by Lee Martin
We drove out Route 59, all the way to Georgetown, and crossed the White River. We turned onto a gravel road to a place called Honeywell, a heap of run-down houses, bird dogs and beagle hounds staked and chained in scrabbly yards, rows of mailboxes nailed to posts along the road, a lot of them with their lids hanging open.
He wanted to take a look, Ray said.
“For what?” I asked him.
“That power plant, the one they’re building outside Brick Chapel.”
He drove to where the houses stopped and the road dipped into the woods. After a while, he pulled the truck over to the side and got out. He stepped up on the running board. I opened the door out into the tall turkey foot grass and did the same, standing on the running board, so I could get a level look at him on the other side of the cab. He had his elbows resting there, his binoculars up to his eyes. Woods spread out to the east, trees rising up, a mess of green.
“Ray, you can’t see anything from here.”
All I could see were glimpses of old shale roads winding back through the trees. The light was fading, dusk coming on.
“Do you know what that foreman said to me?” Ray was still looking through his binoculars, and his voice was low. I knew that he was embarrassed to tell me what he was about to say. I thought then that he’d come out here, to this Honeywell—this place of lost chances, this place of people hardly getting by—to tell me a shameful thing, to speak words he could only stand to hear in the deep woods when dusk was falling. When the only people who might bear witness were folks who knew what it was to be down on their luck, to have people treat you like dirt. “He said I was a no-account man. I tried to tell him he was wrong. Dead wrong. It was just the sun, I told him. That’s when he said it: ‘Asswipe, you’re done. And if you keep giving me guff, I’ll run this trowel right though your guts. Now get out of here. Go on. You ain’t nothing but your daddy’s wet dream.’ That’s what he said. Like I was nothing.”
Something was moving in the grass. I looked down into the turkey foot, and there was a quail. Why it didn’t lift up, I don’t know.
“There’s mean people,” I said. “It’s no secret.”
“No call for it,” said Ray. He lowered the binoculars and banged his fist down onto the cab. With a flurry of its wings, the quail rose from the grass and flew off into the woods. That pop of wings—it’s a sound I can’t hear today without a chill passing over me. “It’s no way to talk to a man,” Ray said. “Mean makes mean, and who’s to blame?”
On the way back home, we came up behind a pickup truck loaded down with hay bales. The bumper barely cleared the ground. The truck was taking it slow, and Ray, even though we were starting down a hill, pulled out to pass. Just then, a set of headlights crested the hill in front of us, dipped down, and sped our way.
I pushed my hand against the dashboard.
“Relax,” Ray said. “We’ve got time.”
The headlights were so close they lit up the inside of our cab. It was one of those souped-up cars with racing stripes down the hood and the back end jacked up. We were so close, I could see the boy inside. He had his T-shirt sleeves rolled up. His girl, a blondie with long, straight hair, was sitting up close to him. She had her hands over her eyes.
Ray jerked the steering wheel and whipped the truck back into the right lane as the car went speeding past, its horn blaring and then dying away.
“I guess they’ll have something to talk about, won’t they?” Ray said. “Tough guy and his queenie.” He stepped on the gas, threw his right arm across the seat, and pulled me to him. “Hon,” he said, “I bet they’ll see me in their dreams.”
July 5
IN GOOSENECK, Clare unplugged her iron. Ray was in the bathroom, shaving, and he was whistling that song, that “Candy Man.” She folded his trousers over a wooden hanger, taking care that the seams were straight. Saturday, they had bought the khaki twills uptown at the J. C. Penney. She had just enough to spare from her paycheck. Got to have some new pants, Ray said, if he was going to look for work after the Fourth of July holiday. The clerk, a polite boy, told them the khakis were on sale. “I remember you,” the boy said to Ray. “You were on the square during Moonlight Madness. You shook my hand.” Ray said no, sorry, I’m afraid you’re thinking of someone else. The boy was handsome, so well mannered, and Clare wondered what her own children would have been like—hers and Bill’s—if they’d ever had any.
