by Joanna Scott
Sally sat up and held her head in her hands, shivering, trying to will the ache away. She sat there like that for a long while, long enough for the crows to fly off and the sky to brighten enough so that a rich, promising blue could be seen between cracks in the clouds. She had no idea where she was. So much didn’t make sense to her right then that she didn’t even try to gather her scattered bits of memory into a single understanding. She preferred to put off the effort for as long as she could.
Slowly, the aching began to relent a little. She clenched her fists to fight the numbness in her fingertips. She rubbed her bruised legs. She opened her eyes and at first perceived the dense cane around her as the locked gate of a trap — somehow she’d been able to find her way into the center, but she’d never be able to find her way out. That thought was enough to motivate her to stand on wobbly legs and get moving.
She had no broken bones, though she felt sore everywhere. Her head hurt worst of all, and she suspected that the mat of her hair above one ear was wet with blood, though none came away on her hands. She had a vague sense that she was lucky to be alive. Yet with her thoughts still bunched up in a knot, she didn’t connect her current predicament with its cause and didn’t remember the accident.
She pushed her way through the thick reeds, heading down the slope in the direction of the river. She was surprised when she stepped forward and her foot sank ankle-deep in mud. Pulling free, she stepped around the muck and reached a rock outcrop above the river. She saw that the moss was thick along the sloping sides of the rock. She planted her feet carefully in the uneven grooves, balanced, and looked out over the broad expanse of the Tuskee.
The water flowed directly beneath her, through a channel cut out of the rock. The breeze carried the Tuskee’s familiar smell of sour mud. The sky seemed to grow brighter as she stood there, and with the light her thoughts started to untangle, giving her a vague feeling of premonition, though she also had enough awareness to know that the important thing about to happen had already happened, and that’s why she was standing there bruised, cold, and alone.
She stared idly at the river, waiting for nothing, watching twigs and leaves swirl over the surface, beneath a veil of steam fog. She watched the debris piling up against the branches of a toppled elm and then spinning around it, dragged by the force of the current. Sally was impressed by the power of the river, which proved far stronger than the barrier formed by the elm. For a moment she seemed to sense the surge of the river in the wind, and she felt as though being above the surface was no different from being below. She took a deep breath to remind herself that she wasn’t drowning. And then she remembered Mole.
She set out in search of him, thrashing through the reeds along the riverbank, calling out to him, following her voice as it disappeared into the silence. The air was raw and empty, and she had the feeling that multitudes of birds hidden in the trees were watching her, waiting for her to leave. But she wouldn’t leave until she found Mole. Really, though, it was his responsibility to find her, not the other way around. She would have concluded that he’d intentionally abandoned her if she wasn’t so certain that he loved her. It comforted her to think about this. Mole would be worried about her right now and at the same time racked with guilt. He hadn’t meant to leave her behind. He’d spend the rest of his life trying to make it up to her, while she’d spend the rest of her life assuring him that he wasn’t to blame.
When she spotted the car sitting at a tilt just a few feet above the river, she was more puzzled than anything else, for she couldn’t understand why the same car that had been traveling at such a high speed not long ago was now so perfectly still and quiet. Or why Mole, slouched in the driver’s seat, didn’t get up and get out of there, why, since he sat with his back to Sally as she approached, he didn’t turn, why he didn’t hear her through the shattered window, why his neck was bent and his head hung back at an odd angle, why, though his eyes were open, all that remained of their green were thin rims around expansive blackness, why, when she reached in to touch him, his skin was so waxy and cold, why he didn’t answer when she called, why any of this was offering itself to her perception as a real experience, in real time. Well, it wasn’t anything she’d been prepared for, not in a thousand years. And her sense of having been caught by surprise made her so frantic that she could only perceive the next action to follow the last out of sheer necessity.
She climbed into the car through the open passenger door and searched until she found her purse lying on the floor beneath the seat, covered with splintered glass. Then, because she believed she had no choice, she left Mole behind and went for help, even though she knew he was beyond help.
