Follow Me

by Joanna Scott

  Mole was quiet, waiting for her to explain. She wanted to tell him something worthy, though she couldn’t bring herself to tell him the truth. Instead, she hatched a story. She said that though she’d once told him before that her parents were living, in fact they’d passed away, her mother in ’41, her father in ’46. She was sorry she hadn’t told him the truth, but the truth, she said, had been too hard to face. She’d wanted to pay a visit to the farm for old times’ sake. Well, the new owners hadn’t been welcoming — not very welcoming at all!

  She was surprised by how easy it was to make up this new lie, so she kept right on lying, spinning one deception out of the web of another. She said that the new owners — the Haggertys, she named them on a whim — had been church friends with her parents, but they’d moved away. They came back to Tauntonville on holidays, and when they visited they always brought Sally a box of ribbon candy, yet now that they owned the farm, they pretended not to know her. They must have coveted the property all through the years her parents were alive, she said. Her father was still warm in his grave when the Haggertys bought the farm for next to nothing, with the help of a no-good lawyer. Sally had been too young to fight them in court. She’d grown up since then. She’d thought about finding a lawyer of her own and trying to win the farm back. Really, though, she didn’t want to live on a dreary old farm in the middle of nowhere. That wasn’t what she’d been born for.

  The story roused Mole; he kept shaking his head and interrupting to tell Sally that she sure had been dealt a bad hand, and it was hard to tell a crook from a friend these days, and she shouldn’t sit back and let others take advantage of her. No, she should claim what was rightfully hers.

  Having taken a sharp turn into a gas station lot, he sealed his last statement with an emphatic cluck of his tongue and shut off the engine. While he was out chatting with the attendant, waiting for the tank to fill, Sally came up with a good reason to explain why the farm was worthless.

  “The thing is, they started using some newfangled fertilizer, something Mr. Haggerty bought on discount, and it turns out they’ve gone and poisoned all their land,” she said as Mole drove from the gas station. “The Haggertys won’t have a harvest next year or ever again. Serves them right, huh?”

  “I guess.”

  She’d thought he shared her indignation and was surprised by his noncommittal response. She wanted to ask him to say more. But he was too busy watching the road, searching the land as though there were something he expected to find.

  “Looking for something?” she asked after a moment.

  “Mmm” was all he said.

  To their left, a wall of tall pines was black in the twilight; to their right, the empty fields were a gray blur. The occasional farmhouse seemed insubstantial, like a cardboard cutout. Front yards were cluttered with tires and hubcaps and the shells of burned-out cars — the kind of junk that would survive the people who lived there.

  “Aha!” Mole said when he finally spotted the sign he’d been looking for. He was already turning into the lot as he announced, “Let’s have dinner.”

  “Dinner,” Sally echoed lamely. She didn’t say, I’m feeling miserable, and all you can think about is dinner? She did exclaim with unnecessary anger when, stepping from the car, she stubbed the toe of her shoe against broken pavement. “Damn you!” she seethed, as if she blamed Mole for her stumble, though he was already ahead and holding open the door to the tavern.

  Sitting across from him in a booth and watching him lick beer foam from his top lip with the tip of his tongue, she felt convinced that he was to blame for everything. It was his fault that she’d had to lie about her visit home. It was his fault that he didn’t know the truth about her. If he’d been the kind of person who could read between the lines, he would have realized that Sally wasn’t upset because she’d lost her parents and the farm. She was upset because all this time she’d been mistakenly thinking that she would see her child again.

  It was Mole’s fault for getting so worked up over the thought of barbecue ribs the attendant back at the gas station had called the best in the free world.

  “I forgot to have lunch,” he explained to the waitress, a girl who looked at least a couple of years younger than Sally, plump and rosy, with a great mound of bleached hair pulled back in a braid.

  “I’ll have the kitchen speed it up, honey.”

