At the laundromat, he finds his clothes piled up on top of the dryer, which is whirring with someone else’s clothes. His laundry is still damp and he has to wait till another dryer is free. Fuming, he sits in the car and listens to the radio, knowing that his impatience is pointless, because when his laundry is finished, all he’ll probably do is drive around and listen to the radio. “Keep it where you got it,” says the DJ. “Ninety-four-five FM.”
Through the window, he sees the woman in purple pants remove her laundry from the dryer he had used. He slouches out of Midnight Magic and enters the laundromat. Her laundry, in a purple laundry basket, includes purple T-shirts and socks and panties.
“Looks like you’re into purple,” he says to her as he wads his damp clothes into the vacated dryer.
“It’s my favorite color, is all,” she says, giving him a cool look. She grabs the panties in her laundry just as he reaches for them. She’s quick.
“Do you want to hear a great joke?” he asks.
“What?”
“Why did Reagan bomb Libya?”
“I don’t know. Why?”
“To impress Jodie Foster.”
“Who’s Jodie Foster?” she asks.
“You’re kidding!” When Doran told Nancy that joke she got the giggles.
The woman folds a filmy nightgown into thirds, then expertly twines together a pair of purple socks. No children’s T-shirts, no men’s clothes in her pile.
“I just had some coffee and it makes me shake,” he says, holding out his hand in front of her face. He makes his hand tremble.
“You oughtn’t to drink coffee, then,” she says.
“You really know how to hurt a guy,” he says to her. “When you say something like that, it’s like closing a door.”
She doesn’t answer. She hip-hugs her laundry basket and leaves.
The red light at the intersection of Walnut and Center streets is taking about three hours, and there’s not a car in sight, so Steve scoots through. He drives back to Karen’s apartment building and pulls in beside her Escort, trying to decide what to do. The small parking lot is wedged between Karen’s building and the service entrance of a luncheonette. After business hours the place is deserted. Karen’s windows look out on the roof of the luncheonette. At night the parking lot is badly lighted. He hates himself for letting her drive home alone last night, but he was too drunk to drive and she refused to let him. Last night, he suddenly remembers, he pretended to be the rapist. That was why she was so furious with him. But she didn’t say anything about it today. Maybe he terrified her so much she was afraid to bring it up. “Don’t do that again!” she cried when she broke free of his clutches last night. “But wouldn’t it be a relief to know it was only me?” he asked. That was where tickling her on the couch had led. He couldn’t stop himself. But it was just a game. She should have known that.
If he were the neighborhood rapist scouting out her apartment, he would hide in the dark doorway of the delivery entrance of the dry cleaner’s downstairs, and when she came in at night, pointing the way with the key, he’d grab her tight around her waist. His weapon, hidden in his jacket, would press into her back. Catching her outside would be easier than coming through the window, smashing bottles to the floor and then being attacked by those spider plants of hers. Steve shudders. The rapist would simply twist her knife out of her hand and use it on her. He would grab her shotgun away from her, as easily as Steve pinned her on the bed last night.
Steve eases into reverse and creeps out of the parking lot. At a stop sign a pickup pulls around him, beeping. It’s Bud.
“I found Big Red!” Bud yells. “He turned up at the back door this morning, starved.” Big Red wobbles in the truck bed, his tongue hanging out like a handkerchief from a pocket.
“I knew he’d come back,” Steve calls over.
“You didn’t know that! Irish setters take a notion to run like hell and they get lost.”
“Tell Big Red to settle down,” says Steve. “Tell him some bedtime stories. Feed him some hog fat.”
“Are you O.K., Steve?”
“Yeah, why?”
“You look like death warmed over.” A car behind them blows. “Take it easy,” says Bud.
