Zigzagging Down a Wild Trail

by Bobbie Ann Mason

“You can cancel that little dream,” Liz said. “It’s probably against the law now.”

  Liz and Peyton had separated six months ago, when he went to jail for possession of cocaine. By the time he was released (prematurely, in her opinion), she had decided she could be free of him. She wouldn’t allow him to stay in the house, so he moved into a small apartment above a friend’s auto-body shop and got work laying sewer pipes. Liz had made Peyton take all his tools and tackle and videotapes. His gun collection had already been confiscated when he was arrested—the shotgun in the closet, the Weatherby .243 varmint rifle over the mantel, and the handguns in various drawers. Now she wouldn’t even call him when she needed his vise grip to open a stuck window lock. For jar lids she used a “rubber husband,” a gimmick that came free with a set of stemware. But Peyton was a nagging presence, like the shotgun that had been propped in the closet. He had begun to leave threatening messages on her answering machine. He swore revenge and demanded that she behave like a wife. “You belong to me,” he had said.

  At home Liz ignored the new messages on her answering machine and opened a beer to settle her head. She microwaved some popcorn and watched a romantic made-for-TV movie, trying to pretend she didn’t know about Daisy’s stroke. She badly wanted to go to Tunica on the excursion bus at dawn. Gambling was her way of mocking the dull predictability of her life, and Daisy’s stroke—an actual surprise—confused her.

  When the telephone rang, she didn’t answer. Her caller I.D. showed Peyton’s number, and when she heard his wheedling voice on the answering machine, she lowered the volume. She wanted to keep Peyton away until after Tunica. He would need petting and forgiveness, and she didn’t feel capable of offering any. Although she had thrown out his Guns & Ammo magazines, there were still reminders of him in the house. Stuffing extruded from holes in the couch, worn from five years of TV evenings with Peyton. She had once hoped they could have a nicer place someday, and she had imagined decorating it with country-kitchen antique-style milk jugs and egg baskets and calico-print chickens. When she married him, she felt exhilarated at each new purchase. But their furniture was cheap, and it wore down at about the same rate as their marriage, faster than the payment schedules. Now she thought about the way he used to sit in front of the TV, a gun in his lap. He would be taking it apart, putting it back together, as if it needed exercise to remain operable. She remembered him caressing the barrel, loving on it as one would fondle a baby. Night after night, Peyton sat watching TV with one of his guns astride his lap—dismantling and reassembling it, concentrating hard.

  Peyton had roared into her life. She was seventeen and he was twenty-four. He seemed mysterious, as if his pockets were loaded with taboos, like candy treats. She fell for him because he was a stud—wearing studs and black leather and frenzied hair and a pair of motorcycle boots that could stomp her heart into submission. He was comfortable in his body, with a cock of the head that implied a secret, superior knowledge—his crotch still warm from the heat of his Harley. The way he moved—casual, unhurried, luxuriating in his muscularity—called to her, like an evangelist inviting her to come forward and get her soul saved. She didn’t know he was a drug dealer. He quit for her sake, he told her later, but she soon decided she had married too young, a mistake that delineated her life as clearly as an arranged marriage in a remote culture. When she began working nights, she felt relieved that she wouldn’t have to watch the revenge thrillers he had begun renting. Then he drifted into trouble, back into dealing. It was so easy, he told her, he couldn’t stay away from it. It beckoned him, like a lighthouse. “You never saw a lighthouse in your life,” Liz pointed out.

  Now the telephone rang again. She picked popcorn hulls out of her teeth. In a commercial, a farmer was walking with his dog in a field of soybeans. The fields were green and pretty, edged with mist. The video whizzed through scenes of the man’s life—his marriage, the birth of a baby, then his daughter’s wedding, with her wedding dress whirling among the bushy plants. The commercial was for a weed killer for no-till soybeans. It made farm life look rich and grand and satisfying. But it also made a life span seem as short as a season’s crop.

  In the morning, as she stepped out of the shower, she heard the telephone ringing and almost burst into tears, thinking of Peyton’s mother, who always looked fresh as a daisy—however fresh that was. Daisies actually smelled like vomit. The telephone stopped ringing.