  “She called you honey,” Sally said after the girl had disappeared through the swinging doors. Mole smiled, as though to indicate that he considered himself deserving. But he wasn’t deserving. He was just ignorant.

  It was his fault for not sensing that Sally was about to burst into tears. It was his fault that they were sitting in this dive with creaking benches and lime green walls and a revolving dessert case holding only one-third of a cream pie. It was his fault that when Sally tried to lift her glass, the bottom of it stuck to the Formica, the glass tipped, and some beer splattered.

  Damn you.

  She was using her napkin to wipe away the spill when the waitress came over and swirled her rag over the table, a handy action that Sally should have known was logical but in her unsettled state took on a vexing meaning, as if the girl were demonstrating for Mole’s benefit how competent she was.

  It was Mole’s fault that Sally was left out and her suffering went undetected. It was his fault that if she didn’t start sobbing soon, she’d start screaming. And it was his fault that he managed to remain oblivious to it all and could think of nothing else to do besides picking up a painted plywood game board from the table beside him. Sliding the board between them, he said, “Checkers?”

  Oh, she was ready to transform her fury into action. She was ready to grab Mole by the collar and shake him until the fog cleared and he saw her for who she really was. But now that he knew his empty belly would soon be filled, he looked so pleased with himself that she couldn’t help but envy him. He leaned back against the cushion of the bench, less in a swaggering way than in a manner that suggested guidance, offering his own example to Sally, proving that she, too, could be happy — at least as happy as Mole.

  She moved a red piece. He moved a black piece. They continued playing, barely glancing up when the waitress delivered their food and then both hurriedly pulling their racks apart so they could each hold a rib in one hand while moving a checker piece with the other.

  Mole was concentrating intently. Sally sensed that he was building up an offense along the right side of the board. She moved stealthily in from the left and after a couple of turns made a multiple jump, capturing two black pieces before he knew what had hit him.

  “Just you wait,” he said in warning.

  He jumped her. She jumped him. They played and they drank, they ate and they played. The longer she concentrated on the game of checkers, the less Sally thought about her visit home. The less she remembered, the more she could savor the delicious immersion in the here and now, playing as if the sheer, teasing fun of the game were all that mattered.

  She signaled to the waitress and ordered a second pitcher of beer. They continued to play slowly, intently. There was nothing else going on in the world, no cause to worry about affairs they couldn’t control. The game absorbed them, and beyond the board was a blur of lights and sounds and memories. It didn’t matter who won or lost, only that they kept playing. And so they took their time, moving a piece only after a long pause spent pondering the options.

  Eventually she’d gained three kings to his one. She was expecting to win at the end and wanted to delay the inevitable, so she made a simple move to stall. In response, Mole brought his own king back toward her offense, clacking the stack along a zigzag, claiming two of Sally’s kings and a single piece with a triple jump!

  She sputtered in disbelief. He offered to take back the move, but she insisted that it was fair and square. She didn’t mind losing, she said. She didn’t say that she wished the game would go on forever, though she wondered if he could guess what she was thinking as he stared at her over
the rim of his glass.

  His affection for her was like the beer — there was too much of it, and the more there was, the more she wanted, but the quantity made her head spin. She decided that she’d better set the story straight and match things to their names before it was too late. Mole might be wondering about the Haggertys, for instance. She should explain. But first she had to determine their connection to the disappearance of her baby. They’d taken him away, hadn’t they, giving Sally justification to despise them? But they were in a made-up story. What, then, had they done with her baby? What baby? She felt as though years had passed since she’d last spoken with her brother and sister in the living room of her parents’ house, and she couldn’t remember all the details of the exchange. Had they even been speaking the same language? The conclusion she’d reached at the time seemed stupid and inexact to her now. She wished she’d stayed long enough to give herself something clear to understand in the aftermath.

  Confusion made her thirsty. She took another sip of beer. Mole drank from his glass, his motion matching hers like a mirror reflection. She drank again just to see him do the same and then refilled her glass and his.

