She was on the phone behind the desk. She wore a name tag on her left breast pocket, PUCKETT. He went into the day room. There were a lot of patients on the ward today. Pajama-clad men huddled at a big round table, awaiting their supper. The food server gave them their trays without speaking and then, consulting a list, set more trays in front of empty chairs around both tables. Other patients shuffled into place. A woman lay sprawled on the vinyl couch over by the television, which was off. She was talking to herself, twisting her head this way and that, and kneading her knuckles. Another woman patient went over to her. “You come eat,” she said loudly, and led the way back to the table. As they sat down, David heard an elderly man say his wife had cooked the supper. A tall fellow with a long bony face was working his way down the corridor, touching one wall with the palms of his hands, then turning and going to the opposite side. He was standing behind a chair, holding onto the back of it, when two women came on the ward. The older woman looked uneasy. Her eyes darted from patient to patient. The younger woman called, “Daddy!” and ran and hugged the man. He pulled the chair out and sat down without reply. David went to the desk.
Marge came out from her place and gave him a quick hug. “I came on shift, and only four patients had dressed today. I don’t know what the day nurses thought they were doing. There was no afternoon therapy group. I’ve got a 180-pound woman in lock-up. She’s worn out but we’ll be hearing from her. And my orderly’s hung over.” It helped, if the load was heavy, to have David come in for part of the evening shift, and Marge had an understanding with the hospital that she could use him so many hours a month. Sometimes she came home with bruised shins and scratches on her face and arms. She liked to talk with David about the patients. She thought he had a knack with them. They could tell he was interested in them; he might be the only person they knew who was. David had said, “It’s more fun than church,” which made his mother smile. Her sister was hardshell Baptist, but Marge had quit religion after her mother died.
Benke rolled a woman by in a wheelchair and pushed her up to the table, then turned and trudged back down the hall. The woman laid her face on the table. Marge gently pulled her by the shoulders back to a sitting position.
“Go get the girl in seven,” she said. “Take a wheelchair.”
David was surprised to hear his mother refer to someone as a girl. He hurried to find out who she was. She was sitting on the edge of her bed, staring at her lap, her head ducked so that he couldn’t see her face. She was a little thing, with light fine hair and wrists like sticks. He asked her if she was hungry. He said, “I didn’t see what supper was, but the carts are here. I’ll sit with you while you eat, if you want.”
She looked up. She really was just a girl, maybe only fourteen or fifteen. It took him an instant to register the familiarity of her face. Of course! She was the girl on the highway, the girl with the rabbit. Without the blood, the rabbit, the dirty hair, she was nothing but a waif, someone you would never notice. He thought he had seen her at school, too, though in a bleached blue hospital gown and scuffs, he could not tell much about what she really looked like. She had a little sunburn across her nose and cheeks. He held his arms out and helped her into the chair. “My name is David,” he said cheerfully. He had often thought that you could get along with disturbed patients by treating them a lot like you did teachers, with hearty good spirits, a false but well-meaning respectfulness. You had to make them think they were okay, no matter how much they were not. The ones who saw things, though, the ones who thought you might do them great harm, were different. They were not in the hospital very long; they had to be moved along the system.
She began to scrub her arm vigorously. She held it out in front of her and ran her other hand up and down the length of it. By the time they were near the day room she was making squeaky sounds as she rubbed.
Marge hurried over and knelt by the chair. “Sissy, dear, I want you to eat your supper. We’re having macaroni and cheese, everybody likes that.” She stood up. “If you don’t eat, I’m going to have to do something.” David looked at the girl again. Sissy. He thought being forced to eat must be one of the worst indignities a patient could suffer, and he resolved to keep it from happening to her. Her arms were relaxed now, but the one she had been rubbing was a bright chafed red. He thought again how mild and unremarkable she was. She was the kind of girl who grew up and became a clerk at Woolworth’s, a girl you would never consider had a complicated or errant mind.
