A Piece of My Heart

by Richard Ford

  “What happened to the deer?” he said.

  “What deer?”

  “The deer the majors shot. Did you let them take the deer, since they did you the favor?”

  “Hell, no. What the hell do you think I was doing out there at six o’clock in the morning? I wanted them does myself. I had me a salt lick set out there. Where do you think them does was headed when those morons potted them? They was headed to my lick, that’s where.”

  “I thought you said it was out of season for deer,” he said.

  The old man looked at him malignantly. “It’s my land. It’s open season on anything I take a notion to shoot. Piss on deer season and every other season. I’ll shoot what I want to shoot. I got a covey of pet quail right out between the house and my airfield this very minute.” He stabbed his finger toward the closest window. “I’ll take Elinor and walk right out there and shoot me two quails and eat them for dinner, if I want to. I don’t need nobody to tell me it ain’t quail season, cause it is. Them quails is always in season—my season.”

  “Just curious.”

  “Well, then, there’s your answer, Curious. This here is my island and I don’t care about nobody but myself, by God, and I don’t care if I do, either. I can’t help it if there ain’t no deer or no quail or nothin else wild around here on these poor bastards’ farms. I protect what I got. I got Hewes hired to keep the assholes off. They done screwed the works on their own land, now they want to screw the same works on mine. But they ain’t. Hewes here’ll see to that, won’t you, son?”

  Robard looked up from his plate, sucked his tooth, and declined to participate. The old man leaned back and eyed them both arrogantly. He had worked his way to the edge of his chair telling the story, and now he pushed his fingers under his suspenders and gave both of them a proprietary look, as though he was challenging anyone to contradict one single word he’d uttered.

  Mrs. Lamb began adjusting the knobs through a hail of static.

  “Get the news, Fidelia,” Mr. Lamb said matter-of-factly, squirming until he could see to the next room.

  “I want the weather,” she said, staring at the little shining panels and plugging in a set of ancient wire PBX headphones that shorted the sound and left the house quiet except for the colored man skating around the kitchen.

  “Mrs. Lamb goes according to the weather,” Mr. Lamb said, turning back slightly bewildered. “She don’t care what time it is, just so long as she knows what the weather’s doing.”

  “At least she doesn’t worry about getting older,” he said.

  “Who the hell does?” the old man snapped, pushing backward in his chair and creating a fierce bracking noise on the floor. “You worry about getting old, T.V.A.?”

  “No suh,” T.V.A. said invisibly from the kitchen. He could make out the spattered toes of the colored man’s shoes where he had taken a seat around the doorway.

  “Why not?” the old man said.

  “Suh?” T.V.A. said.

  “Why don’t you worry about getting old, son? Newel here is worried about getting old. We ain’t, are we?”

  “No suh.”

  “Why not?” the old man demanded impatiently, turning his ear up to hear exactly what was to be said.

  “Cause if I wasn’t getting no older, I’d be dead.”

  “Haw haw haw haw haw.” The old man broke up in more gasps of strangled laughter. T.V.A. never moved from behind the door. Mr. Lamb banged the table with his fist and all the glasses convulsed, and tea frothed both sides of the pitcher. “You’d be dead, Newel, if you didn’t get no older,” the old man wheezed, just able to get a word free. “You, too, Hewes, you’d be dead. We’d all be dead.”

  Mr. Lamb once more removed his teeth from his mouth, dipped them in his iced tea glass, wiggled them with his fingers, then let them sink quietly to the bottom. He looked up with his cheeks sucked in over his gums and his mouth flapping like the nozzle of a collapsed pink balloon, making himself look more like an old woman than an old man.

  “I’ll tell you something that you don’t know, Newman,” the old man said indistinctly, folding his hands neatly in front of him. “Was used to be,” he mumbled, his teeth idling uselessly at the bottom of his tea glass, “that when a man got put in the penitentiary, the big experts on the subject come in and pulled out all his teeth, cause they had ’em a theory then that bad teeth was to blame for all the crimes. It wasn’t your childhood or whether your mother was scared by a goat, or what kind of neighborhood you lived in, or if your mother dressed you up like a girl—none of that baloney. It was your teeth. If you had bad teeth, you was a criminal. So they went in all the jails and started yanking out prisoners’ teeth, and turning them loose right and left. Now, I think that’s a pretty good idea, don’t you? I bet you didn’t know that.”

