Pay the Piper

by Joan Williams

  She gave him a half-pleading look and went onto the porch, telling Buff to stay where she was. Why must she be worried about going to ask a garage man to fix her car? Laurel knew as she walked his way it was because any refusal or hesitancy on his part she would take as personal rejection. And she stood right beside Bubba’s elbow but he did not look up. She adopted William’s hearty, winning, breezy manner and said, “Hello. Hello.”

  “What can I do for you?” he said, with a suspicious mountainside manner.

  She said, “I know it sounds ridiculous.” Then she explained to him what had happened.

  “Kids’ll be kids,” Bubba said. “Bring the car on over here.”

  Laurel went back for it, wondering if to drive it further might not be bad for the car. But she would not protest. Why, she questioned herself, because Bubba might not like you?

  “You a long way from home,” he said, looking at her license plate; then Laurel thought, Lord, she was home. Because all summer long, country people said the same thing to her, with the slight idea that something must be wrong. Did they never go anywhere? she wondered. She felt a great need to explain to Bubba she was not some agitator from the East—though the time was late for that—but that she belonged, and anyway she was more apt to get good service, being part of where they were. “I came from Delton. And I have people in Mississippi. I go back every summer to visit them.” She had purposely used the word “people” as a Southernism.

  “Making this long trip by yourself?” Bubba chose among tools.

  “Yup. Except for my son.”

  “Wire’s caught up in the rear axle. Got to run her up on the lift.” He began to snip with wire clippers, giving her a sideways glance. “If you come up down in this part of the world, how’d you get so far up the country?”

  “Oh.” She shifted her feet about in his sawdust, wondering herself; then she said, “I married a man up there. It just happened.” That was the whole truth.

  “You still married?”

  “Yes.”

  He gave her another sharply angled look. “If I was married to a good-looking woman, I wouldn’t let her be running around the countryside loose.”

  She was not running around loose, she thought angrily. She had given him a viable, justifiable reason about why she was on her way south; why was she made to feel odd making this trip?

  “Done. You ain’t got much toy left.”

  “The car’s still all right?”

  “Good as new. It is new, ain’t it?”

  She nodded. She hated again those moments in the showroom when William moved about turning steering wheels, grinning like a small boy: his conservative family seldom bought new cars: her salesman father, except during the war, had a new one every year. In her mind’s eye, Mr. Woodsum remained stationary in a yellow convertible, asking questions of a salesman. It was tawdry, Laurel thought, a scene that should have been far removed from their lives, and William, despite moralistic attitudes, had brought them to it.

  “You going on down the road, or staying round here?”

  “Going on down the road.”

  “If you was to stay here, I’d carry you on over yonder to that store for a Coke,” Bubba said.

  Laurel smiled. “That would be nice.” What made such men assume you would like to go? “How much for the work?”

  “Not something I’ve priced. Gimme a couple of bucks.”

  She opened the car door. “If you was to come on back this way, I’d carry you on over yonder yet,” Bubba said.

  “I go home a different way. Through St. Louis.” She fended off such suggestions all summer from the most outlandish men, being alone. Always she felt the safety and security of being married; nothing could harm her, really, while there was William.

  “Mom. Buff’s gone.”

  “She couldn’t be gone. She never goes anywhere.” Laurel got out of the car.

  “I’ve called and called.”

  She looked toward the highway where another diesel truck passed; the silhouette of its driver inside looked like a paper doll. “She wouldn’t go to the road.” They looked out over the scraggly land with its yellow weeds; after following footpaths through it, their shoes seemed to have been dusted by dry mustard. They picked cockleburs from their clothes and went on calling, “Buff, Buff,” her name echoing back to them from hidden hollows.

  “We can’t leave her,” Rick said.

  “I know.” But how long could they wait? One time Rick had said that when Buff died that would be the end of his childhood; they had had the dog so long, he did not remember a time without her. But that’s not now, God. Laurel’s lower lip trembled. It’s too soon. Yet that’s what she was thinking of doing to Rick’s childhood; to divorce his father would end it. He’d never have again the innocence he now had. And what about herself? She was walking along thinking she must call William and ask him what to do next.

  Then the miracle happened; the little body came running toward them. Rick fell on his knees and instantly got up holding his nose. “Whew!”

  “She’s been rolling in cow plops,” Laurel said. “Buff, how could you?”

  She was embarrassed by the iridescent greenness in the dog’s coat, explaining the situation to the store’s owner and buying paper towels. They scrubbed Buff down the best they could. The woman stood at her screened door laughing. “Got your chance, didn’t you, girl. A dog will do it every time it can.”

