Zigzagging Down a Wild Trail

by Bobbie Ann Mason

“No, you’d go off and leave me if I was sick. I can’t depend on you.”

  “The reason people stay married is so they can help each other,” he said.

  “Bullshit,” she said.

  “I’ll help you fix your hair.”

  “What’s wrong with my hair?”

  He tousled the top of her head. “It needs a more natural look,” he said.

  “Watch out—you’ll pull my stitches!”

  “I hate it that you went and had that operation and I couldn’t go with you.”

  “I don’t like you following me around. A girl at work told me I should get a restraining order to stop you from bugging me.”

  He kicked at the bench. “I’ve been stupid. If I could roll time back, I wouldn’t do a lot of what I done. But it’s like that split second when there’s a car wreck, and tragedy happens—just like that.” He clicked his fingers. “And you can never undo it to save your life. Now Mama might go to her grave with her last picture of me in her mind—Peyton the Jailbird.”

  His self-pity infuriated her. No tragedy had happened in a split second, she thought.

  “To undo the past would be like rolling the Mississippi River backwards,” she said.

  The little lily-studded brook was sashaying past, but she had a momentary impression that she was moving, not the water.

  During the afternoon she spotted Peyton at a blackjack table. In the past, he typically played till he lost everything; then he always came to her. She’d have five-dollar bills hidden in her clothes in several places—in her inner pockets, in her bra, in a secret pocket fashioned from a drawstring tobacco pouch that she pinned inside her jeans. But he would come after her.

  Vaguely aware that he was still parked at the blackjack table, she breezed down the row of slot machines like someone driving a car while mentally miles away. She wasn’t focusing on her strategy. She was feeding the machines and drinking rum Cokes. She won ten dollars’ worth of quarters on the Triple Diamond and let it ride. It used to be fun to come with Peyton to Tunica. He got her a fake I.D., and they drove down and played until they couldn’t stay awake; then they slept in the car at a roadside rest stop, daring criminals and perverts from Highway 61 to kill them—or kidnap them. But that seemed long ago now. She remembered the day he strolled into the backyard and blew apart a rotten stump with some kind of plastic machine pistol. “You can squeeze off a clip in no time flat,” he told her later, as if merely mentioning how many screws it took to assemble a patio bench.

  Liz pulled the handle and coins rushed out. As long as she stayed lucky, she felt unafraid and rejuvenated, confident she could handle Peyton. He was still engrossed in the blackjack game. His mother’s condition had thrown them onto a Tilt-A-Whirl ride, where they spun around separately, sometimes facing each other momentarily before spinning away again. Liz didn’t want Daisy to die, and she knew she shouldn’t have run away to Tunica. Now she imagined that when she got home, purged of her need to gamble, she could face Daisy’s helpless body—maybe even talk her out of her coma. But what she would do about Peyton was a question that trembled in the air like a tossed coin. She knew she had to be resolute. She had been tangled up in the mess of his mind too long. After another spill of quarters from the Triple Diamond, she felt cocky and clear. She would go home, visit Daisy, possibly go to her funeral, then get a restraining order against Peyton. And file for divorce. She tripped over her coin bucket and almost fell into the arms of a leering greaseball with a toothpick in his mouth.

  “Come to Daddy!” the guy cried, giving her a hug.

  “Fuck off,” Liz said, jerking free.

  Toward the end of the night Liz was twenty dollars ahead, but in the last hour Peyton begged all her winnings from her for blackjack. He was on a streak, he said. When she relented, he said, “You need me. We’re in this together.” He stared at her. “I mean that in more ways than one.” She told him she wouldn’t have let him have her money if his mother wasn’t in a coma.

  The bus was jammed with jubilant winners laughing and joking, celebrating, and glum losers who stared at their laps. A merry elderly woman across the aisle from Liz and Peyton chattered about the hundred dollars she had won—enough to buy a chimnea, one of those little patio stoves, she announced. Liz’s head was about to blow up, and her mind was flying like microwaves blasting from a cell tower. She touched one of her stitches, a little pair of bristles like whiskers. She aimed peppermint breath-killer at her open mouth.