Steve takes home a Big Mac and a double order of fries and eats in his kitchen, with a beer. The Cardinals game is just beginning. He feels at loose ends. Sometimes he has sudden feelings of desperation he can’t explain—as if he has to get rid of something in his system. Like racing the engine to burn impurities out of his fuel line. He realizes a word has been tumbling through his mind all morning. Navratilova. The syllables spill out musically, to the tune of “Hearts on Fire,” by Bryan Adams. Navratilova—her big arms like a man’s. He imagines Nancy coming over—in her leg-of-lamb sleeves, her hot-pink tights. She’s always in a good mood. He’s sure she would be an immaculate housekeeper. Everything would be clean and pretty and safe, but she wouldn’t mention how she slaved over it. Steve has noticed that most people feel sorry for themselves for having to do what they have actually maneuvered themselves into doing. His dad complaining about the food in jail. Bud moaning about his lost dog. Karen painting her wall. Or having to get her chores done so she won’t be late to her meeting. When she had to get new tires, she fussed about the cost for weeks. He realizes he and Karen can never be like Doran and Nancy. There has to be some chemistry between two people, something inexplicable. Why is he involved with someone who follows the bizarre teachings of a teenager who says she’s a reincarnated Indian? In a moment, he realizes how illogical his thoughts are. He wants something miraculous, but he can’t believe in it. His head buzzes.
He finishes eating and surveys the damage. His place is straight out of Beirut. The waste can overflows with TV-dinner boxes and paper plates. In the oven, he finds a pizza box from last Sunday. Two leftover slices are growing little garden plots of gray mold. He locates a garbage bag and starts to clear out his kitchen. He’s aware he’s cleaning it up for Karen to move in; otherwise he wouldn’t bother until it got really bad. If she moves in, she can have the alcove by the bedroom for her crafts table. He pops another beer. The Cards game is away, in a domed stadium. He can never really tell from TV what it would feel like to be inside such a huge place. He can’t imagine how a whole ball field, with fake grass, can be under one roof. Playing baseball there seems as crazy as going fishing indoors. He picks up an earring beside the couch.
Then the telephone rings. It’s Doran. “Steve, you crazy idiot! Where in Jesus’ name are you?”
“I’m right here. Where are you?”
“Well, take a wild guess.”
“I don’t know. Having a beer with Mickey Mouse?”
“Nancy and me are at the Nashville airport, and guess who was supposed to meet us.”
“Oh, no! I thought it was tonight.”
“One o’clock, Flight 432.”
“I wrote it down somewhere. I thought it was seven o’clock.”
“Well, we’re here, and what are we going to do about it?”
“I guess I’ll have to come down and get you.”
“Well, hurry. Nancy’s real tired. She had insomnia last night.”
“Are you still in love?” Steve blurts out. He’s playing with Karen’s earring, a silver loop within a loop.
Doran laughs strangely. “Oh, we’ll tell you all about it. This has been a honeymoon for the record books.”
“Go watch the ball game in the bar. And hang on, Doran. I’ll be there in two and a half hours flat.”
“Don’t burn up the road—but hurry.”
Steve puts the rest of the six-pack in a cooler and takes off. He heads out to the parkway that leads to I-24 and down to Nashville. He can’t understand Doran’s tone. He spoke as though he’d discovered something troubling about Nancy. Steve is miles out of town before he remembers he didn’t pick up his laundry. He wishes Karen were along. She likes to go for Sunday drives in his car. He considers turning around, giving her a call
at a gas station. He can’t decide. On the radio a wild pitch distracts him and he realizes he’s already too far along to turn around. The beer is soothing his headache.
Steve passes the Lake Barkley exits and zooms around a truck on a hill. The highway is easy and open, no traffic. As he drives, the muddle in his mind seems to be smoothing out, like something in a blender. Early in the summer he and Karen spent a Saturday over here at the Land Between the Lakes. At one of the tourist spots they saw an albino deer in a pen. Later, as they cruised down the Trace, the highway that runs the length of the wilderness, Karen said the deer was spooky. “It was like something all bleached out. It wasn’t all there. It was embarrassing, like not having a tan in the summer.”
“Maybe we ought to get Ted Turner to come here and colorize it,” Steve said. “Like he’s doing those movies.”