  At the shopping center, the bus was packed with senior citizens and several lone eccentrics Liz recognized from earlier trips. She found a seat near the rear of the bus and shoved her tote bag on the floor against the wall. She was dressed in her new wide-legged shorts, with a tight tank-top and a loose poppy-print shirt. In her bag was a fleece throw, in case she got cold on the bus.

  Suddenly Peyton slid into the seat beside her, startling her. He had tracked her down with his bad news. Waves of goose bumps rippled across her skin.

  “Where were you?” he asked. “I was at the hospital all night.”

  “Is she all right?”

  “She’s still in a coma.”

  She sat quietly as he told her about the nightmarish night at the hospital and the doctors’ cryptic, noncommittal comments. His hard shoulder pressed against her. His plaid shirt was fresh, but his jeans had twin rips above the knees. He was wearing the jeans with the Confederate flag patch on the right thigh.

  “What do you think you’re doing, Liz?” he asked. “Your mama said you needed to be with me. She told me you were going to Tunica to blow your paycheck.” He slapped her bare knee.

  “Don’t touch me,” she said.

  “I’m coming with you.”

  “You would leave your sick mother to go play the slots?”

  “You need me to go along with you—for your own good.”

  “I don’t need you to chaperone. I told you I wrote you out of my script.”

  “Hey, I like them shorts of yours.” He poked her thigh, making a motion like a mole snouting through dirt. She knocked his hand away with her fist.

  She didn’t know what to say. Peyton had always neglected his mother, so Liz wasn’t surprised that he would duck out now. As the bus lurched out of the parking lot, Peyton tilted his seat back and adjusted the bill of his cap to shade his brow. He reminded Liz of a character in a movie, one of those criminals played by a handsome actor with a smirk. His cobra-head tattoo peeked out of his shirt sleeve. She hadn’t missed that at all.

  “How come you’re off work?” he asked.

  “I’m working twelve-hour shifts now, so I get more days off.”

  “They cut your hours,” he said.

  “But I got a raise—a dollar an hour.” Liz watched for the sun, which was on the verge of rising behind Wal-Mart. “You’re ruining my day,” she said. “You ought to go stay with your mom.” She had no idea what he was feeling about Daisy.

  “I’ll be good,” Peyton said, patting her leg. “I won’t get in your way.”

  “I’m not loaning you any money when you lose yours. As far as I’m concerned, you’re on your own.”

  “I won’t go near the blackjack tables,” he said. “Where were you yesterday? I tried to call. I went by the house.”

  Liz shrugged. “Had my knots cut out—don’t touch my head.”

  “Won’t your brains ooze out?” He flashed one of his Three Stooges smirks.

  Peyton was bleary-eyed and fuzzy-faced. In jail he had lost weight. Actually, he looked good, Liz thought, since he grew his hair back. In jail, he experimented with shaving his head, but it looked peculiar.

  “Did you see that guy in the second row?” Peyton asked rather loudly. “His blubber hangs off into the aisle. I can see it all the way back here. People like that should just be put out of their misery.”

  “Don’t be stupid.”

  “Well, I say it’s time to rid the world of blubber-butts. And queers. And liberals. And people who drive Lincoln Navigators. And David Letterman.”

  “That kind of talk gets
old,” she said angrily. “Decent people don’t talk that way anymore.”

  “Chill out, babe. You’ve been watching too much television.” He gave her knee a little squeeze.

  She had never figured out how to talk to him when he got like this. “At least I haven’t been in jail,” she said finally.

  “One of these days you’ll come to a bad end, Liz.”

  “Speak for yourself.” She opened her magazine.

  “Mama wanted us to stay together,” he whispered in her ear. “She just couldn’t bear knowing how we turned out. I believe that’s why she had a stroke.”

  “That wouldn’t cause a stroke.”

  “I think you still love me,” Peyton said. “I’m coming home with you tonight,” he said. “To our bed. I miss you. Can’t you see I’m full of hurt? And now my mama’s dying. Are you going to kick me when I’m down?”

  She wouldn’t answer. She flipped magazine pages.

  “You’re not getting away with this any longer,” he said.