  “Sometimes I win and sometimes I lose,” said the woman across the aisle. “I started with church bingo and worked my way up. Bingo got me hooked. But I know when to quit.”

  Peyton nodded. “Everybody’s just trying to get a little something, find a way out.”

  “That’s the truth.”

  “Yessir,” Peyton said. “I was in jail, but I never done a thing wrong, and now my poor mama lays dying in a hospital and her last image of me is her son, the jailbird.”

  The church woman said, “My husband died last year on June twenty-ninth. Cancer. It had spread to his liver. He couldn’t pass water, and he was in such pain I was glad to finally see him go. He’s home now, with Jesus.”

  “What?” said Liz, jolted into reality. She might have passed out for a second and missed something. Then she realized it was typical of Peyton to cover his losses by acting unusually sociable. She could sense a hollowness beneath his cheer; he had lost Liz’s money, and he was losing his mother. She was tired and didn’t want to think.

  “You’d make a good preacher,” the church woman said to Peyton with a giggle.

  “Amen,” Liz said, her eye on Peyton.

  He said, “Amen, Brother Ben. Shot a goose and killed a hen.”

  The bus darkened, and the passengers quieted. Some time passed, while Liz sipped from a can of Mountain Dew she had brought on board. All the alcohol she had had earlier that day made her feel chilled, and she removed the fleece throw from her bag and spread it over her bare legs. Peyton was asleep, snoring a little. After a while, a murmur on the bus rose to a loud question.

  “This bus is lost,” someone said. “Where’s he think he’s going?”

  Liz realized they were journeying on narrow roads through bottomland, not on the four-lane. Thick fog breathed at the windows. She touched Peyton’s arm. “We’re lost,” she whispered. “We’re in the Twilight Zone.”

  “Looks like we might drive right into the river,” Peyton said after a bit. He rubbed the sleep from his eyes.

  “I don’t care if we go to Timbuktu,” Liz said. “Where is Timbuktu, anyway?”

  “No idea.”

  “It must be somewhere.” Liz tapped the man in front of her on the shoulder. He had a short beard like Peyton used to have. “Do you know where Timbuktu is?”

  “Over yonder somewhere,” he said, pointing with his elbow. “Over the big pond.”

  “Wouldn’t that be something?” Liz said to the man. “To be hijacked to Timbuktu and nobody knows where it is or how to get there—including the hijacker!” She laughed. “It’ll take us a month to get there.”

  Laughter traveled through the bus. Liz’s remarks got passed around, and a couple of passengers began goading the driver to go to Timbuktu.

  “This is Timbuktu, I believe,” someone called out to the driver. “You’ve hauled us all the way to Timbuktu.”

  “The old geezers look scared,” Peyton said to Liz.

  They seemed to be driving over water, but they couldn’t see a bridge.

  “Hey, don’t he have a map?” someone asked.

  “We’re crossing the Big Muddy,” Peyton said.

  The invisible bridge was long, and the river a void. The bus hushed.

  “Sorry, folks, I dropped the reins back there,” the driver eventually admitted over his microphone. He turned on the overhead lights. “Don’t worry, we’ll get you home. Just hold your horses and I’ll figure out what road this is. And it won’t go to Timbuktu.”

  There was a burst of laughter
and a little applause.

  “I don’t believe such a place exists,” said the church woman. “It’s just a notion, like Never-Never Land.”

  “Like heaven?” Liz said.

  “No. Not at all like heaven. Heaven is a real place. It has gold streets and pearly gates.”

  “And singing,” said Peyton.

  “Everybody sings there, whether they can carry a tune or not,” said the church woman with a smile. “Law’, I hate to sing. I purely dread heaven.”

  “Do you dread heaven, Liz?” asked Peyton as the lights dimmed again.

  “No. Heaven’s the least of my worries.”

  The bus quieted. Most of the passengers seemed to nod off. After awhile, Peyton slipped his hand under the fleece throw on Liz’s lap. His hand rested between her thighs like a sleeping cat. It lay there, its dark heat firing her. Then, under the blanket, his hand began undulating slowly up her leg, inside her shorts. She sat up straight, wide awake, and stared out at the fog. She inched her legs apart. And before long he was finger-fucking her hard, then smoothly, expertly. She felt the peacefulness of giving in, the delicious limbo of temptation, where everything at stake seemed make-believe. For the time being, she was waiting for the spinning images of her life to line up in a perfect row.