  He watched the old man’s mouth work unconsciously gum to gum. “Is that where you got all yours pulled out?”

  The old man smiled a dark smile, leaving his hands anchored to the table. “No, I got mine pulled out in Memphis,” he said.

  “Have you committed any crimes since then?”

  “Just one,” the old man said.

  “What was that?”

  The old man’s eyes darted and he swiped his lips with his sleeve and uncovered a big empty grin. “I had to kick the shit out of a wise-ass one day. But he was the only one I knew and I haven’t had to do it since.” Mr. Lamb’s blue eyes flickered dangerously, and he fixed him in a long intense smile. “Did you ever hear the joke about the nigger caught stealing ax handles that got called up before the judge?” Mr. Lamb stood up from the table and steadied himself on the back of his chair. “The judge looked at the nigger real careful and said, ‘Rufus, have you ever been up before me before?’ And the nigger looked at the judge real serious and said, ‘Well, I don’t rightly know, Judge. What time does you get up?’” The old man’s eyes danced back and forth, waiting for a response. T.V.A. started giggling, banging metal against metal The old man looked at them both a second longer until the smile completely vanished. “You bastards lack one necessary,” he said confoundedly. “A sense of humor. Every goddamned one of you young people don’t know what in the fuck’s funny and what ain’t. I asked some little asshole in Helena last week, just to be a-talking to him, without nothing to gain on it, just bein friendly, I said, ‘Where the hell do all you kids come from?’ And the bastard looked at me like I was a pail of shit and said, ‘You tell me. You’re the ones been having us the last thirty years.’” The old man glowered flatly and stumped away into the other room.

  16

  He stood looking out the screen at the woods where the moon had ignited a thin sheeny mist through the treetops. He heard the colored man come down the steps, tramp across the dooryard, and enter the other cabin. He could hear the light switch on inside, but couldn’t see the house or the light through the doorway, though he could hear the colored man’s feet on the bare pine floor. Past the haze the sky was clear. A few brief specks of cloud were drawn in against the face of the moon. He could hear Elinor making a final investigation of the perimeter of the yard, snorting in the wet leaves and pawing in the grass before passing on, her leash tinkling lightly.

  He breathed through the screen and let his chest empty until he felt himself at ease. He had stood days at the gauzy window and watched the park as the evening floated up like a mist, trying to be at ease. And late in the night the miseries commenced, his eyes smarting, his tendons fibrillating. All of it caused by necessary impulses, like a box of bees whirling to come out.

  Robard, who had come down ahead of him and gone immediately to bed, turned in his sleep and exhaled a long sigh, letting his hand scrape the rippled wall.

  He stood at the screen, imprinted against the moonglow, hulking in his undershorts, took a deep exhaustive breath and let it out through the matrix wires, allowing the emptiness to inhabit him and for an airy moment release his mind to everything.

  17

  In the summer, in the ti
ny tourist cabin in Angola, he had sat with his father and stared out the door toward the prison, a wide barbed-wire compound, visible by day and only a ring of tiny lights at night. The day before, a brown panel truck had come down from Shreveport with the electric chair and driven through the center of town, making everyone stop in the sun and look. The state owned a single electric chair and delivered it wherever it was needed, from courthouse to courthouse all across the state to where there was someone to electrocute. At midnight everyone in the town turned on their lights and stood at their windows and waited, and when the chair was turned on, all the lights in town went dim for a time, and all the glimmering lights at the prison went dim, and in the motel room with his father he lay in the bed and watched the ceiling fan turn slower and slower until it stopped. And in the morning he had gone with his father in his old Mercury to the gate of the prison, and through and along the well-paved macadam to the compound of long white barracks that looked like chicken houses. And in the lot his father had gotten out and gone inside to a man’s office to sell him starch for the prisoners’ laundry, and he had sat still in the car in the moistened heat of early morning and stared down the long rows of chalk barracks and wondered where the dead man was, wondered if he and the dead man, an unforgiving murderer named Walter L. Magee, were locked up there together, or if in the night they had taken him secretly out of the chair and carted him into town and left him in a room overnight to cool.

