by Rob Riggan
Winthrop, his eyes hidden behind large aviator sunglasses, had the window down, an arm out and the radio volume up. He was dressed in fresh-washed jeans, cowboy boots and a clean and pressed blue work shirt, the only token to his status as a businessman the gold Cross pen sticking out of his pocket. It was only 8:10, the traffic running thick toward town. All the cars looked small over his hood, which bounced slightly when the truck rode over the joints of the old concrete highway rising beneath the asphalt. A folded receipt for the block and piping needed to hook up the unit was attached with other papers to a clipboard lying on the seat.
The Southern Railroad track flowed out of the fields beside the highway, and the two ran west side by side and absolutely straight toward the mountains for four miles or so, the mountains looking light blue and pretty. Winthrop had gone over them only as far as Memphis to take Lizzie to Graceland. Sometimes, like this morning, looking west at those mountains caused him to ache with a fine longing that he didn’t understand and that troubled him, too, if he let it.
When he passed Rural Paved 96 in Little Zion, he glanced up the road, where he could see the cross on top of the squat steeple of the Ebenezer church peeking over some trees. That sight made him momentarily unhappy, thinking of the Raconda mobile home he’d set up nearby at Willow Run for that Living Dead Skinner fellow. That TV was still sitting in the closet of his office, its case stuck together with electrician’s tape, looking like $14,987 worth of dead weight. For an instant, his face grew heated with anger and something like fear. Then he found himself thinking about that calendar girl at Forrest’s again. Though he was not much given to reflection, it nevertheless struck him as odd that you could have as pretty a wife as he did and see it all, and wonderful as it was, it wasn’t the same. It was too, well … He struggled for the thought. It just wasn’t the same as that look, that toughness or scariness, like you might get the ride of your life, or be eaten alive. Or both.
He made himself think of church instead, like the past Sunday, the sanctuary filled with people of all ages, every one of whom he knew, and who knew him as Mr. Reedy or just Winn, if they were older or friends. They knew he was doing well with a good business and a pretty wife, so they could trust him with the Christian education of their children and their church finances. Lizzie, her long blond hair in that ponytail, had worn a sharp new yellow suit with a white collar, all of which made her look fresh and upstanding and efficient. He’d always felt himself gain in stature around her. Her mama and daddy sat in the pew with them, and they all went out to Raford’s Fish Camp on the river afterward for catfish and hush puppies. Then they drove by Willow Run to look at the improvements. Her parents were so proud of them—of Willow Run, their new car, the brick house.
He recalled a rumor he’d heard over breakfast at Dorothy’s a couple of hours earlier, that Eddie Lambert had resigned and no one knew where Sheriff Dugan was. Just a rumor, sure, but it had been unsettling. He hoped the sheriff was okay. He was a hardworking man and deserved the best.
As Winthrop left the main highway and started the climb toward Sentry, suddenly he saw himself twenty-five years down the road, fifty-two years old, gray haired and maybe a paunch. Still putting on his suits in the morning? President of the chamber of commerce? Deacon in the church? Member of the city council? Two or three Willow Runs, maybe, a house somewhere in Florida? Debt? Would he ever be out of debt? For sure, he would still be grateful, saying “Yessir” or “Nossir” to the head of the bank and God knew who else, although maybe in a more easy manner because he would be “Winn” to everybody by then, and respect was implied, or he wouldn’t have gotten there. Or just as like, he’d still be peddling mobile homes down on the bypass and maybe poking something on the side in the slow afternoons. Lord! Where are these thoughts coming from?
The lead Pinto missed the turnoff to the old CCC camp. Winthrop, however, spotted it at once and, slowing to a stop, flashed his lights at the little car disappearing around a bend ahead. On his right through a small gap in the trees, he could see the reservoir, said to be over a hundred feet deep in places and running some seventeen miles from east to west, not including all the bays and inlets. Winthrop had never spent much time fishing, but they said catfish as big as boxcars grew there.