  Thunder Snow

  Boogie tried to talk Darlene into staying home that weekend—heavy snow was predicted—but she wouldn’t listen. She had volunteered to drive up to Cincinnati to retrieve her cousin Fentress’s thyroid medicine and then carry it to her all the way down in Bell County.

  “I don’t want you going down there into those mountains if it gets bad.”

  “I’ll be on four-lanes most of the way,” she said. “If I can’t get through to Pineville, I’ll just stop at Aunt Gladys’s house. Don’t worry, Boogie. I’ll watch out. You worry too much.”

  Boogie did worry about Darlene. Their separation during the Gulf War had been traumatic for him, causing him to become overly protective. He had been terrified that she would return from Saudi Arabia in a body bag. For a woman to come home from a war that way was an intolerable notion. But she shrugged off both the terror and the glamour of the war—a lot of sand and bad food and heavy work loading vehicles, she said. “Somebody had to kick Saddam’s butt,” she said when she got home. For a time, she marched around the house like a stranger. He noticed how the permanent in her hair had grown out.

  The sky was clear when Darlene headed for Cincinnati on Sunday morning. She would visit her mother, collect the medicine Fentress had accidentally left there, then head for Pineville on Monday. On Sunday evening rain began falling. It turned to sleet. Later, during the night, Boogie could sense the silence of snow over the house and yard. In the morning he lay still in bed for a few moments. He heard no traffic, no planes, no dogs or birds. He got up and pulled the drapes apart. The snow was coming down in thick blobs fat as cotton balls. Already it had covered the barbecue grill on the porch, and the bushes out back appeared to be a row of snow soldiers.

  He telephoned Darlene’s mother.

  “She left two hours ago,” Loretta said. “She thought she could beat it, but it commenced to snowing about an hour ago.”

  “It’s snowing here,” Boogie said. “She’ll be driving right into it.”

  “I imagine she’ll head home and not try to go down to Fentress’s till tomorrow,” Loretta said. She coughed loudly. “Lord, I’m strangled. Darlene had to go to the all-night place and bring me some cough syrup.”

  Loretta worked at a dry cleaner’s, and in the winter the fumes made her throat raw.

  Boogie said, “If Darlene comes back, or calls, tell her to stop somewhere and not try to drive in the snow. Tell her I said so.”

  Loretta said, “Well, I don’t know what she’s aiming to do. Fentress don’t have to have her medicine till Thursday.” She stopped to cough. “I told Darlene I didn’t think Fentress ought to keep on taking something that’s radioactive. They’re probably doing some kind of experiment on her.”

  “It’s not radioactive,” Boogie said.

  “I know you and Darlene keep saying that, but I believe it is. Darlene’s real good to traipse up here and fetch it for her, though.”

  “She likes to drive,” Boogie said. “That’s what it is.”

  “She said she’d carry me down to Pine Mountain for Easter, but I told her she needn’t.”

  Boogie shoveled out the driveway, angry at himself for not driving Darlene to Cincinnati. But he had been on the weekend shift. Surely she wouldn’t try to drive to Pineville in the snow, he thought. She had been born in the Kentucky mountains but had grown up in Cincinnati, where her parents had moved after her father lost his job in the mines. Darlene said they had worn a path back home to Pine Mountain, they went back to visit so often.

  At work, half of the machines were down. Boogie’s team was short two workers, and they had to rejigger the controls of the main machine, which directed the manufacture of some small plastic computer-casing parts. Boogie filled out the paperwork and checked on the timing of his number-three stamper. Some wheels were spinning in front of him. He reset a dial. He felt like a pilot in a cockpit. He often imagined he was flying. He could see himself in a Strike Eagle, swooping and plunging like a mighty bird.

  “I had to walk half a mile to feed our neighbor’s cows,” said Beverly Cox, from her computer station. “I thought my toes were frostbit.”

  “Why didn’t your husband go feed the cows instead of you?” Boogie asked. He would have done that for Darlene. He would have insisted.