  They sat in silence for a while, Liz fuming. Peyton was interfering with her new mission to straighten out her life—which she could not have explained to him even if she had a week’s time. Now apparently they were running away together, and everyone would blame them for abandoning Daisy on her deathbed.

  As the bus approached the confluence of the Ohio River and the Mississippi, Liz could see the famous ninety-five-foot steel cross towering in the distance. It appeared to extend a frightening embrace in all directions. After crossing the rivers, the bus headed south toward Arkansas. Peyton, slouching beside her, seemed to be sleeping. To steady her mind, Liz worked a word-search puzzle in the magazine she had brought. While he was in jail, she had felt tranquil, but she couldn’t focus on what her future held; it seemed like a fragile bubble that popped when she tried to visualize it. She hadn’t expected him to become so possessive after she threw him out. He made her feel that she was unjustly finding fault. One day a couple of years before, some cops were beating a suspect on the TV news, and Peyton said, “Goddamn, why didn’t they just kick his head in while they were at it?” It shocked her into reassessing his brutal swagger. She had thought it was typical male bluster; he was cool, spouting his charges at the world. But that day she saw him differently. He seemed small and pathetic. It takes a while to know a person, she kept telling herself.

  Peyton slept beside her, not waking until they crossed the Mississippi River again, at Memphis. When he stirred, she turned to peer out the window at plow-scarred fields. After Memphis, the delta stretched out flat and blank—old cotton fields waiting to be submerged under something new and transforming. Billboards planted in the fields like scarecrows marked the way to the casinos. In the distance the casinos began to appear, rising out of the fields like ocean vessels on the horizon—a Confederate armada positioned along the Mississippi, protecting the delta from northern invaders. In this misty atmosphere, Liz thought, the casinos seemed to really float. By law, they were supposed to operate offshore, but their floating was illusory. They actually stood on solid ground a mile or more from the river. She didn’t understand a law like that. It sounded slippery, a lie that let the casinos cut loose and glide along an imaginary river. She didn’t trust the law. It hadn’t been enough to work the kinks out of Peyton. Now she was afraid she couldn’t get a divorce because of legal costs.

  The bus passed two kudzu-smothered silos, some gray casino-worker housing, and an old diner known for its fried pickles. Then they entered the gates of a gleaming city with white-hot pavement and pastel buildings. When the bus stopped, the passengers split like a cluster of coins banged out of a paper roll and disappeared into the row of casinos. Liz walked fast, ignoring Peyton, who loped along behind her. In the Western-frontier casino that she preferred, Liz marched straight to the bank. When she left the window with her bucket of nickels, she glimpsed Peyton in the lobby atrium, lounging on a bench near a tree decorated with tiny lights. He followed her to a Vacation USA game, where—one by one—she inserted the ten dollars’ worth of nickels included with her bus excursion ticket. She liked to hurry through the first action, just for a little warm-up, as if to prove she could withstand loss.

  “Don’t mess with my luck, Peyton,” she said. “I’m warning you.”

  Nearby, a woman jerked a machine’s arm and a cascade of coins jingled out. “Hey, Mississippi!” the woman cried. “Tunica is where I get lucky. I get nihilistic when I’m in Vegas, but in Tunica I’m flying.”

  Liz loved coming to Tunica. It was as close to a luxury resort as she would ever get—a bright, clean place where she could feel classy. She delighted in the extravagant newness of the decor. The little lights on the surprisingly non-fake ficus trees in the atrium provided a Christmasy mood. And she loved the incessant sounds of the slots—the boiling of overlapping tones, something like the tune in Close Encounters of the Third Kind played by a full-blown orchestra, complete with flashing lights. The Western motif, with boots, guns, and wagon wheels imprinted on the carpeting, was homey. She pictured herself—wisecracking and flamboyant—in a flouncy skirt and boots with spurs.

  But today as she wandered through the place, getting her bearings, Peyton trailed her like a hunter, disturbing her concentration. After the first mad rush, she liked to go slowly. Sometimes she preferred to stand in a line for a while, to slow herself down. She liked the suspense of the games—the way they seemed like life-and-death struggles while they were happening. She couldn’t bear uncertainty in everyday life, but at the casinos the sudden emotional turns were like a car chase in the movies. The random surprises of playing the slots made her feel she could revamp her life. At times, being married to Peyton was just sitting in chairs compared with this exhilaration. But at other times, being married to him was more volatile and frightening than any gambling action. It was like being knocked backwards by a thug bursting through a door.

