Rock Springs

by Richard Ford

  Marge was asleep on top of the covers, still in her clothes. The reading light was on. She had a mystery novel open on her chest. She was dead to the world.

  Sims took down the extra blanket and covered Marge up to her neck. He put the book on the window ledge and turned off the light. It was cold in the roomette. There was hardly room for him in the bed.

  Out the window on the station platform he saw the big sergeant walk past, then the other Army people. He could see a green Army van waiting in a parking lot, its motor running in the chilled air. A few Indian men were standing along the wall of the station in their shirt sleeves. Two dogs sat in front of them. One of the Indians saw Sims looking out and pointed to him. Sims, leaning over Marge, waved and gave him the thumbs-up. All the Indians laughed.

  The Army sergeants, seven in all, carrying their bags, walked down to the parking lot and climbed in the van. The one fat woman was with them, and the big man was giving the orders. They looked cold. Where could they be going, Sims wondered. What was out here?

  A bell sounded. The train moved away before the Army van left. Sims kept watching. The Indians all gave him the thumbs-up and laughed again. They had bottles in Sneaky-Pete sacks.

  “What’s happening?” Marge said. She was still asleep, but she was talking. “Where are we now?”

  “Nowhere. I don’t know,” Sims said softly, still leaning over her, watching the town slide by. “Everything’s fine.”

  “Okay,” Marge said. “That’s good news.”

  She went back to sleep. Sims slipped out and headed back to his seat.

  It was quieter in the car now. A couple of new people had gotten on, but it seemed less smoky, the lights not as bright. Sims bought a ham sandwich and a soft drink at the snack bar and sat back in his seat and ate, watching die night go by. He thought he should’ve taken Marge’s mystery novel. That would put him to sleep fast. He wasn’t going to be able to sleep in the roomette anyway.

  Out the window, a highway went along the train tracks. Trucks were running in the night. A big white Winnebago seemed to be trying to keep up with the train. Lights were on in the living quarters and children’s faces at the windows. The kids were pointing toy guns at the train and bouncing up and down. Their parents were up front, invisible in the dark. Sims made a pistol with bis fingers and pointed it at the Winnebago. All the children—three of them—abruptly ducked out of sight. Suddenly the train was onto a long trestle, over a bottomless ravine, and the Winnebago was lost from view in the dark.

  Sergeant Benton rose out of a seat at the far end of the car and looked back toward the rest room. She looked like she’d been asleep. She grabbed her shoulder purse and walked back toward Sims, pushing the sides of her hair up.

  “What happened to your friends?” Sims said, though he knew perfectly well what had happened to them.

  Sergeant Benton looked down at Sims as if she’d never seen him before. Her blouse was wrinkled. She looked dazed. It was the dope, Sims thought. He’d felt the same himself. Like a criminal.

  “Nothing but bars in these towns,” the woman said vaguely. “All social life’s in the bars. Where do you eat?” She shook her head and put her fingers over one eye, leaving the other looking at Sims. “What’s your name?”

  “Vic,” Sims said and smiled.

  “Vic.” The woman stared at him. “How’s your wife?”

  “She’s fine,” Sims said. “She’s locked away in dreamland.”

  “That’s good. My friends left in a hurry. They were loudmouths. Especially that Ethel. She was too loud.”

  “What’s your name” Sims asked. He was staring at the woman’s breasts again.

  Sergeant Benton looked at her name tag and back at Sims. “Can I trust you?” she said. She covered her other eye and looked at Sims with the one that had been covered.

  “Depends,” Sims said.

  “Doris,” she said. “Wait a minute. Stay right here.”

  “I’m up all night,” Sims said.

  The woman went on down to the toilet and locked herself in again. Sims wondered if she’d smoke another joint. Maybe he ‘d smoke one himself this time. He hadn’t been loaded in ten years. He could stand it. If Marge were here, she’d want to get loaded herself. He wondered what Pauline had on her mind tonight. He wondered if she ‘d stopped howling yet. Maybe things would get better for Pauline, Maybe she’d go back and teach school someplace, some small town in Maine, possibly, where no one knew her. Maybe Pauline was a manic depressive and needed to be on drugs.

