“Navy blue.” She nodded. “I approve. You’ve made your statement without being obvious. Now just be relaxed and try to enjoy yourself. And for heaven’s sake, don’t talk about Anthony!”
“I have no small talk,” I said mournfully. “What can I say to this person?”
Vicki thought for a moment. “Well,” she said. “I used to pretend to be an exchange student from Denmark. That was always good for a tour of the campus, but that won’t work for you, Mary Frances. It takes practice. You’re just going to have to play it by ear.”
“Are you sure this is what I should do? Go out with this guy?”
“I’m positive. It’s exactly what you should do.”
“What’s he like, anyway?”
“I have no idea. I have never met him. Was that the house phone?” She jumped up and ran out into the hall, and I heard her say: “By the grace of God and the genius of Alexander Graham Bell, you have reached the third floor of Addison Hall…” It was too late to invent a migraine. He was here.
She walked me down the stairs for moral support. “It’s going to be just fine, Mary Frances. Let go of the banister.” We peeped out the doorway into the parlor and saw him standing nervously in front of the gilt-frame mirror.
Fortunately, he looked nothing like Anthony. He was tall and angular, with hair, eyes, and skin all the same neutral shade of tan. His face was impassive. He looked as if he had never had a thought in his life.
“I couldn’t warm up to him if we were cremated together!” I hissed to Vicki.
“He looks like a moron. Now go out there and be charming!” she hissed back, giving me a push.
I walked over to the Brown Thing and gave myself up. He acknowledged my existence with a grunt, and we put on our coats and walked out into the rain. In the seven minutes it took to walk from Addison to his fraternity house, we managed to cover a great deal of trivia. Such as: where are you from? what’s your major? what year are you? and do you know Bernie Roundtree from your hometown? In seven minutes we had exhausted every possible conversational gambit I could come up with for the entire evening. And I couldn’t become a diabetic until ten o’clock.
I learned that the lizard’s name was Hampton Branch III, that he was a history major, planning to go into law or politics, and several other bits of information that passed through my mind leaving no impression whatsoever. Perhaps I should have written myself a script, I thought. Hampton and I didn’t talk much for the rest of the walk. There weren’t many subjects that he was qualified to discuss, and I wanted to commune with my sorrow. I didn’t feel like telling him the history of nursery rhymes (“Ring around the Roses” is a recitation of plague symptoms), which is what I usually do to entertain strangers. His fraternity house was a blur in the mist. I wouldn’t be able to recognize it if I saw it again. When I try to picture it, I get House of Usher with Vincent Price standing on the porch.
I followed Hampton downstairs to the party room, where two hundred identical people were herded together shouting at each other over the music. The room was dimly lit, tiled, and furnished entirely in contemporary American bodies, arranged in small circular groups, holding drinks, laughing. Unfortunately they were alive, and might have to be conversed with.
Hampton, I noticed, had lurched over to the jukebox and was seeing to it that “My Girl” would play thirty-six times in succession. Dutifully, I followed.
I was standing there studying the checkerboard pattern on the floor, when I suddenly realized with horror that I had not spoken for nearly twenty minutes.
“Hamp, I’m sorry I’m so quiet!” I blurted. “But today I just broke up with the guy I’ve been going with for three years.”
“Gee,” said Hamp.
An electronic scream shook the room, and the lights on the jukebox faded out. A combo, with the name THE FABULOUS PROPHETS OF ECU painted on their drums, had just set up in a corner of the room, and they were either warming up or playing their opening number. It was hard to tell which. The couples surged toward the dance floor, pressing us up against the bandstand with approximately two feet of space in which to move. Hampton was spinning around like a wound-up toy mouse to the blare of the band. I moved mechanically to the rhythm, but really the noise was wrapped around me like a cushion, too loud to scream through, holding my thoughts inside. I thought about all the trivial things I’d been saying to Hampton, and all the real conversations I used to have with Anthony. It was an odd wake to bury three years. Hampton disappeared briefly between dances and came back with two plastic cups of warm beer, one of which he pressed into my hand. I smiled and nodded, indicating that I understood I was to drink it. I sipped enough of it to get the level down so it wouldn’t slosh while I was dancing, I had only managed to drink two-thirds of it. Hampton, by then, was several beers away.
