November Road

by Lou Berney

  He flipped the redhead around, hiked up her skirt, yanked down her panties. The glass flexed again when he thrust into her. Guidry’s landlord claimed the windows in the building could withstand a hurricane, but that remained to be seen.

  2

  Charlotte imagined herself alone on the bridge of a ship, a storm raging and the sea flinging itself over the deck. Sailcloth ripped, lines snapped. And toss in a few splintering planks for good measure, why don’t we? The sun bled a cold, colorless light that made Charlotte feel as if she had already drowned.

  “Mommy,” Rosemary called from the living room, “Joan and I have a question.”

  “I told you to come eat breakfast, chickadees,” Charlotte said.

  “September is your favorite month of autumn, isn’t it, Mommy? And November is your least favorite?”

  “Come eat breakfast.”

  The bacon was burning. Charlotte tripped on the dog, sprawled in the middle of the floor, and lost her shoe. On the way back across the kitchen—the toaster had begun to smoke now, too—she tripped on the shoe. The dog twitched and grimaced, a seizure approaching. Charlotte prayed for a false alarm.

  Plates. Forks. Charlotte put on lipstick with one hand as she poured juice with the other. It was already half past seven. Where did the time go? Anywhere but here, apparently.

  “Girls!” she called.

  Dooley shuffled into the kitchen, still in his pajamas, with the greenish tint and martyred posture of an El Greco saint.

  “You’re going to be late for work again, honey,” Charlotte said.

  He sagged into a chair. “I feel awful puny this morning.”

  Charlotte supposed that he did. It had been after one in the morning when she heard the front door finally bang open, when she heard him come bumping and weaving down the hallway. He’d taken off his pants before he came to bed but had been too drunk to remember his sport coat. As drunk as usual, in other words.

  “Would you like some coffee?” Charlotte said. “I’ll make you some toast.”

  “Might be the flu, I’m thinking.”

  She admired her husband’s ability to keep a straight face. Or maybe he really believed his own lies? He was a trusting soul, after all.

  He took a sip of the coffee and then shuffled back out of the kitchen, into the bathroom. She heard him retch, then rinse.

  The girls climbed into their seats at the table. Rosemary, seven, and Joan, eight. To look at them, you’d never guess that they were sisters. Joan’s little blond head was always as sleek and shiny as the head of a pin. Meanwhile several tendrils of Rosemary’s unruly chestnut hair had already sprung free from the tortoiseshell band. An hour from now, she’d look as if she’d been raised by wolves.

  “But I like November,” Joan said.

  “No, Joan, see, September is best because that’s the one month every year when we’re the same age,” Rosemary said. “And October has Halloween. Halloween is better than Thanksgiving, of course. So November has to be your least favorite month of autumn.”

  “Okay,” Joan said. She was ever agreeable. A good thing, with a little sister like Rosemary.

  Charlotte searched for her purse. She’d had it in her hand a moment ago. Hadn’t she? She heard Dooley retch again, rinse again. The dog had flopped over and then settled. According to the veterinarian, the new medicine might reduce the frequency of the seizures or it might not. They would have to wait and see.

  She found her lost shoe beneath the dog. She had to pry it out from beneath the thick, heavy folds of him.

  “Poor Daddy,” Rosemary said. “Is he under the weather again?”

  “You could certainly say that,” Charlotte conceded. “Yes.”

  Dooley returned from the bathroom, looking less green but more martyred.

  “Daddy!” the girls said.

  He winced. “Shhh. My head.”

  “Daddy, Joan and I agree that September is our favorite month of autumn and November is our least favorite month. Do you want us to explain why?”

  “Unless it snows in November,” Joan said.

  “Oh, yes!” Rosemary said. “If it snows, then it’s the best month. Joan, let’s pretend it’s snowing now. Let’s pretend the wind is howling and the snow is melting down our necks.”

  “Okay,” Joan said.

  Charlotte set the toast in front of Dooley and gave each girl a kiss on the top of the head. Her love for her daughters defied understanding. Sometimes the sudden, unexpected detonation of it shook Charlotte from head to toe.

  “Charlie, I wouldn’t mind a fried egg,” Dooley said.

  “You don’t want to be late for work again, honey.”