He pulled a chair up for himself and set it alongside hers, then went to get both of them a Coca-Cola from the refrigerator behind his mother. The woman from the couch, now at the table, pointed a long finger at the Coca-Colas and screeched, “Mine!” David ignored her and she screamed again. Benke pulled her arm back and spoke sharply. “Your dinner is right in front of you, Wanda June. You pay attention to your own dinner and you can have pop later on.” Benke gave David a dirty look.
The girl ate. It was a slow business, but she ate some of the macaroni and a few bites of carrots. She drank the Coke. While she ate, David talked quietly, telling her about his drive into Basin today from the west. “I couldn’t believe how hot I got. I hope this heat breaks. Think how it’ll feel, sitting at a desk all day. Though I’m glad school is starting. It’s my last year, and I want to get on with it.” He touched her arm where it was red. “I bet you burn if you stay out long. You have really fair skin.”
Sissy put her spoon down in the applesauce, turned her head slightly to look at him, and smiled. Big tears were oozing out of her eyes and sliding down her cheeks. He cleared away her tray and asked her if she would like to play cards. She watched but didn’t say anything. “Do you know how to play gin rummy?” he asked. She shook her head no. He felt relieved; there was something he could do. He moved her away from the clot of patients in the middle of the day room, some of whom were beginning to quarrel about where to sit, or about dessert, or what television show to watch. There was a side table where he laid out the cards and began explaining to Sissy how the game worked.
She hugged herself. “I can’t.”
“Oh sure,” he said. “Anybody can learn to play this.” He gathered up the cards and made a big show of shuffling them.
“Can’t go,” she said, a little louder.
“Go where?”
“There.”
“I hope you won’t have to then,” he said, and dealt the cards. For the next half hour he played both their hands, talking all the time. She watched. The patients calmed down. A few visitors came and went.
Marge came and said, “I’ve got your meds, Sissy.” Sissy didn’t look back as Marge pushed her down the hall. David found some checkers and a board and looked around. One old man looked at him hopefully, and David found a place where they could play. The old man was very happy to play checkers, and very attentive. He told David that his father had died while playing a game in a checkers tournament in Lawton, Oklahoma, forty years ago. “Died happy,” he said. David wondered whose idea it was for him to be on this ward. He didn’t seem any more out of it than most people. David could not help wondering about his own father at sixty or seventy. Now Saul played checkers and chess with his barber and a clerk from the men’s store where he did alterations. At least once a week he played pinochle with the junk dealer, Chasen. Sometimes the four of them got together for poker. Who would play with Saul when he went off the deep end? He did not plan to be around to see it, but it was painful to consider. It seemed inevitable. He was afraid for his parents. They did not eat well, or sleep well, and they did not take care of one another.
At ten his mother called him to her desk to drink a cup of tea. “The highway patrol picked her up. Sissy. She was bloody, carrying a dead rabbit.” She lit a cigarette and inhaled deeply.
“That must have been a sight.” He thought this was going to sound a little fantastic. He wondered about the cop in the fancy sunglasses, how he had handled the girl after David drove on. Had he put her in the back, behind the me
sh barrier, like some old drunk? Had he tried to be gentle? He wished he had not abandoned the scene so readily. He could imagine himself in the patrol car with her, comforting her, soothing her, on the ride into Basin. What had he been afraid of? Maybe of the cop, the cop’s car. It was one thing to imagine his arm around the girl—and she had been skittish as a rabbit, herself, hardly asking for solicitude in that moment of encounter in the brush—and quite another to imagine himself locked up like something in a can. Anyway, he had forgotten her. He had been so wrapped up in his little Fort Stockton fantasies, he had forgotten. Christ.
“Mom, I was going to tell you about it. I found her out there. On my way out of town. She was careening all over the landscape with that damned rabbit. She was scared of me, and I didn’t want to grab her like some crook, I went and got a cop, and went on to Fort Stockton.” He felt sheepish, ineffectual. He felt like a reporter who had missed a scoop.