She carried the trousers into the bedroom and hung the hanger on the knob of the closet door. Outside the sky was just beginning to brighten in the east. She raised the window blind and looked out over the backyard at the clothesline poles, the garage Ray had built, and the old oil drum where they burned their trash. She smelled the dew on the grass and listened to Henry Dees’s martins warbling. This was her favorite part of the day, just before dawn, when the air was cool and the birds were singing, and it was easy to believe, if she chose, that the day wouldn’t turn hot and muggy. She wouldn’t have to spend all those hours in the kitchen or the laundry at Brookstone Manor. She and Ray could just lollygag.
Saturday, after they came home from Penney’s, they sat out on their porch to catch the little bit of air that was stirring.
“Name your heaven,” Ray said.
It was a game that he liked to play. Ray and Clare Own Paradise, he called it. Together, they came up with as many names for prosperity as they could. Names called outside the bright forever, Clare thought, recalling that old hymn that promised a “summer land of song.”
“Easy Street,” she said, even though it made her feel guilty to play the game. There was always someone worse off. Across the street, for instance, the curtains were drawn on Lottie and Leo Marks’s house. They’d gone off to Indianapolis to be with Lottie’s sister when the news came that their nephew had died in Vietnam. Clare saw it every day in the paper or on the news: mothers losing their sons, car bombs going off in Northern Ireland, airplanes being hijacked, that man running for president—that George Wallace—shot and left a cripple. In the light of all the world’s misery, who was anyone to wish for an ounce more than what they had? Why tempt fate, Clare thought, by wanting too much? Still, she played along with Ray because she liked the way his voice went all soft and whispery, and it was love, she thought. It was just love. This wanting more.
“Shangri-La,” he said.
“Never-Never Land,” she told him.
Then, for a long time, they didn’t say anything, and that was good, Clare thought. That was just them together, no thought of time moving on, no worry because Ray had lost his job. It was Saturday. It was summer. They had a new porch, a new garage. Why fret? Maybe this was all there was. Maybe this was paradise. All this. Right here, right now.
Now Ray came into the bedroom, his face shining with aftershave. “Old girl.” He put his arms around her waist and hugged her. “Things are looking up. This is my day.”
He drove her to Brookstone Manor in his pickup and said he’d be back for her come evening when she got off at eight. He was all spiffed up in those twill trousers, a grass-green sport shirt, and the brown pull-on boots he saved for good. He had polished them and buffed them with the horsehair brush he always used. He thought he’d drive down to Brick Chapel to check out that power plant. He gave her a wave when he pulled away from the curb. He slowed down for a moment. His brake lights came on, and she thought he had forgotten to tell her something. She thought he was going to turn around and come back. But then he stuck his arm out the window and waved at her again. She waved back. He tooted his horn, and then he was gone.
HE DIDN’T come back at eight. One of the girlie-girls asked if Clare wanted her to run her home. “No, don’t trouble yourself,” Clare told her. “Ray said he’d be here. I’ll just wait.”
The girl’s name was Pat. She had a boyfriend fighting in the war. She wore his high school ring on a chain around her neck. Sometimes she picked up the ring and tapped it against her teeth. She was the sort of girl Clare had never trusted in hi
gh school even though she had wanted to. She had harbored more than one secret crush, had spent hours daydreaming about being friends with such girls, those pretty girls with the bright smiles and the merry voices. She knew she would never be one of them. She was too plain, too tall and skinny, her chest caved in, her shoulders slumped. She was too timid, too ordinary. She knew how to crochet and cook, but no one really cared about that, and they didn’t care that she had a good heart, not unless they were girls like her, the spooks, the ones the other girls, the popular ones, acted like they never saw.
“I could wait with you,” Pat said. “Really, Clare. I don’t mind.”
“You’ve got things to do,” Clare said. “You don’t need to be wasting time with an old dame like me. He’ll be here in a jiff.”