I wondered what time it was. Nine-thirty by now, surely. But on reflection, I decided that I could think about Anthony here as well as anywhere. The music prevented conversation, and the company was certainly no distraction.
The last time I’d seen Anthony, we went to dinner at the Pines, and then sat down under a tree in the arboretum and talked about life. It had been dark and quiet there, with stars shining between the leaves, and Anthony had held me while we talked. I had felt that I really belonged there. Now I didn’t belong anywhere, and I didn’t know what to do or say when smiling cardboard people came up and screamed imitation questions. I wished I could explain all this to Anthony, because he would understand. But he didn’t care now. He didn’t care at all.
There was a sudden silence in the room, and I was there again. The Fabulous Prophets of ECU began to play a slow, sad melody, “I’ll Be There,” and people began to surge together. Hampton returned from orbit and looked at me with a curiously human expression. Without a word, he held me. I clung to him, occasionally remembering to move my feet, thinking how good it felt to be close to somebody. It felt warm and safe… and… just the way it always did with Anthony.
Suddenly I knew why Vicki had sent me. She wanted to put an emotional Band-Aid on my suppurated ego. And I nearly fell for it. But she was missing the point: I didn’t want to feel better, I wanted to get back at Anthony! By the end of the slow dance, Hampton and I were looking at each other with new interest: I was seeing an instrument for revenge, and he was seeing a five-foot-three-inch mound of fresh meat. When he suggested that we go for a walk in the arboretum, I didn’t even pretend to think it over.
We left the party hand in hand and headed for the arboretum in silence; we still couldn’t think of anything to say to each other. Hampton led me to a spot between two large azalea bushes that he apparently knew quite well, and we sat down on the wet ground. Fortunately it had stopped raining. At this point I considered mentioning my inexperience, but I decided to rely on dance etiquette: let him lead and do your best to keep up. What followed could best be compared to having a pelvic exam while someone blew beer and Lavoris fumes in your face. After a discreet interval-the time it took for Hampton to smoke one Benson & Hedges cigarette-he walked me back to my dorm. As we reached the front door, Hampton shuffled his feet awkwardly and mumbled: “I’ll call you.”
“Yeah, sure,” I said. “Good night.” I didn’t offer to tell him my real name; I was inside and running up the stairs before he got to the edge of the porch.
When I reached the third floor, the hall was dark and quiet-most everybody was in Vicki’s room and the door was half open. Confessions would be heard until one A.M. I hesitated outside her door for a moment, staring down the barrel of LBJ’s machine gun, and then I turned and walked off toward the lair of P. J. Purdue.
There comes a time when you outgrow Vicki Baird.
A SNARE AS OLD AS SOLOMON
FRANCHETTE BELTED HER car coat over her swollen belly and eased her way down the icy back steps. Ramer was still in the shed. Her breath made little puffs of smoke in the chill morning air as she stumbled down the path toward the road. She hurried as if she could still hear the cries co
ming from the crate out front, or the sound of the hatchet on the hen’s neck.
She didn’t look back as she made for the dirt road beyond the trees. The crocuses she’d planted were beginning to put up green shoots. It was going to be an early spring, and that was good. Soon she wouldn’t have to worry about the pipes freezing, or about having to carry firewood in her condition, when Ramer went out drinking and left her alone. She couldn’t stop to look at the plants just now, or to check for deer tracks in the yard. She wished she could do something about the prisoner in the crate, but she couldn’t. She had left the kettle boiling on the stove, and the butcher knife laid out on the newspapers, just like Ramer had asked her to, but she had to get out of there.