“Wonders never cease. You know, she was rigid as a board, eyes off to wonderland, when they hauled her in here.” Marge regarded her son through eyes half-closed to slits. David thought he saw contempt at the corners of her mouth. What did she expect! He wasn’t the nut-nurse in the family! “She’ll probably be here into the week, until she feels stronger. She’s actually a lot better today. I was beginning to wonder. We staffed on her, talked about shipping her off to Wichita Falls. I’m glad we gave it a little more time. Kids are tough, in their own way.” She stubbed out her cigarette. “Something happened out there. She’ll be okay, though. She’s lucid. Come up and see her.”
“Okay.”
“Coming up here—it brings out the good part of you, son.”
“Gosh, I hope this isn’t what it takes.” He was relieved to hear his mother’s warmer tone return. He felt like a real horse’s ass, but he could make up for it. He would visit Sissy. He would give her some of his TLC. Wasn’t that what all girls wanted, attention? Why wouldn’t it help one that had had her toe in deep water for a while? Give him small enough company, and he was a big shot, just like Saul was always saying.
His mother was looking at him curiously. Sometimes he thought that she could read his mind—maybe not the words, the actual thoughts, but the caliber of his thinking. She could see his self-centeredness. The way he looked at it, though, he had to be concerned about himself. Nobody else had the same stake in him. Everybody has a streak of crap in them, he thought. Either you hide it, or you find a way to use it.
“Her father had taken her out shooting. He says she got away from him.” Marge put her hands at the top of her forehead and pulled her skin back and up, easing the depth of her wrinkles, giving her the look of someone in a bathing cap. She let go, and her face crumpled back into place. She looked tired.
“Sounds like something you’d say about a dog. Maybe he’s the one who’s nuts.”
“May be. The county is going to put her in a foster home. I suspect there’s a story there.”
“Mom, I saw your note about the call.”
“I wrote down what the girl told me. Should I have asked her to spell her name? She was so—not exactly snotty, but—distant?”
“I don’t know who it could be.”
“She’ll call you back. Kimber—”
“Kimbrough!”
“Yes, that’s it.”
“Kimbrough’s the name of the fellow who had Ellis and me out to play tennis last May, remember? At the country club?”
The phone rang and then the woman in lock-up began beating on the door. Marge was busy until they left. David stretched out on the couch in the day room and watched the television with the sound low, until the news was over and Benke turned it off. The man with the long face wandered down and sat in a chair near David. “Sombitches took it all,” he said sadly.
David said, “I’m sure sorry to hear that, sir,” and closed his eyes. Right away now he could see Glee, naked and sweet, just the way she, would be with him as soon as he felt like himself again.
6.
David took a quick shower and went to find something to eat. His parents had already settled in at the kitchen table. Saul, now wearing a garish Hawaiian print shirt, had started on a bottle of gin. Marge, in a rayon wrap, had her bourbon. Her robe was an old one, bright green and blue, with snakes crawling up the trim, their heads caught in the facing and turned in on her breasts. She wore it unbelted, and her bra and half-slip showed.
David asked what food there was.
Marge shrugged and reached up to loosen her bra straps. Her large breasts slid down like filled balloons. David opened the refrigerator to inspect the contents. A chicken had been stripped of the meat. There were eggs, a plate of soggy sliced tomatoes, jars of chow-chow, olives, and pepperoncinis. He slammed the door shut. “What do you eat!”
His mother said, “There’s stuff in the cupboard.” She drained her glass and made a face. “Get me some ice, Davy.” She poured an inch of whiskey into the glass.
The ice tray was thoroughly stuck in the tiny freezer compartment, which looked like an ice cave. It had been his sister’s responsibility to defrost it, and it probably had not been done since she left last New Year’s Eve, never to return. He used a table knife to hack away at the tray. He made a lot of noise.
“Ice we can do without!” his father said.
“You do without ice, I want it,” his mother said.
“I got it, I got it, jeez.” David ran water over the tray, plunked a couple of cubes in his mother’s glass, put the rest in a bowl in the refrigerator, and refilled the tray. He knelt to inspect the canned goods. He chose a can of bean with bacon soup and held it up for inspection. “Anybody?”