  Part III

  Robard Hewes

  1

  In the morning he woke before light with rain on the shed. Newel lay like a mountain on his cot, breathing roughly, his nose against the corrugated wall. He stared awhile, drifting in and out of sleep, not able to gauge time. He rose once and stepped out in the rain and craned his head around at Landrieu’s shack and up to the house. But it was all dark. A spotlight was shining at the top of the steps and rain darted through the steamy light. He went back inside.

  “Look here,” the old man had said, lowering his chin into the wattles of his neck, whiskey still in his eyes. “Blinded pigs can dig acorns.” The old man’s eyes widened as he handed over the gun.

  “Yes sir,” he said.

  “You know what that means?” The old man angled his head down to get a better look.

  “I guess,” he said, wondering.

  Mr. Lamb stood back and leveled his shoulders. “I don’t think you do,” he said, and acted as if he was about to walk away, but stopped. “It means any shitass that’s got a gun can figure out a way to shoot somebody.” The old man’s eyes rewidened as if he were searching out a weakness that would let him not have to part with the pistol. “I don’t want you shooting that gun, you understand?”

  “Yes sir,” he said, putting his toe to his instep and looking away.

  “By God, this here is a symbol of my authority,” the old man announced. “You’re just carrying it for me, cause I’m too damn old to boss people off my land by myself. Even if I wasn’t, though, I wouldn’t go around shooting people, you understand?”

  “Yes sir,” he said. He stared at the old man’s toes swaddled in his duck trousers.

  “So, Hewes,” the old man growled, “you treat this gun like it was your pecker and keep it in your pants.”

  He lay on the damp sheets and listened to the rain pepper the roof. Newel spoke a word in his sleep and raised his fist in the air and clinched it as if threatening some intruder in his dream, then opened it like a flower and drew it back.

  2

  He woke up again in blue light, the old man flailing at the porch bell, and the dread of W.W. hanging like another big bell without a clapper. He lay still and listened to the old man curse. Newel lay under the sheet, deep in some wretched dream.

  There would have to be considerable cautions taken now. He couldn’t simply drive to wherever she lived, beep the horn, and have off with her locked in the cranny of his arm without everybody in fifty miles yanking out the phone lines to tell W.W. that some swarthy man in a pickup had just collected his wife and driven her off to God knows where, with her nosing out the inside of his arm like a worm seeking drier air. He’d have to come up with something better or W. might seize on drastic measures.

  The old man started punishing the bell again. He heard Landrieu’s screen slap and Landrieu’s feet on the wet steps, and the old man roaring.

  Newel rolled on his back and stared at the spiderwebs, letting the cover slide off on the floor. Newel’s body was white as an aspirin, and one arm was like two of his. His own stomach was hard as a cord of wood and Newel’s was a big mass of hair and chest and belly piled on the sheet like dough.

  Newel squirmed over on his side and stared at him. “You’re sure fit as a goddamned fiddle, aren’t you?” he moaned. “You should’ve been abusive to yourself like I have. We’d have something to talk about then.”

  He stood and stared at Newel with nothing to say, and began putting on his pants. Newel dragged the covers up to his chin and straightened his legs and seemed to go back to sleep.

  The thing would be to call her as quick as he could, arrange a rendezvous where he could sneak her in the truck and nobody notice anything else but a pickup going down the highway to nowhere anybody gave a shit about. Except time felt against him now. He looked at Newel suspiciously as if he were lying there figuring out a way to interfere.

  The old man suddenly raged out onto the porch and slammed the old bell again as hard as he could. “Goddamn it, Hewes,” he fumed. “You working for me or in business for yourself, you son-of-a-bitch?” A long silence opened up, then the old man slashed the bell again and barged back inside the house, unable to stand silence another moment.

  Newel sat up against the cold wall, poking at his eyes. “Tell me one thing,” he said.

  “How’s that?” he said, ready to go out.

  “What in the hell are you doing down here? I laid up trying to figure that out. A smart guy wouldn’t waste time doing what you’re doing if it wasn’t important.”

  “Didn’t nobody say it wasn’t.’ He couldn’t quite see Newel’s face in the gloom.

  “All right,” Newel said, running his finger around in his nose and sinking back on the bed. “I hope it’s not just some hot young nooky you got farmed out so you have to slip around and take your license plate off to get ahold of.”

  “Why is that?” he said.

  “There’s more important things in the world.”