  “So what else is going on we don’t know about behind that ladylike façade?” Laurel held the graying muzzle between both hands.

  Within miles of Delton, the land turned totally flat. She switched on a local black radio station, liking to hear the caterwauling jive talk, the soul music. Almost there. Rick stirred from sleep. He knew exactly on the trip where they were; his fingers beat time to the music. The sun stood low in the direction of the Mississippi River; and now the sky had a great, wide, open look and alongside the road there were virgin trees; there was a lonesome sense to the emptiness and raw beauty. Laurel remembered in her past standing alone in her Delton house one night and looking out while on a record player behind her Judy Garland sang “Blues in the Night”: a whoo-ee da whooo-ee. And she had told herself then, I’m going away from this place some day.

  She had promised Rick never to say again: It takes as long to get across the state of Tennessee as to get to it from Connecticut. As they rounded Delton on curlicues of concrete that were new since her time, she thought about how many people she knew in the city she was passing, all of them unaware she went by, and she wondered how many of them would have cared; people were so involved with their own lives. They knew little about her life, but she knew their habits. Now, shortly after five o’clock, Delton husbands would be heading home from work. She’d often wondered what couples did with such long evenings; night was well into itself by the time William got home on normal evenings.

  In Mississippi, she had to tell Rick again about the entire town of Whitehill being moved back in the forties because of a federal dam being built nearby. This year he thought to ask, “I wonder if they took the water out of the water tower before they moved it?”

  That tower was a landmark back in the days she drove down to her grandmother’s with her mother, from Delton. Soon, then, they turned off blacktop onto gravel. She longed for those old days, olden days now, when there had not been electricity or running water for years she could remember; what a shadowy, exciting existence it had been, moving from room to room by the light of kerosene lamps. “Let’s eat at the Whitehill café,” Rick said. “I don’t want to have to go to Loma’s first thing and get some of her greenish meat.”

  Laurel parked on Whitehill’s town square, where Rick took Buff for a walk. Old men playing checkers in a store observed her in her miniskirt when she got out of the car. She walked past a laundromat where a discreet sign in the window still read, WHITES ONLY. Inside, the café had a bare look. A lot of old newspapers were piled up in the front window, and she picked up one at rando
m. A black cook stood in the kitchen filling the place with smoke and the smell of frying fish. A blond waitress leaned on a partition laughing with her. “Be right with you, hon,” she said, turning to Laurel.

  She sat down at a table and found her knees ached and were painful from long, cramped hours with the car’s air conditioning blowing directly on them. This was the first year she could remember her knees hurting, and she thought, I’m getting older. Maybe arthritis was in her future. She leaned her chin heavily into her hands and wished the county was not dry.

  Locally, there was a small paper once a week; Delton papers were the ones people read daily. Out of an old habit, Laurel turned first to the society page. But her Delton friend Catherine had told her so many new people had moved into the city, they were the ones who were written up; she’d been a bit huffy about the people she and Laurel knew, Delton’s real society, having been dropped. Laurel joshed herself: could the newcomers get into the country club? When she flipped on idly through pages, she found this was the edition in which Hal MacDonald’s article had been printed. She read it again.

  Merely to see his name there as author flooded her with memories of downtown Delton in her girlhood. Along Cotton Row above the Mississippi River there was a huge warehouse with bright gold letters reading MACDONALD BROTHERS. Also, the city’s tallest building was owned by that family; way up high the name was minuscule; in a park in the center of town a fountain had a plaque noting it was donated by a certain MacDonald, she could not remember who. It had been a name, a family, that pervaded her growing-up; always, she’d longed to have a name so famous everyone where you lived would know it; to have a large important sense of family; to be known over the whole tristate area as they were, in Arkansas, Mississippi, and Tennessee.

  “Mom, did you seriously not know I was sitting here?”

  “No.”

  “Christ on a crutch.”

  “Where’d you get that expression?”

  “From your mother.”

  “Great.”

  “The waitress waited and just walked away.”

  Laurel turned then and looked in her direction. “Sorry,” she said when the woman returned again, bringing menus.

  “That’s all right. I just said to myself, said, That woman’s reading something mighty innaresting.” Then she looked down at the paper where Laurel’s hand rested. “Uh-oh,” she said. “When all that happened down in the Delta, I told myself then, said, There was more than one finger on the trigger that night. The MacDonalds aren’t the kind of folks that go around shooting folks. It’s sad all the way around. What looks good to eat?”

  They ordered catfish, as always, eagerly, on their return. