curb, a blue Chevrolet with a plastic screen in front of the radiator. The passengers stared down at him behind sunglasses, making remarks and pointing politely. Suddenly the door swung open and a tiny girl with long red hair and a pink Sunday school dress popped out holding a tiny camera pressed against her stomach and took his picture and disappeared back inside the car. The passengers smiled and nodded, and sat a minute watching him dress, as if they were expecting some singular gesture in recognition. And when none was given they seemed satisfied and drove slowly back into the traffic.

  He walked back up the hill to the bus station, feeling worn out. The ticket agent acknowledged him with a greasy smile and looked back over his shoulder at the Trailways clock and pointed to it meaningfully.

  He settled his head against the back of the chair and stared at the old milk-colored skylight, trying to empty his brain. Somewhere at the train station a voice came on the loudspeaker and said something unintelligible, and in a minute he heard a train vibrate into the upstairs platform, stop for several minutes while he listened to the brake cylinders bleed off, then start again slowly and fade into the daylight sounds.

  “I was in school,” Beebe said, “with a girl from Belzoni. She married a Phi Delt from Meridian. She was a precious sweet thing with her mother’s complexion and lovely breasts. She married this boy whose name was Morris Spaulding. And Morris took her to Meridian and graduated to his daddy’s Dodge agency, and the first thing any of us knew, he had her doing some ghastly tent show across in Alabama while he was in the audience doing who knows what to himself. All because she was such a sweet little thing and let him make all the decisions for her. I’m afraid that’s a little out of my line, Newel, though maybe not for you.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said. “Who asked you that—who cares?”

  8

  In 1951 in the summer, they had driven in his father’s Mercury from fackson to Memphis, and on the first day he had sat with his mother in the Chief Chisca Hotel and looked out on Union Avenue and sighed, while his father went off in the heat to call on his accounts. And in the evening they went in the car as far on Union Avenue as there was a street to drive on and stopped at a white house with blue shutters where his father knew a man named Hershel Hoytt, who sold raisins. In the house, the man was there and wore golfing shorts and carried a golf club and wore thick black-rimmed glasses and had a face like a stork. They sat down at the round table in the kitchen and drank whiskey and laughed and sang and ate spaghetti with Vienna sausages, and he was shown to the bedroom, where there was a wide bed with a white chenille cover, and told that he could go to sleep. At two o’clock he was asleep with the light on in the ceiling, when the door opened and his mother and father came and stood beside the bed and looked at him and said he was pretty (though he was awake by then) and gently moved him onto the pillows and lay across the bed themselves and went to sleep. And he lay in the bed, the three of them lying crosswise in the tiny room with the fruit-salad globe in the light, still shining over them, and he smelled their breath and listened to them breathing and remembered their singing, and listened to the strange house become quiet until he began to cry, and left the house.

  9

  On Union Avenue he walked back to town, walked back until he came to the chalky red bricks that sloped straight toward the river, and when he walked farther down toward where the water was, there was a terrible stink like oil and old cabbage, and he went back up the levee and over into town, and walked to the Peabody Hotel, where his father had said the rich people stayed when they came to Memphis. And in the upper lobby he went to sleep behind the notary public’s desk.

  In the morning at seven o’clock he waked up and looked down on the wide lobby from the mezzanine and saw people were standing at the circular fish pond in the middle of the wide room, holding tiny boxes of crackers and staring at the bank of elevators built into the wall with gilt mirrors for doors. And in a while the elevator door opened and a Negro wearing a white waiter’s jacket came off followed by six mallard ducks, walking in a line behind him. And when the Negro had walked to the pond and stood beside it, the ducks all walked into the pond and began to float and quack and eat the crackers the people were holding for them, until the people were gone and there were small red and white cracker boxes floating on the water with the ducks, which the Negro later took away.

  When he had found them again in the Chief Chisca waiting, his father said that they would never drink again, and that each day the Negro brought the ducks down precisely at seven o’clock, and precisely at five o’clock he came again and stood beside the pond and the ducks simply walked out and got on the elevator and rode it to the roof and got off and sat in their nests of straw and waited until he came again. Once, he said, a man from Arkansas came and fed one duck one tiny crystal of cyanide. And when the duck died, which wasn’t very long, the others would not come down for a month. The Negro would ride the elevator to the roof and stand beside their nests and wait for them, but they wouldn’t come. They simply quacked and quacked at him, as if he were the man who had betrayed them. Though after a month of quacking at the Negro and sitting on their nests all day getting fatter and fatter, when the Negro came with a different-colored coat and stood beside their cages, they came along the way they always had. And before long, his father told him, sitting looking out the window of the Chief Chisca down on Union Avenue, the man went back to wearing his white jacket and the ducks could not remember they had thought he had betrayed them.