  “Oh, hell. Pete doesn’t mind when I come in. I might call in sick today anyway.”

  Pete Winemiller owned the hardware store in town. A friend of Dooley’s father, Pete was the latest in a long line of friends and clients who’d done the old man a favor and hired his wayward son. And the latest in a long line of employers whose patience with Dooley had been quickly exhausted.

  But Charlotte had to proceed with caution. She’d learned early in the marriage that the wrong word or tone of voice or poorly timed frown could send Dooley into a wounded sulk that might last for hours.

  “Didn’t Pete say last week that he needed you bright and early every day?” she said.

  “Oh, don’t worry about Pete. He’s full of gas.”

  “But I bet he’s counting on you. Maybe if you just—”

  “Lord Almighty, Charlie,” Dooley said. “I’m a sick man. Can’t you see that? You’re trying to wring blood from a stone.”

  If only dealing with Dooley were so simple or so easy as that. Charlotte hesitated and then turned away. “All right,” she said. “I’ll fry you an egg.”

  “I’m going to lie down on the couch for a minute. Holler at me when it’s ready.”

  She watched him exit. Where did the time go? Only a moment ago, Charlotte had been eleven years old, not twenty-eight. Only a moment ago, she’d been barefoot and baked brown by the long prairie summer, racing through swishing bluestem and switchgrass as tall as her waist, leaping from the high bank of the Redbud River, cannonballing into the water. Parents always warned their children to stay in the shallows, on the town side of the river, but Charlotte had been the strongest swimmer of any her friends, undaunted by the current, and she could make it to the far shore, to parts unknown, with hardly any trouble at all.

  Charlotte remembered lying sprawled in the sun afterward, daydreaming about skyscrapers in New York City and movie premieres in Hollywood and jeeps on the African savanna, wondering which of many delightful and exotic futures awaited her. Anything was possible. Everything was possible.

  She reached for Joan’s plate and knocked over her juice. The glass hit the floor and shattered. The dog began to jerk and grimace again, more forcefully this time.

  “Mommy?” Rosemary said. “Are you crying or laughing?”

  Charlotte knelt to stroke the dog’s head. With her other hand, she collected the sharp, sparkling shards of the juice glass.

  “Well, sweetie,” she said, “I think maybe both.”

  She finally made it downtown at a quarter past eight. “Downtown” was far too grand a designation. Three blocks square, a handful of redbrick buildings with Victorian cupolas and rough-faced limestone trim, not one of them more than three stories tall. A diner, a dress shop, a hardware store, a bakery. The First (and only) Bank of Woodrow, Oklahoma.

  The photography studio was on the corner of Main and Oklahoma, next to the bakery. Charlotte had worked there for almost five years now. Mr. Hotchkiss specialized in formal portraits. Beaming brides-to-be, toddlers in starched sailor suits, freshly delivered infants. Charlotte mixed the darkroom chemicals, processed the film, printed the contact sheets, and tinted the black-and-white portraits. For hour after tedious hour, she sat at her table, using linseed oil and paint to add a golden glow to hair, a blue gleam to irises.

  She lit a cigarette and
started in on the Richardson toddlers, a pair of identical twins with matching Santa hats and stunned expressions.

  Mr. Hotchkiss puttered over and bent down to examine her work. A widower in his sixties, he smelled of apple-flavored pipe tobacco and photochemical fixative. He tended, as preface to any important pronouncement, to hitch up his pants.

  He hitched up his pants. “Well, all right.”

  “Thank you,” Charlotte said. “I couldn’t decide on the shade of red for the hats. The debate with myself grew heated.”

  Mr. Hotchkiss glanced at her transistor radio on the shelf. The AM station that she liked broadcast from Kansas City, so by the time the signal reached Woodrow, it had gone fuzzy and ragged. Even after Charlotte had done much fiddling with the dial and the antenna, Bob Dylan still sounded as if he was singing “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right” from the bottom of a well.

  “I’ll tell you what, Charlie,” Mr. Hotchkiss said. “That old boy’s no Bobby Vinton.”

  “I fully agree,” Charlotte said.

  “Mumble, mumble, mumble. I don’t understand a thing he’s saying.”

  “The world is changing, Mr. Hotchkiss. It’s speaking a new language.”

