A Piece of My Heart

by Richard Ford

  He tried to think in a clear-headed way what to do. He had an intuition the road would merge south with the River Road, and that it would be a peril to go back in town and risk getting pulled over by the sheriff and detained long enough for W. to start blazing away again at close enough range where it would be hard to miss anything not moving. The little prick wounds began to bleed down his cheek, and he raised up until he could see his face in the mirror and see where blood was popping out of several little vents along his jaw. Splinters were bristling on his neck but there wasn’t blood there yet, though there would be, he thought.

  He shot down the row of scrub farms, the wind whistling between the twin bullet holes, and straight into the drizzly distance. A cab-over diesel was burning out of Helena heading for the bridge cutoff, smoke flagging in a long gray streamer.

  He was disgusted for not thinking any respectable boy would keep a 30-06 behind the door on the chance some old buck might lose his bearings and decide to browse the front yard, in which case you were entitled to a shot just to protect your property from depredation. He picked a little sliver out of his cheek and pinched it through the glass pucker and took another look at the Plymouth, which was nothing but a hump in the dirt spray. Water had risen higher now than last year’s rows and just the woody plants were visible above the surface.

  When he pulled up at the junction he could barely see W. barreling down the straight stretch of road a mile and a quarter in the field.

  He turned right into the force of the rain and beat the accelerator and got the truck hissing back down the phone lines toward Elaine.

  He knew already from the old man’s map that 185 just quit, kicked out into a rat’s nest of farm roads and hog trails that he knew nothing about and that W. stood a better chance of knowing about and using to an advantage. He figured he could go on into Mississippi, but that there was just the chance somebody would be manning the boll weevil quarantine at the other end, and he’d get tied up on account of his plates, and W. would come off the ramp shooting every direction and killing people. And then, too, if he got across, there wasn’t anyplace to go where he knew anything.

  It would be best of all, he figured, if he could just open enough distance between him and W. to get back onto the island, and hold him off from the shore with the old man’s pistol, and hope in a while he’d forget about it and go on home.

  He could see W. lagging back, still bracking down the farm lane in a mud fury, like a tornado dragging the tailpipe. At eighty-five the chassis began agitating, and wind funneled in the holes and stirred up more glass, and he let it back to eighty, considering the small good it would do to slide off in a ditch and have W.W. pot him like a sparrow in a birdbath. Which made him think for the first time how much serious peril there was of getting swept off exactly like his old man. And after he’d already decided he’d made it out, by staying clear of the evil Beuna wanted to get him into, as a way of convincing him that inasmuch as they were in the same bad way they might as well enjoy it. Because he’d seen the trap already. If he refused whatever included her little plastic bag, then he refused that he and she were in the same boat. And that was what had made her lead him right to W.W., a desire to end the dispute by cutting the knot. She was just determined that if she had to live with herself, she was going to let everybody else see how their lives had brought them as low. And in his case she was ready to have him see it just as he drew his last breath with her sitting in the mud shrieking.

  He lit a cigarette. The blood dried on his temples and he could feel his skin crusty. When he passed the turnoff for Mississippi he couldn’t see W.W. anymore. The highway bent around the course of the old river, then wound back toward the west, obliterating his view of the road and making him feel apprehensive since he couldn’t gauge the distance and couldn’t gauge his chance of getting across before W. could start pounding away at the lake.

  The road sprung back east, passed over a cypress bayou, then fell along the straight open stretch of highway toward Elaine, where he could see the store bumped in the low distance above the cotton fields.

  He tossed the cigarette and got a look at the road behind him, and saw nothing in the drizzle. To the west were long latitudinal flecks of waxy light at the rear of the storm, which still grayed the sky for miles. He thought the day would turn warm and be clear by nightfall.

  He turned down off by Goodenough’s and glimpsed the window where the old lady stood and watched the sky develop, but no one was there, and he aimed straight out toward the levee.

  It bothered him about Newel and he wished he hadn’t remembered it, inasmuch as there wasn’t anything. At one time it might have been Beuna, though she hadn’t ever had a real hold on him and couldn’t have wormed inside enough to break his heart.

  He passed the two foundered machines. A car was just out of the cypress, a pillar of rain behind it, but he couldn’t make out who it was. He wiped the glass, but couldn’t see.

  He set off down the lee side of the levee, getting a little anxious about taking a boat without asking. The road flattened through the sycamores and crossed the gap. There were no lights in Gaspareau’s little house and none of the dogs was out, and the row of cabins seemed as empty as they had been. He drove up under the willows and stared quickly at the last of the cabins, where he thought he saw some motion and color behind one of the torn screens, though it didn’t materialize.

  Mr. Lamb’s Traveler was hitched at the end of the dock, the All State still fastened to the transom, dipping in the rain. He put on his jacket, stashed his clothes behind the seat, and got out.

  He listened for the wheeze of W.’s Plymouth, but he could hear only the sough of the rain and the pearls of water dropping off the sycamore leaves.

  He went down and surveyed the bottom of the boat and decided he’d have to go without bailing. He untied the painter, stepped in, and kicked away from the dock into the water. The boat began to drift backward in the breeze, and he balanced in the back, gave the motor a jerk, and let it flood out. He looked back at the row of cabins and whipped it again, and it bawled and kicked up smoke and lake bottom and rose partway out before he could catch the throttle and push the cowling down.