Saul said, “I’ll have a cup of that.” David scraped the soup into a pan, added water, set it to heat, and turned on the iron skillet. He spread a piece of bread with bacon grease from the crock on the stove. His mother had bacon almost every morning. He put the greased bread down on the skillet to fry.
“Piece of this, too?” he asked his father.
“You should live so long, to see me eat pig grease.”
“There’s bacon in the soup.”
Saul flipped his hand. “And you need a microscope to find it.”
David gave his father soup in a cup, and ate the rest from the pan. He set it in the sink to soak. The phone rang. “I’ll get it,” he said, but his father had already stepped the few feet it took to reach the phone. He held it out away from him and pointed to it. “Your girlfriend, so late.”
David went into his room and picked up the phone. “You can hang up now,” he said.
“Davy, weren’t you going to call me?” It was Glee.
He could hear his father breathing. “So hang up,” he said again, and Saul did. David sat down. “Don’t start that.”
“I knew you were home. I drove by a little after five and there was the car. I went home in case you called. Then I figured you must a gone to the hospital. But now it’s midnight—”
“I know what time it is. Don’t your folks mind you blabbing on the phone in the middle of the night?”
“That’s what I called to tell you. They’re not here. They went to Greg’s sister’s for the weekend. Big Spring. You could come over.”
“I’m too tired. Too much driving today.”
“Davy—” she whined.
He felt as if she had run her manicured fingernail down his spine. “I’m too tired,” he said, more softly.
“I can come over there.”
“My folks—”
“When they go to bed.”
He did not want to try to explain. “They’ll be up a while.”
“I have things to tell you.” She spoke so breathily he could hardly hear her.
“Tell me.”
“In person, Davy.”
“David.”
“You’re in a bad mood!”
“I told you, I’m tired.”
“Sorry.” She did sound contrite. “I haven’t seen you since August 12, 11:20 PM. I missed you.”
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“Tomorrow, okay? I’ll call you tomorrow. I promise.” He hung up and lay back heavily.
It wasn’t long until he heard scratching at his door. He wondered for a moment if it would be possible to lift his head. He felt anger flash through him; of course it was her. Then he had an instant to think of her, before he opened the door.
“I had to,” she said. She was wearing white. Her blouse had puffed sleeves, a scooped neck, and elastic under her breasts. Sometimes she wore old clothes of her mother’s from the forties. Her shorts were pleated and full and a little yellowed with age. She looked like a starlet from an old movie. She smelled of vanilla. “Don’t be mad,” she whispered. Her bare midriff was smooth and brown. Her light brown hair was streaked almost white, by sun, or peroxide, or a combination of both.
He put his arms around her and moaned as she moved her body against the length of his. Suddenly he wanted to touch her everywhere. He did not know why he fought this so much. She was sleek as some fine animal. How could she be so hard and lean, and yet so soft?
She was trying to pull up the sheet. He laughed at her. “It’s not exactly cold in here.” They were both shiny with sweat.
“What if they come in?”
He laughed again. “You don’t have to worry. They don’t come in here. They’re busy.”
She looked perplexed at his sardonic tone. He made a motion, chug-a-lug. Her expression shifted to one of sad concern. “Forget it!” he said sharply. “It’s none of your business.” He moved his leg so she could cover up.
They lay side by side. He thought, she’s not going to put me down on account of my parents. She has her own history.
He laid his hand on her thigh.
It had been a great relief to connect with Glee, whose mother had been a waitress in the cocktail lounge at the Alamo Hotel for years, until she recently married an accountant and got pregnant again. Glee didn’t know who her own father was. If anyone asked, she said he died in the Pacific. After she had been with David all winter, she told him she thought it was more likely her father was one of those cowboys you see going in the roadhouses in the early evenings, wearing filthy boots and cheap shirts. David, in a rush of pity, said, “He must have been good looking, though, look at you.”
Walking Dunes Page 4