  A girl in a skimpy black satin-and-lace costume offered her a free rum Coke from a tray. She looked too young for the job, Liz thought. She wore a black knee brace, which seemed to complement her outfit. “Rollerblading?” the server-girl explained in a nasal accent. Peyton was playing a slot next to Liz. As he pulled the arm, a memory flashed through her mind—Peyton grabbing the handle of the fuse box in the basement after a fuse blew. She had been ironing and making toast while he was watching his tape of Die Hard with a Vengeance. He often replayed the most violent scenes in his favorite movies. He had a Top Ten list of best wipe-out scenes. “How can you watch all that?” she had asked him. “It’s not my life,” he said with a satisfied smile. “No skin off my butt.” She wondered increasingly if she should be afraid, although in his obsession he ignored her, as if he was somewhere in the movie and she didn’t exist. But now he was stalking her. She wondered if she had been making excuses for him unconsciously. He had his good side—the way he cooked pancakes on Sundays, his habit of making up funny songs to amuse her. She didn’t draw conclusions easily about people. But even before he went to jail, her friends had said: Dump him. You’ll end up shooting him. Or he’ll shoot you. The rum was opening up her head, and she imagined that she was having deep thoughts.

  In the afternoon Liz drank another rum Coke, and her luck improved. As she collected a fanfare of coins from a machine’s maw, Peyton appeared with a sack of barbecue and Cokes. Carrying her coin bucket, she followed him outside into the hazy, muggy air. They crossed a small bridge to a bench by the brook—the moat that ostensibly allowed the casino to float. Liz thought of the sump pump in her basement. When it rained, water seeped in, and the basement smelled like a drainage ditch.

  “I’m moving up to the Double Jackpot Haywire,” Liz said. “I’m going to put in fifty bucks all at once—in quarters—and then I’m going to hit the MAX button until it gives me back something good.”

  Her head buzzed. She had forgotten about her stitches, and when she ran her hand through her hair she almost yanked out a stitch, thinking it was a tick.

  Peyton
handed her a sandwich. She stared at it while he peeled a straw and stuck it in one of the Cokes for her. They sat on the bench and gazed at the picturesque stream, choked with blooming lilies. Peyton was unusually quiet.

  “Why don’t you call and find out how your mother is?” Liz said.

  “I’ll know sooner or later. There’s nothing I can do, anyway.”

  Liz felt a new wave of grief for Daisy—poor, fat Daisy with her mannish cigarette voice and absurd pink pantsuits. Liz had never really liked her. Daisy always told Liz she had no style. Liz meant to find her style one day. It was one of her recent resolutions. Squinting at the sun, Liz blinked the image of Daisy from her mind.

  “I thought up a poem for you while I was watching you this morning,” Peyton said.

  “When I count up the stuff I really like,

  The first thing for sure is my Harley bike

  But I guess that isn’t really true

  ’Cause the thing I really like best is you.”

  She held up two fingers. “When I married you, I was about two poker chips short of insanely happy,” she said.

  “The trouble with you is, you want people to be perfect.”

  “What do you want?” she asked him.

  “I want you to stop acting so ill towards me. It makes you ugly.”

  “Well, leave me alone. Why don’t you go over to the Hollywood or Harrah’s and leave me here? This is my casino.” She wadded up her sandwich wrapper. “Hey, what do you mean ugly—looks or acts?”

  “I meant your frame of mind makes you act ugly, but I can see it in your face, too. It makes all them little blond hairs stand out and your freckles act like they’re on speed.” His face lit up in a sort of Bruce Willis sneer, and she knew he was teasing. She had missed that.

  She rubbed at her cheek, as if to calm down her freckles. “Are you ashamed of me?”

  “For how ugly you act?”

  “Oh, shut up.” She punched his arm.

  “I can’t help my mama, but maybe I can help you.”