  He thought about Sergeant Benton, in the head now, washing up. His attitude toward “lifers,” which is what he assumed she was, had always been that something was wrong with them. The women, especially. Something made them unsuited for the rest of life, made them need to be in a special category. The women were always almost pretty, yet not quite pretty. They had a loud laugh, or a moustache or enlarged pores, or some mannishness that went back to a farm experience with roughneck brothers and a cruel, strict father—something to run away from. Bad luck, really. Something somebody with a clearer oudook might just get over and turn into a strong point. Maybe he could find out what it was in Doris and treat her like a normal person, and that would make a difference.

  Out the window, running along with the train, was the big white Winnebago again. The kids were in the windows, but they weren’t shooting guns at him this time. They were just staring. Sims thought maybe they weren’t staring at him, but at something else entirely.

  Sergeant Benton came out of the toilet and this time no dope smell came out with her. She had puffed up her hair, straightened her green blouse and her tie, and put on some lipstick. She looked better, Sims thought, and he was happy for her to come back. But Sergeant Benton looked straight down the aisle past him, patted her hair again, raised her chin slightly and made no gesture to suggest she had ever known Sims was alive or on the earth at that moment. She turned and walked straight out through the door and into the next car.

  Sims watched through the window glass as her blond head crossed the vestibule and disappeared through the second door into the lounge car. He felt surprised and vaguely disappointed, but it was actually better, he thought, if she didn’t come back. He’d wanted her to sit down and talk—all a matter of being friendly and passing the time—but it wasn’t going anyplace. Killing time led to trouble, he’d found. It even was possible Sergeant Benton was traveling with someone else, somebody asleep somewhere. Another sergeant.

  A year ago, Marge had gotten sick and had had to go in the hospital for an operation. Marge had seemed fine, then suddenly she’d lost twenty pounds and gotten pale and weak, so weak she couldn’t go to work—all in the space of what seemed like ten days. The doctor who examined Marge told her and Sims together that Marge had a tumor the size of an Easter egg deep under her arm, and in all likelihood it was cancerous. After a dangerous operation, she would have to undergo prolonged treatments at the end of which she would probably die anyway, though nothing was certain. Sims took a leave from his insurance job and spent every day and every night until nine in the hospital with Marge, who needed to be there two weeks just to get strong enough for the surgery.

  Every night Sims kissed Marge good-bye in her bed, then drove off into the night streets alone. Sometimes he’d stop in a waffle house, eat a sandwich, read the paper and talk to the waitresses. But most of the time he would go home, fix his own sandwich, eat it standing at the sink and watch TV until he went off to sleep, usually by eleven. Sometimes he’d wake up in his chair at three a.m.

  When he’d been alone at home for three weeks, he began to notice as he stood at the sink eating his sandwich and staring into the dark, that the woman in the house next door was always at her kitchen table at that time. A radio and an ashtray were on the tabletop, and as he stood and watched, she would start crying, put her head down on her bare arms and wag it back and forth as if there was something in her life, an important fact of some kind, she couldn’t understand.

&
nbsp; Sims knew the woman was the younger sister of Mrs. Krukow, who owned the house with her husband, Stan. The Krukows were away on a driving trip to Florida, and the sister was watching the house for them. The sister’s name was Cleo. She had dyed red hair and green eyes, and Mrs. Krukow had told Sims that she was “betwixt and between” and had no place to go at the moment. Sims had seen her in the backyard hanging out clothes and, often late in the day, walking the Krukows’ dachshund on the sidewalk. He had waved several times, and once or twice they’d exchanged a pleasant word.

  When Sims had stood in the kitchen drinking milk and eating a sandwich three days running, and watching Cleo alone and crying, he decided he should call over to the Krukows’ and ask if there was something he could do. Maybe she was worried about the house. Or maybe something had happened to the Krukows and she was in shock about it and hadn’t come out of the house for days. He didn’t know what she did all day. It would be an act of kindness. Marge would go herself if she weren’t in the hospital.