  “Not here in Logan County it’s not,” he said, “thank goodness.”

  No, not here in Logan County. On that fact Charlotte stood corrected.

  “Mr. Hotchkiss,” she said, “have you had a chance yet to look at that new photo I gave you?”

  In addition to his duties at the studio, Mr. Hotchkiss served as photo editor for the local newspaper, the Woodrow Trumpet. Charlotte coveted one of the freelance assignments. Several months ago she’d persuaded Mr. Hotchkiss to loan her one of his lesser cameras.

  Her early attempts at photography had been woeful. She’d kept at it, though. She practiced on her lunch hour, if she had a few minutes between errands, and early in the morning before the girls woke. When she took the girls to the library on Saturday, she studied magazines and art books. Taking pictures, thinking about the world from a perspective she otherwise wouldn’t have considered, made her feel the way she did when she listened to Bob Dylan and Ruth Brown—bright and vital, as if her small life were, just for a moment, part of something larger.

  “Mr. Hotchkiss?” she said.

  He’d been distracted by the morning mail. “Hmm?” he said.

  “I asked if you’d had a chance yet to look at my new photo.”

  He hitched up his pants and cleared his throat. “Ah, yes. Well. Yes.”

  The photo she’d given him was of Alice Hibbard and Christine Kuriger, waiting to cross Oklahoma Avenue at the end of the day. The backlight, the contrast … what had caught Charlotte’s eye was how their shadows seemed more substantial, almost more real, than the two women themselves.

  “And what did you think?” Charlotte said.

  “Well. Have I explained the rule of thirds?”

  Only a few dozen times. “Yes, I understand,” she said. “But in this case I was trying to capture the—”

  “Charlotte,” he said. “Dear. You’re a lovely, smart girl, and I’m lucky to have you. The girl I had before you … well. All thumbs and not a brain in her head, bless her heart. I don’t know what I’d do without you, Charlie.”

  He patted her shoulder. She was tempted to present an ultimatum. Either he gave her a chance with the Trumpet—she’d take any assignment, no matter how lowly—or he’d find out exactly what he would do without her.

  Did she have any talent as a photographer? Charlotte wasn’t sure but thought she might. She knew the difference between an interesting picture and a dull one at least. She knew the difference between the photos in Life and National Geographic that seemed to leap off the page and the ones in the Trumpet that sprawled like corpses on a slab.

  “Mr. Hotchkiss,” she said.

  He’d turned and started to putter away. “Hmm?”

  But of course she couldn’t afford to quit the studio. The money she brought home every week kept the ship afloat. And perhaps Mr. Hotchkiss was right and Charlotte was all thumbs when it came to photography. He was a professional, after all, with a framed certificate of merit from the Oklahoma Society of Professional Journalists. He might be doing Charlotte a favor. Thank goodness, she might say years from now, looking back. Thank goodness I didn’t waste any more time on that.

  “Nothing,” she told Mr. Hotchkiss. “Never mind.”

  She returned to work on the Richardson toddlers. Their parents were Harold and Virginia. Harold’s sister Beanie had been Charlotte’s best friend in grade school. His father had been Charlotte’s choir director in junior high. His mother loved pineapple upside-down cake, and every year Charlotte made sure to bake one for her birthday.

  Virginia Richardson (née Norton) had worked with Charlotte on the high-school yearbook. She’d insisted that Charlotte double-check the spelling of every caption she wrote. Bob, Virginia’s older brother, had been a dashingly handsome varsity star in track, baseball, and football. He was married now to Hope Kirby, who a year after graduation had blossomed from ugly duckling to beautiful swan. Hope Kirby’s mother, Irene, had been Charlotte’s mother’s maid of honor.

  Charlotte had known them all her life, the Richardsons and the Nortons and the Kirbys. She’d known everyone in town all her life, she realized. And everyone in town had known her. Always would.

  Was it selfish of her, she wondered, to want more from her life? To want more for Rosemary and Joan? Woodrow was idyllic in many ways. Quaint, safe, friendly. But it was also interminably dull, as locked in its stubborn, small-minded ways, as resistant to new things and ideas, as Mr. Hotchkiss. Charlotte longed to live in a place where it wasn’t so hard to tell the past from the future.