But he wasn’t. She walked uptown and stood on the curb in front of the Coach House, thinking maybe she’d see his truck coming up High Street. It was nearly eight-thirty. She wandered up and down the block a ways, glancing at the new ladies’ dresses on the mannequins in the front window of Helene’s Dress Shop—goodness, how short the hems were—turning back to the street from time to time. She would see headlights coming and she would think, There, that’s his truck, but it never was. She remembered once, when she was a girl—probably no more than six or seven—coming out of a matinee picture show on a winter afternoon and looking for her mother, who had said she would be there waiting for her. But she wasn’t. Clare stood in the cold, snow coming down, not knowing what to do. “Just stand still,” her mother told her when she finally arrived. “If you think you’re lost, don’t move. I’ll find you.”
Clare knew she should have stayed at Brookstone Manor; maybe Ray was there waiting for her. She almost turned around and went back. She almost started walking the rest of the way home. Finally, she couldn’t bring herself to do either. The longer she stood there, the more worried she became. She was afraid to move, afraid that if she walked away from that corner, Ray would pull up in his truck and she wouldn’t be there to get into the cab beside him, to hear his familiar voice, “Oh, hon, did you think I’d forgotten my best girl?” To slide over next to him and let him drape his arm over her shoulders and to ride along, the breeze coming in through the open windows, as they went home. He would be jabbering about everything he’d done that day—oh, how she loved to hear him talk—and she would close her eyes and revel in what she had missed those long months after Bill died, the sound of someone talking to her, the sense that she was part of someone’s life.
Finally, it was a quarter of nine, and cars of teenagers were cruising up and down High Street. A few men who were staying at the Litz Hotel came out onto the sidewalk and started passing a pint bottle back and forth. Across the square, in front of the J. C. Penney store, a man and a boy loaded a bicycle into the trunk of their car. Clare hated for people to see her there, like she was lost and didn’t know where to turn. She gave up on Ray and started walking to Gooseneck.
When she got home, the house was dark, and Ray was nowhere to be found. She heated up a can of vegetable soup and tidied up the kitchen when she was finished eating. She dragged a kitchen chair out onto the new porch and sat there awhile, again imagining that each approaching set of headlights belonged to Ray’s truck. She got sleepy in the dark, and the mosquitoes came out, so finally she went back inside, put on her nightgown, and went to bed.
IT WAS THE smell that woke her, well past midnight—the smell of something burning—and when she opened her eyes, she saw the glow on the bedroom walls. She rolled over toward the window and saw the reflection of the flames, watery on the glass.
Ray was in the backyard at the burn barrel, poking at the fire with a stick. He was in his T-shirt and jockey shorts, and his pull-on boots were still on his feet. Bits of ash fluttered at the tips of the fire’s flames.
Clare put on a robe and walked barefoot across the damp grass. She came up behind Ray and touched him on his arm. He didn’t look at her. He kept staring into the fire. She could see his new trousers, his green sport shirt, charring and curling in the burn barrel. She wanted to tell him that she had waited and waited for him. She wanted to ask him whether he had found a job. Where had he been all this time? But she didn’t say a word. It was such a strange sight—her husband in his underthings, burning his clothes—she had no idea what to say.
“I went fishing,” he finally told her. “I went down to Patoka Lake. Me and another fella, we cleaned up a mess of perch, and I got fish guts all over my clothes. Well, hon, I just ruined them, that’s what I did. My shirt and my new pants. No good for nothing but to burn.”
He stirred the fire, and the flames crackled and sparks flew up into the air.
“I could’ve washed those clothes,” she said.
All the houses up and down the street were dark, and the night was still. The only sound was the crackling of the fire.
“No,” said Ray. “Nothing you could’ve done would’ve ever got them clean. Now go on back to bed. I’m going to pull my truck into the garage and then I’ll be in.”