  At ten-thirty on the fourth night, just as he saw Cleo’s head go down on her folded arms on the kitchen table, he called the Krukows’ number from the kitchen phone. He saw Cleo wagging her head in unhappiness, then saw her look at the phone ringing on the wall, then look at the kitchen window and out into the night, as if whoever was calling was watching her, which of course was the case, though Sims had turned off his own light and stood far back in the room where he couldn’t be seen. Somehow he knew Cleo was going to look his way the moment the phone rang.

  “Hi, it’s Vic Sims from next door,” Sims said from the darkness. “Are you okay over there?”

  “It’s what?” Cleo said harshly. Again she turned and furrowed her brow at the window above the sink. She frowned into the night, then her eyes seemed to widen as if she could see something specific.

  “It’s Vic Sims,” Sims said cheerfully. “Marge and I were just concerned that you were all right over there. Stan and Betty asked us to check on you and see if you needed anything. I was up late over here anyway” This was a lie, but Sims knew it could’ve been the truth. Stan and Betty were not good friends of theirs and had never asked them to do anything for Cleo at all.

  “Where are you?” Cleo said.

  “I’m at home. In my living room,” Sims lied, staring at Cleo, who, he could see, had on shorts and a long T-shirt. She sniffed into the receiver.

  “Are you watching me?” Cleo said, looking at the window, then up at the ceiling. She sniffed again, then Sims thought he heard her sob softly and swallow. He couldn’t tell from looking through the two windows and the dark. She was turned toward the wall phone now.

  “Am I watching you?” Sims laughed, “No, I’m not watching you. I’m watching the news. If you’re fine, then that’s all I’m calling to find out. Just checking. What are you crying about, anyway?”

  “Nothing. Oh, Jesus,” Cleo said. Then she was overcome by tears and sobbing. “I’m sorry,” she said after what seemed to Sims like a long time. “I’m just at my wit’s end over here. I have to hang up now. Good-bye.”

  Sims watched her hang up the phone, then turn and lean against the wall and cry again. She wagged her head just as she had when she was seated at the table. Finally, Sims saw her slide down and out of sight to the floor. It was a dramatic thing to see.

  Sims stood in the dark against the kitchen wall of his own house. She could hurt herself, he thought. She could be in some real trouble and have no one to help her, whereas if someone would just talk to her she might work out whatever it was and be fine. Sims thought about calling back, but suspected she wouldn’t answer now. He decided he would go over, knock on the door and offer help. He took a bottle of brandy out of the cabinet, walked across the dark grassy yard and up the back steps, and knocked.

  Cleo came to the back door with tears still fresh on her cheeks. Her red hair was frizzy and damp, and she was barefooted. She looked grief-stricken, Sims thought. She also looked vulnerable and beautiful. Coming over and having a drink with redheaded Cleo seemed like a good idea for both of them.

  “Who are you?” Cleo said suspiciously through the screen. She glanced down at Sims’s brandy bottle and hardened her mouth.

  “Vic,” Sims said. “From next door. Remember me? I thought you might like a drink. It sounded like you were crying. I can leave the bottle here.” He hoped leaving the bottle wouldn’t be necessary, but he didn’t want to seem to hope that. He hoped she’d ask him to come in.

  “Come on in, I guess,” Cleo said and turned around and walked away, leaving Sims on the doorstep, watching her through the screen as she disappeared back into the kitchen.