  The beer was tasting better with every sip. It was also weakening her resolve and loosening her tongue. It had been so easy to tell him a lie about herself. Why wouldn’t it be just as easy to tell him the truth?

  “You want to know something?” she asked.

  “That can’t be right,” he said.

  She didn’t understand his response and wondered if she should apologize peremptorily. But then she followed his gaze, turning to look over his shoulder at the wall clock, which had on its face the picture of a Jeep splashing through mud. The motto read “traction through action,” and the second h was covered by the point of the hour hand.

  “Aw geez,” he said with a moan. “I told Phil I’d be back by six. He’s gonna kill me. He’s gonna squash me like I’m a worm.” He thumped his fist on the table to demonstrate. “A goddamn worm. Hey, miss, can I have the check? Excuse me, hey, miss!”

  The waitress was sitting on a stool behind the cash register dipping a french fry into ketchup. She nodded to the bartender, a fat, bald, lugubrious man, who plodded over with the check and after setting the slip on the table turned his back and belched into his fist. The waitress kept eating her french fries, lost in her daydream. It was a strange place, Sally thought. Everything seemed out of sync and yet deliberate. She looked hard at Mole to try to gauge what he was thinking, but he was busy fishing in his wallet for money. He left a five-dollar bill to cover the three-dollar cost, explaining to Sally that he didn’t want to wait for change.

  At the tavern door they discovered it was raining in torrents. They held hands and ran across the gravel lot, but they were already soaked by the time they reached the car. Slipping in on either side, slamming the doors behind them, they forgot their haste and dove, as though on cue, into each other’s arms. They began pecking at each other, their kisses broken up by bursts of absurd giggles, their cheeks slick from the rain, their hands fumbling to find a way in through their wet coats.

  With lips and tongues, they traded hot spice from the ribs along with the sweet aftertaste of beer. Mole’s hand slid inside the elastic waist of Sally’s pants and moved toward her crotch. The damp inside her body warmed the cold damp of the surface of her skin. They couldn’t get out of their coats fast enough. They rubbed and dipped, bumping against the steering wheel, kissing and caressing, forgetting the public setting in pursuit of their private pleasure until the raking headlights of a pickup truck turning into the tavern lot reminded Mole that they were late, he had responsibilities, and they were far from Helena, where a fuming Phil was waiting to flatten his little brother.

  Sally tilted her head. Mole fit his mouth against her neck, just below her chin, for one last greedy kiss before pulling away. With the sluggishness of a couple awakened in the middle of the night, they smoothed and tucked themselves back into order.

  Mole drove north, slowly at first, then faster and faster through the downpour. Sally loved the sensation of flying effortlessly, chasing the headlight beams while the wipers flicked away the streaming rain. Though she was dizzy from too much beer, she felt safe, anchored by her trust in Mole. She was impressed with his agility as he maneuvered the car around sharp curves and over the peaks of hills. He seemed entirely capable, confident, even fearless — not at all the awkward boy who had nearly put a bullet in his head by accident back at the Helena mill. Why, he knew the difference between above and beyond, between a will and a way. Lordy, there they go, galumph, galumph, around the sharp turn at a breakneck pace. It sure felt swell to be going so fast. The past would never catch up to Sally at this rate. She could at least try out the belief that her family had released her from the consequences of her actions, and she was free to follow her own design, never having to answer for something that others insisted didn’t even happen, never having to wake from the dream of their denial, never going back, the circle never coming around, the remnants of what couldn’t be helped washed away by the pouring rain, worry soothed by the swish, swish of the wipers, headlights gleaming, and the whole future waiting for her to catch up.