When the car reappeared about five minutes later, Winthrop had already gotten the other Pinto to take the lead and maneuvered the tractor and mobile home onto a narrow, grassy track that led across a small clearing into the forest. “You gonna have twelve foot down in there, Mr. Reedy?” the driver asked, eyeing the opening.
“How are you with a chain saw, Willie?”
“Ha!” the driver, Willie Cantrell, who was sixty, rejoined, grinning. “Does look like they’s been a car and maybe a dozer down there,” he added, scuffing the matted grass with the toe of his shoe. He climbed back into his car. The drivers all knew Winthrop and liked him. He also tipped them, which a lot of customers did not.
It took Winthrop thirty minutes to maneuver the trailer a quarter-mile down the road, which once grew so narrow that two young saplings rubbed the sides, but with only the faintest hiss of bark on metal.
“Whoo, boy! Vaseline wouldn’t have done it with less friction,” Willie said as Winthrop climbed down to look for damage.
Finding only a few green marks, he pulled himself back up into the cab. “C’mon, boys!” he said.
Ahead he saw a clearing for a trailer, just like that Grady Snipes had promised. But it sure wasn’t Snipes standing there.
XXXII
Winthrop
“Good God Almighty!” Winthrop exclaimed as he swung the tractor into the clearing. The drivers of both Pintos had already emerged from their vehicles to gape at a woman in short khaki shorts and a man’s blue dress shirt with the sleeves rolled up and the front mostly unbuttoned. Ignoring them, she made her way barefoot over the grass from a battered Ford Mustang convertible to the cab of the truck, and was waiting when Winthrop swung the door open and jumped down.
Winthrop noticed at once that she came just to his chin, that she smelled faintly of lemons and that, although he wasn’t touching her, he was as good as holding her and more, the way she stood in front of him. “I’m looking for Mr. Snipes,” he said, admirably maintaining his composure, he thought, though he couldn’t bring himself to move back even a smidgen for the sake of appearances. He did make himself look around the clearing, saw the swath cleared up through the woods for the electric line, and an area graded by a bulldozer a little bigger than the trailer, where a plastic pipe stood up out of the ground, and another freshly turned area he assumed was the leach field. The clearing was sunny and nice, he thought. In the silence of his breathing, and hers, and maybe the drivers’, too, he heard the splash of a nearby stream.
“Grady’s at work,” the woman said in a deep voice that wasn’t Southern but wasn’t harsh or unfriendly either. “My name’s Helen. They call me Peanut.”
“Peanut!” he heard himself exclaim. “You sure don’t look like any peanut I’ve ever seen, ma’am.” He saw her wide brown eyes lift to meet his gaze, noticed the pretty silver barrettes holding her long hair over her ears. He felt she was asking him to take them out, but no, he had to be imagining that. There was nothing but silence.
“Willie! Dooley! Hey!” Winthrop shook his head savagely and, turning away, started for the Pintos, where the two men stood by their open doors, still staring. But maybe holding back a little grin, too? He fished a tooled leather wallet, one Lizzie had given him, out of a back pocket and, flopping it open, pulled out two ten-dollar bills. “I shouldn’t need you anymore, boys. Thank you kindly,” he said, handing each one a bill. Then he blushed. By God, they were grinning! I got to unload those blocks, get a signature and get out of here, same as always, and I always do it alone. So where do they get off grinning?
“Sure you don’t need some help?” Dooley Trivett asked, a twinkle in his eye.
“You know, Mr. Reedy, the altitude up here … It’s a long way down.”
“Damn, boys!” was all he could say. He’d never seen them like this. It was disrespect. But they climbed in their cars and were soon bouncing back up the road.
In the sudden, hushed tumult of the forest, Winthrop felt the sun warm his face. He hadn’t moved from the spot where he’d paid the drivers. She hadn’t moved either. But without looking, he knew precisely where she was and felt her stillness.
“I’ll just drop this trailer on that pad,” he said suddenly. “You guide me. I’ll leave the blocks for Mr. Snipes.”
With that, he strode resolutely across the clearing to the truck. In a few minutes, he dropped the trailer precisely in place.