  “Cows ain’t his thing,” Beverly said. “If it don’t eat regular unleaded, he don’t want it. He don’t even want a dog.”

  One of the managers stepped out of a connecting tunnel. “Traffic’s backed up on I-75 south,” he said, gleeful with his news. “The trucks can’t get over Jellico Mountain. The governor’s talking about closing down the interstates.”

  At break, Boogie went to the pay phone, but a dozen people were in line and nobody was getting through. The circuits were busy.

  “I don’t see how folks up north put up with weather like this,” said a wide-bodied guy Boogie knew as Big George.

  “Snow—they can have it, I hate it,” said Beverly as she ripped open a candy bar.

  “Darlene loves it,” Boogie said. “I bet she’s having a big time out there while I sit around and worry.”

  “Darlene needs a car phone,” said Beverly.

  “That’s what I want for Christmas,” said Big George.

  “They cost a fortune,” Boogie said.

  “What’s a fortune if it saves your life?” Beverly sent her candy wrapper flying. “I told Ken if he didn’t get me one he might find me in a ditch in pieces.”

  “Darlene always thinks she can do anything,” Boogie said, wincing. “She’ll drive and drive till she gets stuck. I know her.”

  “Oh, she’ll probably stop somewhere and call,” Beverly said in a sympathetic tone that made Boogie feel even worse.

  At six o’clock, soon after Boogie got home, his National Guard unit called him out for the snow emergency. The weather service said this was the worst winter storm in over fifteen years. Garbed in layers, he struggled into the blowing snow. As he drove to the armory, he passed several ditched cars, and he skidded a couple of times himself. The trees had been coated with ice yesterday, and now the snow hung on in great clumps, bending the boughs low. He wondered where the birds were. The radio said it was going down to zero; already the wind-chill factor was five below.

  He hadn’t heard from her. He’d found only one message on his answering machine, from Darlene’s brother Jack. “Boogie, how’s the storm treating you? Are you O.K.? Got enough supplies? Did Darlene get back from Cincinnati? I hope she didn’t head down to Pineville with Fentress’s medicine.”

  Snow made hats on garbage cans. Boogie saw a doghouse blown full of snow. He thought for a moment about Alexander, how he used to love to play in the snow. They had had to put h
im to sleep last winter. Freezing to death would be like being put to sleep. They said freezing in the snow was like drifting away under a soft blanket. You felt like you were settling in for a long winter’s nap. Once your mind froze, you couldn’t keep on fighting, he thought with a shudder.

  Her funeral wouldn’t be here, he thought, or even in Cincinnati. It would be in Bell County, with all her kinfolks. He always planned her funeral when he was worried that she’d had a wreck. Sometimes he worried so much that he got pissed when she showed up safely. When she left for Saudi Arabia, he had said, “You better come back. I don’t want to have to listen to all your kinfolks wailing and weeping at your funeral.” And she said, “They’ll just cry long enough to get it out of their system and then they’ll try to sue the government and then they’ll forget all about me.” She had grinned so big when she said that.

  Gusts of snow blew in front of the car as he felt his way toward Man o’ War Boulevard. He was creeping past a horse farm. The snow-covered fields made him think of the desert. Black fences rimmed with snow created a grid against the blank, vanished ground. He saw five snow-blanketed horses huddled under a clump of trees. He wondered if they were Arabian horses. He was surprised they weren’t lolling on feather beds in their climate-controlled barns. Racehorses got better care than some people, he thought. Gazing at the broad plain of horse pastures, he thought about Darlene’s people shut up in those close, tight little mountains. Darlene had said it used to snow at her grandparents’ place on Pine Mountain more than it ever snowed in Lexington. The closeness of the mountains held the cold air longer and drew more snow in, she said. Darlene was always saying, “I wish it would come a sixteen-footer.”

  “Sixteen Tons.” Song he remembered from the oldies station. The radio now was listing cancellations. Self-help groups, church groups, schools, a basketball game. The snow glistened and gleamed in the night. His car seemed to be crunching and swaying through heavy sand. “Did you miss it here?” he had asked her when she came back from the war. “Did you think about me?”

  “We were too busy to think,” she said. “It was another world.”