  10

  “You remind me of somebody,” Robard said, spitting out the window.

  “Who?”

  “I don’t know, a movie star, somebody like that.”

  They drove up the levee and turned and went a hundred yards along the top on another tractor path to where the road bent over the other side. A red combine was bogged down in the field below the levee. Someone had attached a cable to it and tried to pull it out with a heavy Fordall tractor, but the tractor had foundered in the same row and both machines were sitting in the sun. The plants around them w
ere all blackened and bent in broken rows with dried fibers clinging to the bolls. Someone had laid a plank walk over the mud and there were signs on the planks that people had been going to the levee and back. But neither machine seemed to have ever moved, and all the sticks and cardboard sheets and logs and blankets had finally been left under the wheels and the business abandoned.

  “Why do they take machines in a field that muddy?” he said.

  Robard let the truck wobble down the river side of the levee. “I guess they intended pickin it.”

  “They could just look at it, though. Why didn’t they just say fuck it?”

  “They might’ve strained their imaginations,” Robard said thoughtfully. “They ain’t got too much of that.”

  The road widened and cleaved back along the inner coast of the levee, then bent north across another cotton lot that was tilled and dry and waiting for planting. It struck into a grove of maples and sycamores behind which he could see the sheen of the lake and the first low buildings of the camp. The road straightened and passed under a banner plank that had DINKLE LAKE CAMP painted in red, beneath which were the cheesy remains of a hound, and sixty yards on, the camp, which was a bight of five cracker-box cottages with low, green-pitched roofs, the first looking like two of the smaller ones bradded together, with the rest left in a half coil reaching toward the lake, the last cabin up to its joists in backwater. Someone had put up a pipe bracket in front of the first cabin and hung a World War II whistle bomb off two chains and painted the whole architecture white. Back of the smaller cabins in the maples was a litter of turned-up sawbuck tables, two snail-back house trailers with curling roofs, and the husk of a yellow school bus set off its axles in the grass with burlap curtains strung along the glassless windows. The lake was a dark silver-black ankle lying to the north and south, with the island five hundred yards away, a dense revetment of shumards and willows reaching as far as he could see in either direction. It looked to him like a reproach, and he felt that he ought to turn around and try to put the whole business behind him. “It isn’t much,” he said, looking at the lake.

  “We ain’t there yet,” Robard said, letting the wheels straddle the remains of the dead dog.

  Six more black-and-tan deerhounds fetched out from underneath the first cabin and took up barking, and creating a lot of noise. Robard drove up into the grass and honked the horn, which made the hounds bark louder.

  “Eat you alive,” Robard said, staring expressionlessly at the hounds.

  “Honk the horn again,” he said. The boat dock was down the bank, a raft built out of oil drums and car tires with planks roped over the tops, floating behind the last swamped cottage. An aluminum boat was moored to the dock, motionless in the water.

  An old man appeared outside the corrugated-roof porch, carrying a double-barrel shotgun and a swivel ash cane. The dogs managed not to see him and kept barking and kicking dirt until he got behind them, looking put out by the noise, and gave the nearest dog a stripe across the ribs that dropped it off its feet. The others immediately clammed up and trotted back around the house while the wounded dog tried to crawl away without taking his eyes off the stick, though the old man managed to catch him again across the hind leg, sending him springing off into the sycamores.

  The old man set his cane back on the ground, renewed his hold on the shotgun, and limped to the truck, looking in the bed first, then narrowly into the cab. The old man was bald and wore loose clean khakis, and had a thin chain around his neck fastened to a silver disk with a hole in the middle which was buried inside a plug in his throat. When he had satisfied himself with the contents of the truck, he set the cane against his hip and put his finger on the disk. “You boys?” he said, cradling the shotgun higher up in the crook of his elbow. His voice made a squeaky sound.

  “I’m to see P. H. Gaspareau,” Robard said.

  “That’s me, what about?” the man said, jabbing his finger on the disk so it picked up a flicker of light.

  Robard held a newspaper to the window for the man to see where he was pointing.

  The old man perused the paper, then stared up over it. “What’s he want?” His eyes grew smaller as if the sun were on them.

  “Have to ask him,” Robard said. “I brought him from the store.” He folded the paper back carefully.

  “I want to go on the island,” he said. “Beebe Henley was supposed to call you. My name’s Newel.”

  “A goddamned month ago,” Gaspareau croaked, and kept on glaring at him.

  “I got detained.”

  “I told him you was coming, but that was four weeks ago.”