  Wasn’t she a lucky girl to have found a boy as fine as Mole? According to those who knew better, she didn’t even have the right to insist on the reality of her experience. But thanks to Mole, she could relish the thrilling, becalming gift of love. Thanks to Mole, experience was as precise as a checkerboard, the game never ending. Like her father used to say: behold the glory. What once had splendor has no splendor at all because of the splendor that surpasses it — something like that. Nonsense making perfect sense in the absence of the truth. That’s how it should be, life announcing itself with a juicy burrrp. Laughter and adventure and the sheer fun of being propelled through space and time, away from all her troubles, fast and faster and too fast to see —

  That devil of a car, that fancy green stub-finned Cadillac soaring over the bump of the hill’s summit as if it owned the world, crossing the line into the northbound lane and forcing Mole to jerk the wheel to the right to avoid a collision, sending the Pontiac off the road, the front right wheel dipping into a narrow gulch and the forward momentum causing the left wheels to lift into the air, the car turning over, crashing onto its top with a great bump that wrenched open the passenger door and catapulted Sally out onto the slope as the car continued to roll down, thumping toward the river, coming to rest, wheels jammed in the mud of the riverbank, the engine’s whir sputtering out, the swollen Tuskee rushing north while up on the road Benny Patterson realigned his Cadillac to the southbound lane and sped on through the rain.

  Something was supposed to happen next. What? Following from therefore and whence. How easily we forget. In other words. Just think, think, think. If, then. Oh, of course, why not?

  Hello, Sally.

  Tell Sally it’s time to get up.

  She couldn’t hear anything, not even the clatter of rain and the shushing of the paper reeds and the bubbling of the swollen river. Deep within her, though, she felt the imminence of the next thing. There would always be a next thing, until it was over. It wasn’t until it was, and never everywhere. Here, there was mud that smelled of mint and the taste in her mouth of that awful milk from cows after they’d grazed in a pasture infested with oniongrass.

  Sally, finish up and clear the table.

  Wash the dishes.

  Sweep the floor.

  Swish, swish.

  Hurry up, Sally!

  She can’t hear you.

  Dreamin’ a dream of no return.

  Good-bye, Sally.

  Aw, let’s give her another chance.

  Repent!

  Rejoice!

  “Oh.”

  Shhh.

  What’s going on?

  She’s waking up!

  Drenching rain convincing her that she would only ever be cold, as cold as she was now, for the rest of eternity. Eye to eye with the rotting tuber
of a duckweed wrapped in the knotted string of horsehair worms. Gross. Where was she? In the reeds. Why? Because.

  Hello, Sally.

  Oh, her aching head.

  Seen from below, plumes of cane brushed the heavy clouds, painting them gray. There was no sky beyond, no space, only layer after layer. It hurt to keep her eyes open. She preferred the dark behind closed lids, where here was there. But listen… someone was at the door.

  Knock, knock.

  Who’s there?

  Think, Sally.

  It hurt too much to think. It hurt too much to cry, to gulp, to breathe, to wonder about anything.

  It helped to hear, though, beyond the rain, or between it, the sound of the river. Why, she recognized that sound! She knew it from another time. She couldn’t remember when, exactly, but she would never forget it. At first she was reminded of the rustling that a piece of cellophane made when it blew loose from the top of a bowl. But that wasn’t right. She told herself that she must be patient. She must let the mist of recognition clear of its own volition, wisp by wisp, like notes of a melody — debris swirling, then the water rushing between soft banks, dislodged stones overturning, ravines eroding, moss thickening, time passing with the current of the Tuskee.

  The Tuskee!

  Of course it was the Tuskee. As long as she heard the river, then she wasn’t lost. Comforted by this awareness, she closed her eyes again and let herself drift away from the feeling of cold and the dull aching of her body all over and the rain that would never let up. It was easier to think of nothing.

  Sally?

  Sally Werner!

  She’s gone.

  She’ll be back.

  When she awoke again, it was close to dawn and the bottom of the black cloudbed was streaked with a metallic gray. The storm had passed, though drops still flew through the air, blown with the gusts off the soaked cane. Hundreds of crows roosting in the woods across the river made a racket, silencing any other wintering birds that might have wanted to greet the dawn.