Karen laughed. He used to be able to cheer her up like that before she got tangled up with Sardo. Before Sardo—B.S. Maybe he should become a cult-buster and rescue her. He has no idea how much money Sardo is costing her. She keeps that a secret.
Before long, he crosses the Tennessee line. Tennessee, the Volunteer State. For several miles, he tries to think of something that rhymes with Tennessee, then loses his train of thought. Suddenly he spots something lying ahead on the bank by the shoulder. It is large—perhaps a dead deer. As he approaches, he tries to guess what it is. He likes the way eyes can play tricks—how a giant bullfrog can turn out to be a cedar tree or a traffic sign. He realizes it’s a man, lying several yards off the shoulder. He wonders if it’s just a traveler who has stopped to take a nap, but there is no car nearby. Steve slows down to fifty. It is clearly a man, about twenty feet from the shoulder, near a bush. The man is lying face down, in an unnatural position, straight and flat—the position of a dead man. He’s wearing a plaid shirt and blue running shoes and faded jeans. Lying out there in the open, he seems discarded, like a bag of trash.
Steve glides past the nearby exit, figuring that someone has probably already called the police. With beer in the car and on his breath, Steve doesn’t want to fool with the police. They would want to know his license number, probably even bring him in for questions. If he stopped, he might leave footprints, flecks of paint from Midnight Magic. For all he knows, the mud flaps could have flung mud from Steve’s driveway straight toward the body as he passed. But he’s letting his imagination run away with him. He tries to laugh at this habit of his. He gulps some beer and tunes the ball game in over another station. It was fading away. Karen says to trust yourself, your instincts—know yourself.
“You don’t need a thousand-year-old Indian to tell you that,” he told her a few days ago. “I could have told you that for free.”
The Clarksville exit is coming up. “Last Train to Clarksville” runs through his mind. The man lying out there in broad daylight bothers him. It reminds him of the time he fell asleep at lunch hour in the mattress room, and when he woke up he felt like a patient awakening after surgery. Everyone was standing around him in a circle, probing him with their eyes. Without really planning it, he curves onto the exit ramp. He slows down, turns left, then right. He pulls up to the side of a gas station, in front of the telephone booth. He leaves the motor running and feels in his pocket for a quarter. He flips the quarter, thinking heads. It’s tails. There are emergency numbers on the telephone. The emergency numbers are free. He pockets the quarter and dials. A recorded voice asks him to hold.
In a moment, a woman’s voice answers. Steve answers in a tone higher than normal. “I was driving south on I-24? And I want to report that I saw a man laying on the side of the road. I don’t know if he was dead or just resting.”
“Where are you, sir?”
“Now? Oh, I’m at a gas station.”
“Location of gas station?”
“Hell, I don’t know. The Clarksville exit.”
“North or south?”
“South. I said south.”
“What’s the telephone number you’re speaking from?”
He spreads his free hand on the glass wall of the telephone booth and gazes through his fingers at pie-slice sections of scenery. Up on the interstate, the traffic proceeds nonchalantly, as indifferent as worms working the soil. The woman’s voice is asking something else over the phone. “Sir?” she says. “Are you there, sir?” His head buzzes from the beer. On his knuckle is a blood blister he doesn’t know where he got.
Steve studies his car through the door of the phone booth. It’s idling, jerkily, like a panting dog. It speeds up, then kicks down. His muffler has been growing throatier, making an impressive drag-race rumble. It’s the power of Midnight Magic, the sound of his heart.
Wish
FROM Love Life (1989)
Sam tried to hold his eyes open. The preacher, a fat-faced boy with a college degree, had a curious way of pronouncing his r’s. The sermon was about pollution of the soul and started with a news item about an oil spill. Sam drifted into a dream about a flock of chickens scratching up a bed of petunias. His sister Damson, beside him, knifed him in the ribs with her bony elbow. Snoring, she said with her eyes.