  A few months ago, she’d suggested to Dooley that they consider moving away—to Kansas City, maybe, or to Chicago. Dooley had stared at her dumbfounded, as if she’d suggested that they strip off their clothes and run screaming through the streets.

  Today, on her lunch hour, Charlotte had no time for photography. She wolfed her sandwich, picked up the dog’s medicine at the vet, and then hurried down the street to the bank. Dooley had promised to talk to Jim Feeney this time, but no one was more adept at evading unpleasant tasks than her husband. Charlotte, unfortunately, couldn’t afford the luxury.

  “Oh, darn, did I forget?” Dooley would say, his smile bashful without being apologetic, a little boy who’d gotten away with much in his life and become accustomed to it.

  At the bank Charlotte had to sit and wait until Jim Feeney finished a phone call.

  Little Jimmy Feeney. He and Charlotte had been in the same class since kindergarten. In grade school he’d been held back a year because arithmetic eluded him. In high school he’d broken his arm while attempting to tip a cow. Yet there he sat, behind the assistant manager’s desk, because he was a man. And here she sat, on the other side of the desk, because she was not.

  “Hello, Charlie,” he said. “What may I help you with today?”

  What indeed? Charlotte wondered if Jim relished her mortification or was just oblivious to it.

  “Hello, Jim,” she said. “I’m afraid I have to ask for an extension on our mortgage payment this month.”

  “I see.”

  Bonnie Bublitz observed them from the teller cage. So did Vernon Phipps, cashing a check. Hope Norton (née Kirby) fluttered past and then fluttered back to hand Jim a folder.

  I won’t beg, Charlotte thought, as she prepared to do just that.

  “We just need a short extension, Jim,” she said. “A week or two.”

  “This puts me in a spot, Charlie,” he said.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “It’d be the third extension this year, you know.”

  “I do know. Things have been a bit tight lately. But they’re looking up.”

  Jim drummed his fountain pen against the edge of his ledger. Thinking, or coming as near to it as he was able.

  “You have to pinch every penny, Cha
rlie,” he said, even though he knew Dooley, even though he knew full well the real source of their financial difficulties. “A detailed budget can be very useful. Household expenses and such.”

  “Just an extra two weeks,” Charlotte said. “Please, Jim.”

  His drumming trailed away. Da-da-da, da-da, da. Like a fading heartbeat. “Well, I suppose I can give you one more… .”

  Earl Grindle stepped out of the manager’s office. He looked wildly around, as if he couldn’t fathom why everyone else in the bank continued to sit or stand calmly.

  He took off his glasses and then put them back on. “Someone shot him. Someone shot President Kennedy.”

  Charlotte walked back to the photography studio. Mr. Hotchkiss had not learned the news about the president yet. She peeked into the darkroom and saw him tinkering, blissfully ignorant, with the lamphouse of the Beseler enlarger.

  She sat down at her table and started tinting a new portrait. The Moore baby, three months old. He was propped on a carnation-shaped swirl of satin that, Charlotte decided, required a subtle shade of ivory.

  The president had been shot. Charlotte wasn’t sure if she’d truly grasped that yet. At the bank she’d watched as Hope Norton dropped her armful of folders. As Bonnie Bublitz in the teller cage burst into tears. As Vernon Phipps had walked out of the bank in a trance, leaving behind on the counter a stack of five-dollar bills. Jimmy Feeney kept asking, “Is this a joke? Earl, is this some kind of a joke?”

  The smell of linseed oil and apple-flavored pipe tobacco. The hum and chuckle of the radiator. Charlotte worked. She continued to remain curiously unmoved, curiously removed, by the news from Dallas. For a moment she couldn’t remember what day of the week it was, or what year. It could have been any day, any year.

  The phone rang. She heard Mr. Hotchkiss walk to his office and answer it.

  “What’s that?” he said. “What? Oh, no! Oh, no!”

  The parents of the Moore baby, their third, were Tim and Ann Moore. Charlotte’s first babysitting job had been for Tim’s pack of younger brothers. Ann’s sister was none other than Hope Norton, who was married to Virginia Richardson’s older brother, Bob. And yes, yet another link in the chain: Ann’s cousin on her mother’s side was Dooley’s boss at the hardware store, Pete Winemiller.