by Richard Ford
“Name me one,” he said.
Newel’s flesh brightened in the light. “There isn’t any use my telling you.”
“Shit.” He caught the latch nail in his fingers. “I was hoping you were going to say ‘Another one.’”
“Another what?”
“Another piece,” he said. “That’s all I know’s more important than a piece of tail. I was hoping you’d say that, then we would have something to talk about. I’d of thought a lot more of you than I do now.”
“I bet you wished you believed that,” Newel said.
“You know I believe it,” he said, and laughed. “You better hurry and get smart, boy. You ain’t got that much time.”
3
Mr. Lamb was sitting in his place at the end of the table when he came in out of the rain. The colored man was wearing a dented chintz chef’s hat and an apron up around his armpits, and wouldn’t look at him as he went through the kitchen. The room smelled like hot oatmeal.
He sat down and took up his napkin while Mr. Lamb glared at him silently for a long time. The old man had on the same red and yellow suspenders and canvas pants he’d had on the night before, worn up over a yellow pajama shirt that was buttoned to his neck.
“If it wasn’t raining, I’d run your ass off here,” the old man said, making his eyes into tiny slits behind his spectacles.
“Why is that?” he said.
“The sun’s up,” Mr. Lamb said, and shot a look at the window to make sure everybody knew he knew it was raining. “Any bastard wanted to sneak up to this island has already done it time you get your ass out of bed. If it wasn’t raining I’d put you right in the boat.”
“If it wasn’t raining I’d let you do it,” he said calmly.
The old man frowned and thumbed the bowl of his spoon. “Bring him some oatmeal!” he shouted, and put several quick loads in his mouth and began chewing vigorously. “Where’s Newel at?” he said.
“In the bed.”
“Son-of-a-bitch,” the old man gurgled, drinking a little coffee out of his saucer and spilling some more in.
“I’ll need to go in town this evening,” he said.
The old man’s face was stricken. “Don’t you want to do any work?” he said. “You don’t arrive in here till after six o’clock, and you’re already thinking about taking off again. Shit.”
“I said I was going to have to go some,” he said.
“What the hell for?”
“Business.”
The old man looked at him resentfully for not being let in on the secret. “What kind of business?”
“We already discussed that,” he said, and washed some grounds around the bottom of his mouth.
“Have we?” the old man said loudly. “You ain’t plottin no armed robbery up there in Helena, are you?”
“No sir.” He tried to get the oatmeal to stir and found out it wouldn’t.
The old man took another big bite and eyed him up and down. “You got people in Helena?”
“They all moved off,” he said.
“I don’t know nobody in Helena,” the old man said. “I’m from Marks, Mississippi, and if it didn’t happen I had to come over across that Helena Bridge to get over to this island, I wouldn’t come over there at all. I hate it. This island resides in the state of Mississippi. I don’t have no business in Arkansas at all. There ain’t nothin but nitwits and criminals in Arkansas, like that old piss ant lives across the lake. If you want to go rob that little Bank of Dixie in Helena, go right ahead, cause I ain’t got a cent in it.”
“All right,” he said, ready to leave.
“What do you think about Newel?” the old man said aggravatedly.
“He asks a lot of questions.”
“I don’t think he’d have sense to pour piss out of tall boot, do you?” The old man grinned and his teeth subsided slowly away from his soft gums.
He thought about Newel lying in the cool, half awake and half asleep, while he had to cozy up to the old man just to beg one night off, and Newel seemed right then to have things in a good deal better hands than he did. “He’ll make a lawyer.”
“Shit,” the old man snorted. “Them bastards is crooked as corkscrews, every one. I let ’em make out my will, but that’s all, by merciful God, that I’ll have to do with them.” The old man’s face became studious. “You done made your will out?”
“I hadn’t thought about it.”
“You ought to,” the old man said, lowering his chin confidentially. “I got mine made and feel a whole lot better about everything.” He regarded his fingers as if the benefits were spelled out right there. “Ain’t no telling when you might plop over like a hoe handle. You’re married, ain’t you?”
“I guess,” he said.
“Well, then,” the old man said, and rocked back in his chair and let his lips loosen in the corners. “You know why the birdies wake up singing, don’t you?”
He let his head come up to the old man’s eye level, and tried remembering a bird singing in the wet limbs, and couldn’t remember anything but the drone of the rain and the specter of W. standing in the trees.
“No sir,” he said.
The old man’s lips twisted into a little tricky smile. “Because,” he said, “they’re happy to be alive one more day. You can’t count on that, Hewes. Them little birdies know it, too. That’s why they’re out there singing all the time. They’re trying to tell us something. Tweet, tweet, you’re alive, you ignorant asshole.’” His eyes rounded and he croaked up a rough laugh and got up on his feet. “T.V.A.”
Landrieu appeared in the doorway.
“Go out to the castle and warm up the throne.”
The colored man went off across the porch and down the steps.
“I can’t stand to sit on a cold seat,” the old man said, thumbing his supenders off his shoulders.