  Cleo, whose last name was Middleton, told Sims her entire story. How she and Betty, who was five years older, had grown up on a farm in Iowa; that Betty had gone off to college and married Stan and Stan had enjoyed a nice, unexamined life of advancement and few financial worries working as an executive for a chain of hardware stores. She herself, Cleo, had gone to a cosmetology school and had somehow ended up in California hanging out with a motorcycle gang who robbed and beat people up for fun and sold drugs and generally rained terror on anybody they wanted to. She didn’t say how this involvement had started. She showed Sims a tattoo of a Satan’s head she had on her ass. She pulled up her shorts and turned her back to him from across the table, and smiled when she did it. This tattoo was involuntary, she told him, and later she showed him some cigarette burns on the soles of her feet. Cleo said she’d had two children in her life—she was twenty-nine, she said, but Sims didn’t believe her. She looked much older in the dim kitchen light. Forty, Sims guessed, though possibly younger. One child had died soon after birth. But the other, a little boy named Archie, was still living with his father down in Rio Vista, but Cleo couldn’t see him because his father, who was a biker, had threatened to cut her head off if he ever so much as saw her again. “The courts are helpless against that kind of attitude,” Cleo said and looked stern. She told Sims about waking up one night and finding herself being dragged out of her bed by a bunch of her husband’s biker friends—Satan’s Diplomats. They put her in the back of a car and drove off to the mountains. She could hear them talking about Satan, she said, and his evil empire, and she heard one man, a biker named Loser, say they were going to sacrifice her to Satan and then laugh about it. She said she’d screamed and yelled but no one paid attention. Eventually, she said, the car ran out of gas, and all the bikers had gotten out and abandoned it with her left in it. The next morning a policeman came along and that was how she got out. She said she hadn’t gone back home after that, but that her husband, whose name was Savage, sent her a letter care of Betty telling her all he would do to her if he ever laid eyes on her.

  Cleo shivered when she told this story, then she took out a cigarette and smoked it, holding it between her teeth. There was a sense about Cleo, Sims thought, that all she said might not be true. Yet she’d obviously had a kind of life that made inventing such a story an attractive possibility, and that was enough.

  Cleo told Sims she knew his wife was in the hospital, and she encouraged him to talk about that. Sims had no idea how she’d found out about Marge, but he didn’t really want to talk about it. Marge’s illness was his terrible worry, he thought, and he didn’t know what to say. Marge was sick and might die. And he hated the whole thought of it. He loved Marge, and if she died his life would be over. No ifs or ands. It would just be over. He’d already decided he’d go out in the woods and hang himself so no one but animals would ever find him. That didn’t make good conversation in the middle of the night, though. Nothing he or Cleo could say would help any of that. He was happy to sit across from Cleo, who was very pretty, and get peacefully drunk and forget about illness and hospitals and people’s puny insurance claims he wasn’t processing.

  Cleo drank brandy and said that since she’d left California, five years before, she’d had several jobs but couldn’t seem to find herself, “couldn’t get focused.” She’d lived in Boise,
she said, doing hair. She’d lived in Salt Lake. She’d gone back to California and gotten married again, but that hadn’t lasted. She’d gone to Seattle, then, and come as close as she ever would to a steady job in her field, in a shopping center up in Bellingham. After that she’d gone on unemployment for a year. And then she’d accidentally run into Stan one day on the Winslow ferry. And that had panned out in her staying in Stan and Betty’s house for a month. “A real cross-patch life pattern.” Cleo shook her head, smiling. “A long way from Iowa, though not in actual miles.”

  “Things seem better now, though. Here, at least,” Sims said.

  “Not really,” Cleo said. “What’s next? It’s anybody’s guess.”

  “Maybe there’ll be work here.”

  “I don’t ever want to touch another head professionally,” Cleo said. She looked down then, and Sims thought she might be ready to cry again. He didn’t want that, though he didn’t think he could blame her. She’d told him her whole life in ten minutes, and once the telling was finished the life itself seemed over, too. His was not that way. Not yet, anyway. Marge could get well. He could go back to work. Different and good things could happen to them. They were young. But that wasn’t Cleo’s lot in life. She had plenty to regret and cry about, and it wasn’t over yet, not by any means.

  Cleo started wagging her head again slowly, and he knew she was about to start sobbing, maybe even cracking up completely, and he would be there alone with her for that. He thought of himself waiting outside a dingy emergency room inside which Cleo, someone he didn’t even know, lay strapped to a gurney, heavily sedated, while Marge, his own wife whom he loved, was asleep and dying and alone three floors up.