Somehow she managed to scramble up the steep slope, tearing through brush that reeked of gasoline. Somehow she managed to find the road and flag down a mail truck. When the driver, a gaunt, gray-bearded postman, signaled to her to convey that he was deaf, she began to wail. And though she wailed for the whole ten miles to the nearest town, the old man didn’t seem to mind.
Martin Oliver Langerton was buried in the Hopewell Cemetery in Helena; Sally saw his family for the first and only time at the funeral service, and then they wouldn’t acknowledge her. She understood why they blamed her for Mole’s death. They had a right to blame her. She’d been a bad influence in all sorts of ways. She’d kept him out past midnight when he had to go to Fenton the next day. She’d been drinking with him on the day of the accident. That Mole hadn’t ever introduced her to his family was proof that he’d known she was a bad sort and his family wouldn’t approve of her.
Everyone disapproved of her in Helena. The other mourners wouldn’t speak to her after the funeral service. Mole’s friends, the ones she’d seen playing that dangerous game at the mill, wouldn’t come near her. A few days later, when she went to purchase shampoo at the five-and-dime, the clerk pretended that she couldn’t make change for a five-dollar bill, and she advised Sally to buy her shampoo someplace else. When she accompanied Gladdy to the Barge one night, the bartender ignored her. Mrs. Mellow met her at the door when Sally arrived for work. She told her that she wouldn’t be needing a typist for the foreseeable future and handed her an envelope with a month’s pay. And Gladdy, who at first made an unconvincing show of trying to comfort Sally “in her tearful sorrow,” as Gladdy put it, made it clearer than ever that she didn’t want her around. She kept saying that she would be packing up and moving to Florida any day now and told Sally to start looking for other accommodations.
Sally had every intention of leaving Helena, though for a long while, she couldn’t bring herself to go. Helena had been Mole’s home, and she preferred to stay as near to his memory as possible. But she knew she had to leave. She was just so afraid of being alone, and even Gladdy Toffit, in all her drunken indifference, seemed better company than no one at all.
On a gray Saturday morning at the end of January, she woke up, dressed, boiled water to make herself a cup of Nescafé. After she discovered that there was no milk in the refrigerator, she decided to walk the half mile to the market at the gas station.
When she returned, she found Gladdy’s door locked. She wondered if she’d locked the door behind her. She knocked loudly, first on the door, then on Gladdy’s bedroom window, until she noticed that the car was gone from the driveway. She waited on the porch for an hour or more and finally went to the Barge. The tavern was closed, but she met the bartender, who had come down from his apartment on the second floor and was sitting on the steps smoking a cigarette. She asked him if he’d seen Gladdy, and he said she’d moved to Florida.
“Where in Florida?”
“Florida is all I know,” he said, tossing away his cigarette. He might as well have told her that it was her turn to get out of there.
Back at Gladdy’s house, Sally smashed a pane in the back vestibule door with a stick and was able to reach in and turn the lock. Inside the house, she became aware of the heavy feeling of abandonment and an oppressive cold. She turned up the thermostat bu
t didn’t hear the surge of the furnace starting up, so she went to check it in the basement and discovered that it wasn’t firing. She tried to light it manually but couldn’t get a flame going and gave up.
Instead of packing her few belongings and leaving on the next bus out of town, Sally moved her things into Gladdy’s bedroom and made herself at home. With the furnace out of oil, the house grew brutally cold over the course of the day, but Sally turned on the electric oven, opened the door to spread the heat, and wrapped herself in some extra clothes Gladdy had left behind — a thick flannel robe, flannel pajamas, wool socks.
It was her right to stay there, she told herself. She couldn’t be expected to leave without having somewhere else to go. Besides, Gladdy was lucky to have her remain, for without the extra warmth from the oven, the pipes would have frozen and cracked, flooding the house. There would have been a terrible mess.