He looked into the sitting room to see if Mrs. Lamb was there, but the room was empty, and the house felt tranquilized. The rain had left off, and he could hear the water hitting the puddles underneath the eaves. He listened for a bird in the trees and thought about Newel in the cool bed and W. staring curiously at the hollow chamber of some air rifle wondering why he wasn’t throwing baseballs, not signing autographs, not being the toast of somebody’s town instead of doing what he was doing. And it all made him feel peculiar, like he was missing something going on close to him he couldn’t see on account of some defect. He listened for the sweet sound of the birds, but there was nothing except the water sliding off the shakes in slow irregular drops, and somewhere in the distance the sound of the spring on the privy door drawing shut.
“Get your ass out of here and go to work,” the old man shouted from the double doors. He had his zipper down, holding his pants by the empty belt loops. “If you see Mr. Newel out there somewhere, tell him he’s missed his breakfast.” The old man went hustling out.
He stepped out onto the screen porch and breathed the cold rain fragrance and listened, but heard nothing but the door to the outhouse slamming, and the great trees dripping water into the grass.
4
At five o’clock he drove the jeep across to the lake and took the boat back to Gaspareau’s. The light was fanned out in bands whitening in the haze toward Helena.
Two of Gaspareau’s hounds strolled out into the dirt and stood blinking while he fastened the boat and made his way under the hackberries. Neither one offered to bark, as if they felt someone coming off the lake was not someone to bother with, and in a moment they walked back up under the house. He waited for a sign of Gaspareau, but there wasn’t one. Mr. Lamb’s Continental sat where it had, collecting hackberries washed down by the rain. Katydids hummed in the trees up the lake, and repose hung over the camp and the bight of cabins stretched into the water. Gaspareau’s whistle bomb was holding the last direct tincture of sunlight.
He drove up the tractor lane and across the levee into the watered field. The water was still and reflecting black and white in the fur
row rows, like silver arrows mirroring the crusts of the sky.
He stopped in at Goodenough’s. Mrs. Goodenough was standing behind the mail cage in a green visor, watching the sun lower into the windbreak, leaving the sky purple at the horizon.
He wedged behind the baked goods, took the paper out of his shoe, and dialed.
“It’s me,” he said, holding the receiver below his shoulder so the sound couldn’t get away.
“You bastard,” she said, her voice low down.
“What’s the matter?”
“Why didn’t you come?”
“I told you,” he whispered, and filched a look down the aisle at Mrs. Goodenough, who had gone to sorting letters, examining each one from several angles, then inserting it in a canvas bag on the counter.
“I’m on my way,” he said, keeping his mouth walled in by the receiver.
A long silence came on the line. “All right,” she said.
“Don’t you want me to?”
“Yes,” she said coldly. “I wanted you last night.”
“I’m coming tonight,” he said.
“All right.”
“Where do I get you?” he said, and flatted the receiver to his chest.
“Pick me up here,” she said nonchalantly.
“I ain’t going to last a minute if somebody sees me.”
“Then come get me back of the post office.”
“Won’t somebody see you?”
“No. And it don’t make any difference if they did. I don’t have to be good for nobody.”
“Where’s he at?”
“Where do you think? Playing baseball in Humnoke. W.’s done turned hisself into a baseball. Where you at?”
“At E-laine.”
“Ain’t nothing but snakes and mosquitoes down there, is there? Not that I’m down there too often.”
“I’m coming on,” he said.
“Not on this phone you’re not,” she said. “You told me I couldn’t, so you can’t.”
He looked at Mrs. Goodenough, who had taken to staring at the sunset again. He could see the sympathetic line of brow beneath her visor, silhouetted against the window glass. He felt in a frenzy, and she seemed locked away in a solace nothing would ever disturb. She turned her head and looked at him and smiled.
“Where we going?” Beuna said noisily.
“Where there ain’t nobody,” he said, trying to keep from looking at Mrs. Goodenough.
“We going to get a motel?”
“You go on to the post office,” he said.
And she hung up.
He walked to the door feeling upset. Mrs. Goodenough smiled and twisted a frond of her hair back beneath the band of her visor. “Going to town?” she said.
“Hope so,” he said. “If I haven’t slipped up someplace.”
She looked at him sympathetically as if she knew exactly what he meant. “Oh, well”—she smiled—“we make mistakes, but we’re still here.”
There was no other sound in the store but their breathing, separated by odd cadences. They waited for her words to catch someplace or drift away.
“Yes, ma’am,” he said. “I just hope I’m here tomorrow.”
She picked up a letter and examined it carelessly, and he stepped out into the evening, looking up the straight River Road toward Helena, whose lights were a shabby taint to the sky.
5
The post office was a buff brick structure across the train yards. He drove up the unpaved part of the street that bounded the yards, by where Beuna’s father’s house had been, and found that the house was gone and the lot had been turned into a depot for fireplugs. The plugs were sitting by themselves inside a cyclone enclosure, tilted every way they could be, in a cone-shaped pile at the back corner of the fence, behind which were some chinaberry trees he remembered. The town was back of the lot, facing the highway, so that the post office was on the dark farm edge of town, almost in the bean rows.
He switched across the rails by the yardmaster’s house, a light burning behind the shade. He could feel diesel on his lips and on the air. He turned back parallel toward the post office, and felt little fingers itching inside his stomach.