Every Sunday after church, Sam and Damson visited their other sister, Hortense, and her husband, Cecil. Ordinarily, Sam drove his own car, but today Damson gave him a ride because his car was low on gas. Damson lived in town, but Hort and Cecil lived out in the country, not far from the old homeplace, which had been sold twenty years before, when Pap died. As they drove past the old place now, Sam saw Damson shudder. She had stopped saying “Trash” under her breath when they passed by and saw the junk cars that had accumulated around the old house. The yard was bare dirt now, and the large elm in front had split. Many times Sam and his sisters had wished the new interstate had gone through the homeplace instead. Sam knew he should have bought out his sisters and kept it.
“How are you, Sam?” Hort asked when he and Damson arrived. Damson’s husband, Porter, had stayed home today with a bad back.
“About dead.” Sam grinned and knuckled his chest, pretending heart trouble and exaggerating the arthritis in his hands.
“Not again!” Hort said, teasing him. “You just like to growl, Sam. You’ve been that way all your life.”
“You ain’t even knowed me that long! Why, I remember the night you was born. You come in mad at the world, with your stinger out, and you’ve been like that ever since.”
Hort patted his arm. “Your barn door’s open, Sam,” she said as they went into the living room.
He zipped up his fly unself-consciously. At his age, he didn’t care.
Hort steered Damson off into the kitchen, murmuring something about a blue dish, and Sam sat down with Cecil to discuss crops and the weather. It was their habit to review the week’s weather, then their health, then local news—in that order. Cecil was a small, amiable man who didn’t like to argue.
A little later, at the dinner table, Cecil jokingly asked Sam, “Are you sending any money to Jimmy Swaggart?”
“Hell, no! I ain’t sending a penny to that bastard.”
“Sam never gave them preachers nothing,” Hort said defensively as she sent a bowl of potatoes au gratin Sam’s way. “That was Nova.”
Nova, Sam’s wife, had been dead eight and a half years. Nova was always buying chances on Heaven, Sam thought. There was something squirrelly in her, like the habit she had of saving out extra seed from the garden or putting up more preserves than they could use.
Hort said, “I still think Nova wanted to build on that ground she heired so she could have a house in her own name.”
Damson nodded vigorously. “She didn’t want you to have your name on the new house, Sam. She wanted it in her name.”
“Didn’t make no sense, did it?” Sam said, reflecting a moment on Nova. He could see her plainly, holding up a piece of fried chicken like a signal for attention. The impression was so vivid he almost asked her to pass the peas.
Hort said, “You already had a nice house with shade trees a
nd a tobacco patch, and it was close to your kinfolks, but she just had to move toward town.”
“She told me if she had to get to the hospital the ambulance would get there quicker,” said Damson, taking a second biscuit. “Hort, these biscuits ain’t as good as you usually make.”
“I didn’t use self-rising,” said Hort.
“It wouldn’t make much difference, with that new highway,” said Cecil, speaking of the ambulance.
On the day they moved to the new house, Sam stayed in bed with the covers pulled up around him and refused to budge. He was still there at four o’clock in the evening, after his cousins had moved out all the furniture. Nova ignored him until they came for the bed. She laid his clothes on the bed and rattled the car keys in his face. She had never learned to drive. That was nearly fifteen years ago. Only a few years after that, Nova died and left him in that brick box she called a dream home. There wasn’t a tree in the yard when they built the house. Now there were two flowering crab apples and a flimsy little oak.
After dinner, Hort and Cecil brought out new pictures of their great-grand-children. The children had changed, and Sam couldn’t keep straight which ones belonged to Linda and which ones belonged to Donald. He felt full. He made himself comfortable among the crocheted pillows on Hort’s highbacked couch. For ten minutes, Hort talked on the telephone to Linda, in Louisiana, and when she hung up she reported that Linda had a new job at a finance company. Drowsily, Sam listened to the voices rise and fall. Their language was so familiar; his kinfolks never told stories or reminisced when they sat around on a Sunday. Instead, they discussed character. “He’s the stingiest man alive.” “She was nice to talk to on the street but H to work with.” “He never would listen when you tried to tell him anything.” “She’d do anything for you.”
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