If she ignored the catch in her side, she could be around the bend to Della’s trailer in five minutes. Della worked the lunch shift at her uncle’s diner in town, so she’d be leaving soon. If Franchette said she had a doctor’s appointment on account of the baby, Della would let her ride in to town with her for nothing. She couldn’t tell Della the real reason she wanted to go. Della’s man was living over across the river with a bleached blond dental assistant, and he never sent Della a cent for the kids or the payments on the Pontiac. Della would laugh and say that pregnant women always got fanciful, that Ramer was being protective like a man ought to be, and he was a heap better than some. Maybe he was being protective, but Franchette didn’t think so. She thought he was saving his own pride at the cost of hers. And the worst part was the way he’d done it. It was like the Bible story turned inside out, but she hadn’t seen that until today. Della couldn’t be made to understand. She’d say: “Ramer killed that old stray hen. So what?”
It had been no use trying to talk about it to Ramer either. They had been married a year now, and already the talk had run out. Used to be, Ramer would listen to her way of looking at things, her dreaming out loud, but now when she tried to talk to him, he’d look at her for a minute and then go back to what he was doing. It wasn’t all his fault, though. Being out of work was hard on a man’s pride. When he took her high school diploma down off the wall, she hadn’t said anything, because she knew it was reminding him that he’d quit in tenth grade, and maybe if he hadn’t he’d be working. Things had been different when he had the job in the sawmill. He’d wanted her to finish high school before the wedding and at graduation he’d showed up in his white tie and suit coat and had taken her out to dinner at the Beef Barn to celebrate. Those were happy times. They talked about her getting a typing job in town so that they could buy a new truck and maybe a dish-shaped antenna for the television. He had let her go and get the birth control pills at the clinic, so they could save up and have a few things before the babies started to arrive. But that was before. Now if she even brought home a book from the bookmobile, he accused her of showing off her education. So Franchette had given up reading and started a quilt. Sometimes she thought something had died inside Ramer, and that he’d be damned if he’d let it live anywhere else.
That morning Ramer had been staring out the kitchen window, same as always. The want ads page of the Scout lay crumpled beside his coffee mug, ready to be thrown out with the coffee grounds. First thing after breakfast (oatmeal mostly; eggs at the first of the month), Franchette would clear up the dishes and Ramer would run his finger down the want ads. It never took him very long to go through them. Since the mine shut down and the sawmill laid off, there weren’t any jobs; and if there was one-say, painting a barn-there were twenty people trying to get it, and the one closest related to the barn owner got hired on. So far that hadn’t been Ramer. He was staring out at the pasture and the hills beyond as if he were looking for deer to come down the ridge, but he wasn’t seeing. Franchette cleared up the breakfast dishes in silence.
No use trying to talk to him. No use, either, asking for the want ads. She’d tried that when he first got laid off, and he’d given her a cold, dead look and said: “What’s the matter, Miss High and Mighty? You want to be the boss of this family now?” She’d snapped back that it would be better than the welfare, and Ramer had left the house and hadn’t come back for three hours. After that, she’d try to sneak and read them before she put them in the garbage, but it hadn’t been any use. Ramer had seen to that.
“I’m going to kill that damned chicken!” Ramer had shouted, bringing his fist down hard on the kitchen table.
Franchette wanted to tell him to leave it be. It wasn’t doing any harm this early in the spring. But she knew that taking up for it would only make him madder. Anyway, she didn’t think he could catch it; that old hen knew about people, at least enough to stay out of range. She was a scraggly old Red, gone wild from somebody’s farm, and living on whatever she could forage. Wasn’t enough meat on her to make a mouthful; anybody could see that. All winter she’d clucked and rambled across their yard, a friendly sight to Franchette, and to Ramer a sign of one more thing he couldn’t control. Sometimes he would go out and shy rocks at her, but he never came close to a hit, and the next day, she’d be back like nothing had happened.
A couple of days after the first thaw, the hen had showed up with one puny chick following behind her-probably the only survivor of an early nest. They’d pecked and cackled at each other in the patches of late snow, while Ramer sat at the window and watched them, day after day.