SHE HAD JUST settled back into bed when a knock came on the front door. It was a loud knock, three impatient raps. She thought it must be Ray, but why would he be knocking? She came out into the living room, this time without her robe. Her long cotton gown swept over the floor. She opened the front door, and standing on the porch was a policeman. He was tall, and his shoulders slumped a bit as if he were ducking under a low ceiling. “Ma’am,” he said. A soft-spoken young man in a light-blue shirt, a silver badge pinned to the pocket. He had thick sideburns. “Ma’am,” he said again. “I’m sorry to bother you, ma’am, but it’s your husband.” He lifted his right hand and scratched at a sideburn. “You are married to Raymond Wright, aren’t you, ma’am?”
“I’m Mrs. Wright.” Clare could make out the shapes of men coming up the driveway. Three city police cars were parked along the street, but their lights weren’t on. She could hear boots kicking up gravel and leather creaking, and she knew the men were policemen, and that it was their gun holsters she was hearing. “I’m Clare,” she said, and then she felt foolish for having said it, as if she were a little girl. But that’s how she felt, like a girl bumbling through something she didn’t understand. She told herself to listen hard, to do what this nice young man was telling her.
It was her husband, he said again. That’s who he was looking for. Had she seen him?
Once when she was just a girl—this was when the Depression was on—she let a tramp into the house and gave him a plate of food. He ran off with the only thing of value that her family owned, her grandmother’s gold earrings, the ones with jade insets. “If Hitler was dying of thirst,” her father said when he found out, “she’d carry him to the well.” She couldn’t help herself. She knew too much about misery. When she saw someone else hurting, she couldn’t help but fall in love with that hurt. If she couldn’t be pretty or smart, she decided, at least she could be generous and kind. And she could make a nice home. She knew how to cook and sew and how to keep the house spic and span.
“He’s out to the garage,” she told the policeman. It came to her then what this was all about. Later, she would feel foolish for having such a simple thought, but at the time it made sense to her because she didn’t want to think that what was happening might be anything else. “Those cement blocks,” she said. “I told Ray not to steal them. I said, ‘Ray, what if someone finds out?’”
The policeman bowed his head. When he looked back up at her, there was such a pain on his face, she wanted to touch him and tell him it was all right. Whatever he had to say, it was fine.
“Ma’am, you seem like a nice lady.” His voice was so low she had to lean close to hear it. “I don’t know how you hooked up with Raymond Wright, but ma’am.” He rubbed his hand over his mouth as if he were trying to pull out the words. “Ma’am,” he said again, “the truth is, those cement blocks, they’re the least of your troubles now.”
THE POLICEMEN brought Ray out of the gara
ge. They had handcuffs on his wrists. His head was hanging down, and he wouldn’t look at Clare, who stood in the backyard, her hands trying to rub the chill out of her bare arms. The flames from the burn barrel cast an eerie glow over the faces of the policemen and Ray in his jockey shorts and T-shirt.
“What’s burning in that barrel?” the policeman with the sideburns asked Clare.
“Ray?” she said to him.
“It’s just clothes,” he said. “Just dirty clothes. I went fishing.”
“Ray, what’s this all about?”
“It’s a mistake,” he told her. “Whatever they say I done, they’re wrong, Clare. They’re dead wrong.”
Soon there would be questions, plenty of questions. But there was a first one, and the soft-spoken policeman put it to Ray now. “Ray? Ray, listen to me. What have you done with the girl?”
MR. DEES saw the police cars go by his house. They didn’t have their red lights on or their sirens, but he knew that’s what they were, and he knew where they had been and who they had come for. He knew because at eleven o’clock, he finally worked up the courage to call the courthouse and tell the dispatcher who answered that he understood they were looking for a Ford truck, green with black circles painted on the doors. How did he know? It didn’t matter. No, it wasn’t important who he was. He just had the information they needed. He’d seen that truck uptown around five-thirty—and that girl, the one they were looking for?—he’d seen her up on the running board of that truck, talking to the man who was driving it. “That truck,” he said. “You come down to Gooseneck. You’ll find it. That odd-looking truck. It belongs to a man named Raymond Wright.”
Now he was up, pacing the floors, tired of tossing and turning in his bed, going back over everything that had happened that night.