  He wheeled and started down the lake the way Landrieu had approached free of the shallows, admitting that much more space between him and W., if W. arrived while he was half across and decided to go ahead and start shooting right away.

  He took a look, expecting to see back up through the willows to the levee top, and instead saw someone who was not W.W. and was not Gaspareau, and didn’t seem to be anyone he’d ever seen before on earth. He came clear of the shallows and piloted toward the middle of the lake and opened the throttle. The rain had started again full stream, and the boat slipped out over the tiny white wavelets that were headed toward the shore four hundred yards away.

  He looked at the figure on the dock. The man was tall and built slenderly and wore only a T-shirt and pants and no provision for the weather. He held a long slender rifle he was just fitting to his shoulder with a fat bulb-ended scope bolted to the receiver. He stared at the man, wondering what he might be doing and who he was, and had it break on him it was the boy from the road sale, the boy Gaspareau had sent over for the old man’s guarding job. It seemed clear he was left to guard the camp, and was probably right now under the impression he was stealing a boat to get over, since the island was as vacant as the camp appeared to be, and open season for whoever could get across and create mayhem.

  The boy stood for a long time with the gun to his shoulder, sighting in the scope as the boat slid farther and farther out onto the lake. He scowled at the boy, trying to figure out measures to take, without having to turn around and go back and risk getting cornered by W. before he could make it clear he wasn’t converting anything and get back on the water.

  The boat passed the quarter way in the lake, and the size of the boy was diminishing, making him feel better. Though he could still see the boy clearly, sighting the scope, dr
opping the barrel periodically and looking out on the lake with just his eyes as if he were estimating the real distance to what he could actually see in the glass. He looked up the levee but couldn’t see anything, and it made him uncomfortable again.

  All at once he turned the boat out sideways so that it was pointed down the long curve of the lake, cut the throttle, and offered the boy a perfect broadside of the boat. He stood up in the bottom, faced the dock, and spread his arms so the boy could see him clearly in the prism of his scope, see his face, and recognize him as the old man’s employee heading across to attend to business.

  But instead the boy fired.

  Somewhere between his ribs and his collarbone he felt a great upheaval, a tumult of molecules being rearranged and sloughed off in rapid succession, and in the midst of it a feeling like hitting your thumb so hard with a hammer that the pain is delayed and stays inert in your thumb for a long number of seconds before it flies up, and you have to lie down just to get yourself ready. That, until he hit the water. Then it hurt and felt cold all at one time, and the surface of the water seemed like a line bobbing in front of his eyes up and sideways and down again, like a lariat being snaked and twirled over the top of itself. And he could hear a loud and tremendous roaring and himself saying “Oh, oh,” and tried to see above the water and beyond the rocking boat nearby, but couldn’t.

  Epilogue

  In the Roosevelt Hotel in New Orleans he went with his father out of their room and into the dark, shaded corridor to where the elevators were, to go have oysters in the Sazerac Bar. And in the corridor there were men piled up against a doorway, straining and staring inside at something he could not see, but that was the object of someone’s flash camera inside the room. And when his father got to where the men were, he looked in over their shoulders and said, “Look here. “And the men parted the way and he stepped up to the door and looked around the painted jamb and saw a young man in his thirties with short blond hair and a square meaty face, lying face down half on his bed and half off, with his feet sticking straight up into the air like flagpoles, holding a pistol. The room was cool and smelled like cheap soap, and the man looked strange to be lying in that particular way. And he said to his father, “What’s this?” And all at once the dark man with the camera reached to move the young man who was half on and half off the bed, and his father said, “Listen, now listen, and you can hear him rattle in his throat.”And he listened and when the man with the camera moved the man with his feet on the bed in such a way that he was no longer lying on his nose, there was a faint sound from somewhere, like someone in the room had caught a fly in his throat and tried to cough it up without making any noise, and his father said, “See? See? Did you hear it?” And he wasn’t ever sure if he had heard it or not.

  A Note on the Author

  Richard Ford was born in Jackson, Mississippi, in 1944. He has published six novels and three collections of stories, including The Sportswriter, Independence Day, Wildlife, A Multitude of Sins and most recently The Lay of the Land. Independence Day was awarded the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction.

  By the Same Author

  NOVELS

  The Ultimate Good Luck

  The Sportswriter

  Wildlife

  Independence Day

  The Lay of the Land

  Canada

  SHORT FICTION

  Rock Springs

  Women with Men: Three Stories

  A Multitude of Sins

  This electronic edition published in 2012 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

  Copyright © 1976 by Richard Ford

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  All rights reserved

  You may not copy, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (including without limitation electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, printing, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages

  Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

  50 Bedford Square

  London WC1B 3DP

  Bloomsbury Publishing, London, Berlin, New York and Sydney

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN: 9781408835074

  Visit www.bloomsbury.com to find out more about our authors and their books

  You will find extracts, author interviews, author events and you can sign up for newsletters to be the first to hear about our latest releases and special offers