“Damn, you did some good directing, Peanut,” he said once he was on the ground again.
“Kind of ugly, isn’t it?” she said, looking at the trailer.
Her unsmiling bluntness took Winthrop aback, but then he decided he liked it. “Yeah, I told him. Tried to show him one that would have done more justice by you, ma’am. A real home. But he knew what he wanted.”
“Grady always knows what he wants.”
“Mr. Snipes your husband, ma’am?” Now, why the hell do I need to know that? he thought.
“Ha!” she laughed. “I’ve seen prettier trailers on construction sites. You have a key to this sardine can?”
“Yes, ma’am.” Winthrop retrieved a pair of keys from his shirt pocket and dropped them in her hand. She hadn’t taken her eyes off the trailer, and he found himself a little disappointed.
“Any furniture?” she asked, reaching up on tiptoes to unlock the door. As she did, her shirt fell open where the buttons were undone, revealing one entire lovely breast. Winthrop swallowed hard, then looked away as she grabbed the sides of the open door and effortlessly pulled herself the almost three feet up into the trailer.
“I’ll just unload these blocks and the hookup kit—the pipe and all that, ma’am—then you’ll need to sign some papers.” Winthrop grabbed the clipboard from the cab.
She was standing in the door of the trailer, leaning outward, when he returned. Both hands clutched the frame while she looked down on him, making his eyes travel up her body to find her face. “Show me around,” she said.
“Yes, ma’am.” Reaching for the doorframe, he pulled himself up. His face landed between her thighs, flowing like tanned silk out of those shorts. She didn’t move. Winthrop gulped pungent, sun-warmed skin and hidden excretions.
“And it’s Peanut, please,” she said, still not moving while he half-hung from the door. “I appreciate your Southern manners and all that, but I’m not married and you’re making me feel ancient.” Then she moved back while Winthrop prepared to pull himself up again, trying hard not to look anywhere at all.
Scrambling through the door on his knees, Winthrop gained the shadowy interior of the trailer with a good deal less grace than he’d strived for. Again he found her standing in front of him inside that space where he knew he wasn’t touching her, but damn if it didn’t feel that way. “I gather you’re not from around here,” he said, clearing his throat and avoiding the word Yankee, in case it might offend her.
She was staring at his chest. “Mantoloking, New Jersey. Ever been there?”
“No … Peanut.”
“It’s by the ocean. All houses, sky and telephone poles. Everybody’s rich as hell. You can look out to where the sky and sea come together and become nothing,” she added, turning her back on him and padding to the front of the trailer, where she paused, legs wide apart, hands on hips, and looked around, her skepticism evident. She brushed past him, her bare arm just touching his, and made her way toward the rear of the trailer, first stopping at the kitchen to twist the handles on the faucet and peek into the refrigerator, then pushing the bathroom door open and sticking her head in there. Finally she entered the bedroom.
Winthrop found her standing in the same pose she’d taken at the front of the trailer. She wiped her hand across her brow. “You’re Mr. Reedy?”
“Winthrop,” he said. “If you’ll just sign these papers …” He lifted the clipboard toward her, feeling like a schoolboy asking his teacher for approval.
“It’s damn hot, Winthrop, isn’t it?” she said, ignoring the clipboard.
Striving to appear relaxed, like he had all the time in the world and didn’t have a business to run, Winthrop leaned against the doorframe and crossed his arms over the clipboard, pressing it to his chest. He heard the tick of expanding metal and was surprised by the ferocious humidity so high up. “It sure is,” he agreed. Watching her move unhurriedly from window to window cranking open the jalousies, panic began to tug at his insides, as Damascus, work, the entire day threatened to slip away.
“What are we supposed to sleep on? Did he buy a bed?”
“Not from me,” Winthrop said.
All at once, she lifted her head from an examination of the floor and gave Winthrop a piercing look. Then she glided to the door where he stood and, slipping her hand around his waist, drew him into the room. “Come here and look at this! It’s damn small, isn’t it?” she said, stopping in the middle of the room.