A brief, unseasonable thaw the following day made the house more tolerable. Sally put on an old denim dress she found in Gladdy’s closet, something that probably had once belonged to the daughter, and she hauled in wood from a dingy woodpile behind the garage. She kept the fire going all evening and then relit it the next morning, comforted by the crackling as much as by the warmth. She cooked herself meals on the stovetop, and after the electricity was shut off she made sandwiches, ate vegetables cold from their cans, and at night read by a lantern fueled with kerosene she bought at the store.
She lived like that, alone in Gladdy’s house, for far longer than she would have thought possible. She cried often, though only when there was no one around to hear her. In town, she put on a show of calm. People started to treat her with casual acceptance. Somehow weeks added up to months. By the spring she began showing up at the Barge regularly in the evenings, and she took to drinking with a newfound thirst. The booze made her chatty, and the men gathered around her as they used to gather around Gladdy, trading jokes and competing for her laughter. She would focus on one and then another, happy for the conversation, and sometimes she’d spend part of the evening dancing. Closing her eyes as she swayed in their embraces, she’d imagine them each as a different version of Mole — Freddy Mole and JJ Mole and Billy Mole.
Though she liked each of them because, in different ways, they helped distract her, she never brought a man home, not for a long while. Not until she met the fellow in the plaid suit who introduced himself to her at the Barge, with a clink of his glass, as Bennett, but who turned out to be Benny Patterson, the famous cream-cheese prince. He was the only one she invited back to Gladdy’s.
He’d breezed into town on a Saturday night looking for fun and had decided, after meeting Sally, to stick around for a while. He was wide in girth and voice, the boom of his greeting filling the room, his belly filling his shirt and stretching apart the cloth between the lower buttons. Pools of liquid gray filled the slits of his grinning eyes, and his blond curls made a floppy halo. He was big and loud and impossible to ignore. And he used his merry mood as a charm, winning Sally over with his teasing ways, convincing her to trust him enough to buy her a drink and then to buy her another.
“Angel!” he bellowed in echo after she’d told him her name. And while she watched him over the lip of her glass, he called into the crowd at the Barge, “You boys, you have an angel in your midst! A real live angel! How come this ain’t national news?” And then he said in a quieter, silkier voice, “Miss Sally Angel. Why, you’re something else.”
She was something else. Did she believe it? Not quite. But she had the sense, mistakenly or not, she couldn’t tell at first, that there was a worshipful quality to his affection, and in this single way he seemed more like Mole than anyone else she’d met in Helena.
But the real lure of him for Sally was in the gamble. Though he didn’t reveal much information about himself, he had an insistent manner and implied that she had to make her choice about him quickly. He wasn’t a man who would let himself be strung along. It was now or never. Either she followed through or she gave up the possibility of ever getting to know him any better. Without putting any of this explicitly, he offered her an ultimatum, making the opportunity seem tantalizing and the timing urgent.
In the six months since Mole’s death, Sally had come to think of loneliness as an aspect of herself, inescapable and defining; she really wasn’t so different from a woman who’d been widowed after fifty years of marriage. Having lost the boy she loved, she expected to be mourning him for the rest of her life.
But here was Benny Patterson to prove that she didn’t have to stay lonely forever. Sally could almost persuade herself that he’d been sent by Mole to deliver her from her loneliness, or at least she could hope that Mole wouldn’t mind if she tried out an alternative ending to the story that had begun for her in Helena.
Back at Gladdy’s, in Gladdy’s own bed, Benny Patterson covered Sally so completely that she couldn’t see past him and couldn’t raise her head to see their reflection in the mirror above the bureau. The weight of his body was in itself a comfort, and the fragrance of his skin — cigarettes and sweat and a faint scent of glycerin combined — made him seem worldly and important. He moved decisively, obviously confident in his knowledge of physical pleasure.
They slept through the next morning until noon. Like Sally, Benny Patterson had no place he had to be, no responsibilities or schedules to follow; if he was telling the truth, there were foremen to oversee the workers on his family’s farm, and he didn’t even have to show up for meals.