He stopped on the shoulder and tried to think. He wanted to draw himself together now so that at the moment of setting eyes on her he would have reduced to such a compact item that he could completely command himself, so that no limbs or parts were out of control.
He got still and stared down into the yards, watching the hard little red and green foot lanterns and the flatcars loaded with pine timber, listening to the engines heave in the darkness, regulating his breath, setting his mind on one thing and nothing else.
In the yardmaster’s house, where the yardmaster sat and read the Memphis paper, there was a tiny dark inner office with painted windows and a great black banquet of red and yellow and green lights, darting and flashing before a man in a straw hat and perforated cotton shirt, who pressed buttons and flipped toggles and talked to trains out on the line, using a slow drawling voice over a two-way radio. He sat in the room undisturbed for seven-hour stretches and ruled every train and every crew in and out of the rails between Memphis and Lake Village, everything dependent on him to keep from spilling into one another, and keeping the one passenger train that used the line from shooting off into dead spurs at seventy miles an hour and collapsing like a string of garbage cans. Late at night he had slipped in the room and watched the man, whose name was Wheeler, studied him, his white shirt pink and chartreuse in the tiny reflected lights, puzzling at how when the lights started snapping and flashing and trains started heading toward one another at awful speeds, and conductors were howling threats on the two-way, Wheeler could always speak to them in the same mild country voice, adjusting the brim of his hat and flipping a switch to open a rail that was a green light on the banquet, and never making a remark to whoever was sitting behind him, since there was always somebody there watching in total amazement, always keeping his business to himself. He had sat a long time, and despaired over sitting alone in the dark with all the trains and all the switches and the engineers and the conductors and the passengers facing you through one tiny light after another, until the pressure was too great, and you’d fall to the temptation, one night, of letting it all run together, of opening every switch and watching lights converge in a slow series of blinks and snaps, until they all were together and there was nothing left to dispatch.
He had waited in the morning on the settle beside the yardmaster’s house until the daylight dispatcher came and Wheeler came out in the open air, his hat in his hand and a St. Louis Cardinals cap on his head, blinking in the steely light. He stood up quickly and looked at Wheeler, who for all the hours they’d spent together watching lights blink on the dark, silent board had never once seen him, and said out loud, “How can you run that all night, in that teensy place, and not ever drive it all together?”
And Wheeler looked at him as if he had asked himself the question a thousand times and was not amazed to hear it from somebody else. “Mind like a moon,” he said easily, taking off his Cardinals cap and stroking his fine sparse hair. “If you stare at the moon a long time, all you’ll see is the moon, and all you’ll want to see is the moon. I can do it.”
He sat in the truck and stared at the yardmaster’s house in the mirror, a yellow light above the cramped casements, and the panel of painted glass all the way to the end. The moon had risen so that it stood up above the post office, drifting back into some gauzy smoke. Here it all was, he felt, the time when there wasn’t any holding out, the one true last time, and he didn’t want to do it halfway, since halfway was as good as nothing.
He throttled the truck and broke out straight down the narrow truck corridor the wrong way between the post office and the cotton broker’s shed. At the end, the pavement blind-switched left directly into the rear alley of the post office. The truck barely missed taking the corner of the building and leaped on into the alley, losing purchase and fading rearward towar
d the back wall. He fought the wheel, surprised to have got going so fast in so short a space, then suddenly Beuna was in the headlights and he was pounding the pedals to keep from barging right out over her and carrying on into the street.
And Beuna never twitched. When the truck bucked the back corner full tilt, sliding and seizing two directions at once, she stood up unperturbed in the lights, lifted one hip an inch above the other, and smiled as though she had fallen heir to a power that pickup trucks couldn’t impede.
The truck halted and he blinked at her through the fly-specked glass, his heart lunging like an engine ripped off its mounts. She was wearing tiny terry-cloth shorts that had shrunk up in her crotch and made her thighs look bigger than they could be and made him feel strangled, bound up, as if he wanted to be both in the truck and out of it someplace way away all at the same time. She had worried her hair up in little pencil curls that haloed her head and gave her face a round shape. She turned slightly in the light and smiled at him or toward wherever she thought he was in the truck, and rounded her eyes and unbuttoned her little sleeveless blouse until it sagged open and a big quarter of her breast nosed between the parting.
He felt like there wasn’t enough air to breathe, and the only movement he could school himself to make was to kick on the high beams and shoot her in a hot wash of crackling lights. Her features instantly turned inward and twisted in a mean way. Her hips contracting as if she was trying to withdraw from the light, she raised her bare arm to her eyes so that both her breasts broke out of the shirt, and with her body bent at the waist, wagged over the tops of her shorts.
“Goddamn!” she yelled, ducking lower under her arm. She writhed, trying with both arms to stop the light. He tried to move, but couldn’t work his arms. “Robard!” she screamed.
He all at once stamped the light pull with his heel and sank back in the seat, hearing his name going off through the dark.
And the alley disappeared. There was a pause when he couldn’t see anything, then Beuna’s face popped up in the window, glaring through the dark air.