He never made any move to catch the pair of them, and never said anything about their presence in the yard. He just watched them with eyes like slits. Franchette thought Ramer might be easing up toward the old hen, seeing as how he was going to be a father himself in a few months’ time, but that hope had ended today. He must have been planning it for a couple of days, since he put the wooden crate on the front porch and the gun by the front door.
He hadn’t said anything else after the first outburst. He just grabbed the half-eaten toast from Franchette’s plate and walked out into the yard. Franchette watched him from the window. He stood there stock-still in his work clothes, no coat or gloves, and waited for the hen to come closer. Then he threw down a piece of bread. The hen cocked her head at him, like she didn’t like what she saw. She bustled away toward the trees, but her chick hadn’t learned better. It came up to see what had fallen. Ramer tossed a smaller piece of bread and backed up toward the porch. The chick followed him at a careful distance, gulping down bread crumbs, until Ramer was on the porch, tossing crumbs into the flower bed by the steps. The hen came a few yards out of the trees and shrieked at her baby, but it was too dumb or too hungry to hear her. Finally, Ramer dumped the rest of the bread crumbs into the flower bed and eased the wooden crate toward the edge of the porch. When the chick bent down to peck the bread, he leaned out and slammed the crate down on top of it. Franchette put her fist in her mouth to keep from yelling at him to let it loose. She thought he would wring its neck then and there, but instead he got up and slammed into the house.
“What did you want to do that for?” she asked when he got inside.
“You’ll find out,” he said without looking at her. He was watching the crate.
The chick had found it couldn’t get out, and was flapping around inside, screaming in terror. You could see it through the wooden slats, thrashing against the top and sides. The hen could see it, too. She answered its cries with distressed sounds of her own and edged nearer the box. Every step or so, she’d cock her head and look up at the house where Ramer waited, and she’d back up a few feet, but the chick’s cries always pulled her closer. It took a good five minutes for her to get to the crate. The chick’s cries were coming louder than ever, and she circled the crate, peering in at it and screeching.
Ramer picked up the gun and eased open the door.
“Oh, Ramer, don’t!” Franchette whispered, grabbing his sleeve.
“I guess that settled it,” he said, grinning at her, and he was gone.
She wished she had gone back to the kitchen and not watched Ramer level the gun at the frantic hen. The hen had looked away from the crate when he came out; she had to
have seen the gun, but she stayed there by the crate as if it didn’t matter. He got her with one shot. The chick was still shrieking inside the crate when Ramer picked up its mother’s body and carried it off to the shed to dress it out. He would scald off the feathers and gut it, and then he’d bring it to the house for Franchette to cook. Franchette knew that if she ever tried to eat that hen, she’d never be done with vomiting, but that wasn’t why she had run.
It was the way Ramer had grinned when he said “I guess that settled it.” It had puzzled her for a while, trying to think what it reminded her of. She had been setting the kettle on to boil when it came to her. After she’d asked for the want ads that time, and then gotten Della to ask her uncle if he could use another waitress, Ramer had told her to wait till after Christmas to start to work, and she’d been happy that he’d taken it so well. It had almost been like old times again for a couple of weeks. Ramer had been so loving again. He’d thrown away her birth control pills, because they cause cancer, he said. And he told her he’d use something to make it safe. He never had, though. And when around Christmastime, she’d known she was pregnant, he smiled just that same funny way, and said that settled it. She was going to be a mother. She couldn’t work. No wife of his was going to leave her kid and go to work. He didn’t seem very happy about the baby, though; he never wanted to talk about what to name it, or anything. He’d just say that she had to stay home and look after it.
It wasn’t until she saw him shoot the hen today that she understood what he’d done and why. It was like the story about Solomon: when the king offered to cut the disputed baby in two, and the real mother was willing to give it up rather than see it killed. That poor old hen had been willing to do anything to save her baby. And Ramer had tried to make her give up her life, the chance to make something of herself, using their baby as a weapon. But Ramer was no Solomon; he would have cut the baby in two, just to make sure that everyone was equally unhappy.
Foggy Mountain Breakdown and Other Stories Page 6