“I guess so.” She hadn’t removed her arm. Winthrop felt sweat begin to flow freely down his forehead and under his arms. “Whew,” he said. “You’ll need air conditioning.” Her hand felt like a ten-ton feather on his hip.
She turned and pressed his body with the front of hers, from about his knees to his stomach. Reaching up, she lightly brushed the fingertips of her free hand over his forehead, her eyes following her fingers. “Where did you learn to drive a truck?”
It was another moment before Winthrop became aware that her fingers were moving over his chest, playing in the dampness there, making little circles. He hadn’t felt her undo the buttons of his shirt. Sweat began to sting his eyes as though he were crying. He felt like he was crying, like he was on fire from an exquisite pain that was going to blow his body wide apart. His hands found her waist, lifted her shirt and wrapped themselves around satiny skin so his fingertips met. For a moment, he felt the top of her shorts, then knew the shorts weren’t there anymore.
Her smell overwhelmed him as sweat suddenly gushed down his body.
“What took you so goddamn long?” Cub demanded as Winthrop wandered into the garage. Behind him in the yard, the sun spilled under the oak tree and over the Firebird in long, golden streams, churning dust and insects. Winthrop stared at Cub’s thin, freckled, earnest face and scattered mop of hair. Suddenly they were very funny to him, but strange, too, unreal like the day itself, a kind of dreamy, lost feeling pervading everything.
“Willie and Dooley said you ran into some kind of wood nymph up there. They didn’t want to leave you.” Cub laughed, showing his bad teeth. His eyes were angry.
I don’t believe this is about the truck, thought Winthrop. But Winthrop was having trouble focusing, much less taking anything seriously. There was a sadness in him, too, filling him and pressing outward like a huge balloon. “Surely, Cub. All I’ve been doing all afternoon is chasing a wood nymph.” Winthrop listened to his own words as though someone else were speaking them over a microphone. He looked down and wiped his hands over his clothes, over streaks of dirt on his jeans and shirt. His boots were scuffed. Only the Cross pen glinting in his pocket looked the way it had when the day began.
Leaving the woods, Winthrop had stopped where the grassy track rose to the pavement and, grabbing some handfuls of dirt from the shoulder of the road, rubbed them over his clothes. The sadness hit him hard then, though it had begun nibbling at him hours before in that trailer, like dizziness almost.
“Better go. Grady’s due back,” she’d said, standing once again in the space where even if he weren’t touching her, he could be and more. Only he was touching her, his hands resting on her hips where they sloped toward her waist, she not wearing a stitch, just standing before him in that empty trailer. Again the sweat had poured from him like liquid fire, devouring his senses. Again they’d melted together.
/> “Lizzie’s been calling since about three. I didn’t know what to tell her, Winn.”
“The truth, goddamnit!” he said. “Look here!” He flicked his hands angrily over his shirt front. “That Snipes fella may work construction, but he doesn’t know shit about mounting a trailer. He showed up right after the boys left, but I wound up jacking that whole damn rig. And no phone, or sure as hell I would’ve called you!”
“You have no need to swear,” Cub said with uncharacteristic primness, holding up his hands. “I didn’t know. I just never saw Willie and Dooley acting so.”
“Neither have I,” Winthrop said. Looking at Cub, he realized that his friend didn’t want to believe for a second that anything had happened, not to someone doing so well and married to Lizzie. Nothing did happen, Winthrop told himself. “Maybe I got to stop tipping,” he said, and laughed. Cub laughed, too, his eyes betraying the degree of his relief. He damn near worships me, Winthrop thought, disheartened. Cub was tight-wired, and though he rarely showed it, he had a hell of a temper. “Cub, I got to go take a shower,” Winthrop said, swinging the Firebird’s key ring. “Put the extra hours on the tab.”
No, she didn’t have Lizzie’s lean good looks, nor her brains and quickness. But she was pure instinct, he thought, feeling that exquisite pain again. He wished he were back up in the mountains, where she might be paying attention to him instead of that Grady creep.