Sally wasn’t convinced that he was telling the truth. In fact, as she observed him over the next few days, she perceived something furtive in his sweetness. And then over breakfast their fourth morning together, after she’d poured his coffee and spilled some drops on his lap, he thrashed his arm in sudden rage, smacking the back of his hand hard against her chin. He was immediately full of remorse. He was sorry, so sorry, he hadn’t meant to hit her. Would she ever forgive him? Sure, she said. How could she blame him for something he hadn’t meant to do?
She watched him more carefully after that and noticed that he had a habit of suddenly shaking his head, as though trying to empty it of an unwanted thought. Or maybe he was just prone to sudden bouts of irritableness, without motive or depth. She wasn’t really sure what to think about him. But she didn’t need to trust him. In fact, she preferred not to trust him and to enjoy his bulky body without worrying about his intentions. Just by filling so much space, he distracted her from her grief.
He stayed with Sally at Gladdy’s house for five nights altogether. The lack of electricity in the house amused him. Everything amused him. Sally didn’t lie to herself about the potential of this romance: whatever they had going on between them didn’t add up to much. It would be a brief chapter in both their lives. And yet it was this, the very brevity of the affair, that made her desire something permanent to take away with her and gave an intensity to her recklessness. She’d already lost so much in her life. But she wasn’t yet twenty-two. She felt her youthfulness more strongly than ever when she lay with Benny Patterson. And because she was still young, she deserved a second chance.
On the sixth afternoon Benny offered to take her driving in his green Cadillac wherever she wanted to go. She carried the purse containing all of Mason Jackson’s money, along with the few dollars she had left of the pay from Mrs. Mellow. She asked Benny to drive to the town of Fenton, which had its own department store. It made him proud to dole out money for a beautiful girl, and he didn’t hold back. He bought her a bottle of French perfume and a necklace of freshwater pearls, and as he was paying the clerk he winked at Sally, communicating to her his anticipation at the thanks he expected when they returned to Gladdy’s.
They headed over to the Woolworth’s next and ordered milk shakes at the coffee counter. While they were waiting to be served, Sally excused herself to go to the ladies’ room. She lingered at the back of the store, watching Benny as he took out his fancy gold-plated lighter to light his cigarette. The flame fail
ed to rise, and he jammed his thumb on the lever repeatedly, his upper lip curling in a sneer, his teeth gritting, his whole face bunching and turning a hot, furious red.
Sally would never know that it was Benny Patterson in his Cadillac who had forced Mole off the road. She didn’t need to know. The image of the cream-cheese prince sitting there trying to force the flame from his lighter was enough for her to admit to herself the truth she’d been avoiding: it was plain that he hadn’t smacked her by accident, and he would do it again. She’d be better off without him. And even if he didn’t feel the same about her, he would feel it sooner or later. They’d be miserable if they stayed together. And so it was a welcome coincidence when, in the ladies’ room, she looked out the window and spotted a Northway bus drawing up to the stop beyond the store’s awning.
She made it outside just as the driver was closing the doors. She ran along the sidewalk, calling for him to wait. He opened the doors for her, and she fumbled in her purse for money to buy a ticket to, to, to… She couldn’t think straight and couldn’t come up with the name of any place she wanted to go. The best she could do, finally, was to spit out “Rondo,” the name of a place that didn’t exist.
“What’s that?” the driver asked. “Rondo,” she repeated stupidly, desperate to escape before Benny Patterson realized that she wasn’t coming back.
“Rondo it is,” said the driver, to her amazement — or that’s what she thought she heard him say. “Three dollars seventy-five cents, please and thank you,” he added. Sally counted the money into the box. When the driver pulled the lever to shut the doors, she felt weak enough to faint right there in the aisle, but somehow she managed to make her way to a seat.
She gazed out the window at a lanky young man pedaling on a bike, racing the bus. She wondered where the bus was taking her, where Rondo was — the real Rondo and not the place she’d made up. She thought about Gladdy Toffit’s cold, dreary, abandoned house in Helena. She thought about Benny Patterson waiting for her at the coffee counter. She was relieved that she’d never see him again.