  “I’ll pay you,” he said. “Otherwise I’ll jump in that goddamn lake and swim across.”

  Robard looked at him uncomfortably.

  “Mr. Mark Lamb pays me, you don’t.” Gaspareau wheeled the barrel end of the shotgun in the general direction of the island. “You won’t be doing no swimmin.”

  “What about the job?” Robard said, sucking his tooth.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Hewes.”

  “Where you from? Them ain’t no Arkansas tags, is they?” The old man bent back slightly as if he were trying to see around to the back of the truck without moving off the spot.

  “California,” Robard said, and settled his eyes at a point in front of the headlights. “I was raised up in Helena.”

  “You know anybody up there?” the old man said.

  “Nope.”

  “Then why you want to come back?” Gaspareau said, his voice blowing and wheezing out the top of his throat.

  “I used to switch on the Missouri Pacific.”

  “That’s a goddamn good job,” the old man said sourly. “How come you to quit that?”

  Robard contemplated the steering wheel. “My wife liked California.”

  “She wants back, is that right?”

  “Not exactly.”

  A smile cracked the old man’s wet mouth so that his big busy tongue came into view. “Niggers is took over everywhere else,” Gaspareau said.

  He looked past Robard at Gaspareau’s mouth and at the metal disk, where the skin was all pinched and eroded and looked like the foot of a volcano.

  “I need that job,” Robard said.

  “She come with you?” Gaspareau said.

  “No.”

  Gaspareau tightened his grip on the shotgun. “I’da left her ass sittin, too.”

  Robard put his eye on Gaspareau and smiled. “I come about your job,” he said.

  The old man lost his humor. “But you don’t know nobody in town, do you?”

  “I’ll give you a man’s name in Hazen,” Robard said. “If that ain’t enough, you can give it to Newel here.”

  Gaspareau looked deviled. “What’s his name?”

  “Rudolph,” Robard said.

  “You know how to use a pistol?” The old man put the shotgun against the side of the truck and grabbed his cane off his hip.

  “Point it and pull the trigger,” Robard said.

  Gaspareau looked insulted. “Shoot your dick off that way,” he said. “I ain’t hiring you, though. He is. I know where to get somebody to shoot.”

  “Where’s that?” he said, leaning across Robard and sticking his face in the window to annoy the old man.

  Gaspareau smiled and shoved his finger to his throat. “Did you see them tow-headed boys sitting up at that big icebox?”

  He couldn’t remember seeing anybody at all, though Robard seemed to nod that he did.

  The old man looked craftily at both of them and uncovered a few mahogany teeth. “That biggest boy there killed a man a year ago. A bastard broke loose of a road gang in Mississippi and tried to break in one of my cabins.” The old man looked around at the cabin as if he wanted to be certain it was still there. “Shot him deader’n a toadstool with a twenty-two rifle. I sent him over with a letter pinned to his shirt, but the old man sent him back.”

  “Aren’t you going to pick up your dead dog?” he said
, trying to see around Robard’s head.

  Gaspareau quit grinning and picked up the shotgun and cradled it back in the crook of his arm.

  “I ain’t,” he said slowly. “Been a month. If I was to go down and start shoveling him up, he’d just come to pieces. I’ll let you borrow my shovel, if you got an interest in him.”

  “I don’t like dogs,” he said, and removed from the window.

  “That one ain’t going to bite you,” Gaspareau snorted, then thought about something else. “Park back by the last cabin, and go on down.” He jerked the barrel of the gun at the boat dock and went stumping off to his house.

  Robard backed the truck under the willows between the last cabin and a maroon Continental with Mississippi plates.

  “You still think I want your job?”

  Robard looked at him gravely. “That mouth of yours about tore your ass,” he said, reaching across and fumbling into the glove box. “Ought not to mouth a man like that. Bastard’ll shoot you or put one of them boys up to it, and wouldn’t nobody be the smarter.”

  “You would, wouldn’t you?” he said.

  Robard laid his hands on a big flat-bitted screwdriver with a transparent orange grip, climbed out, and went about unscrewing the license tag. “I’ll tell you,” he said, holding one screw in his hand and commencing the other one. “It suits me to stay out of the way of things. Bullets, anything like that, I’m glad to be out of the way.” Robard looked up significantly.

  “I’d like to go in something and never come out,” he said, staring at the rusted holes in the bracket. “You know what I mean?”

  “I don’t,” Robard said. “I always want to get out. It makes me itchy, like something was about to happen I didn’t know about.”

  He watched Robard wrap the plate in a newspaper and lay it up under the seat.

  “If you’re smart you’ll figure out the same thing.” Robard smiled and walked off to the boat dock.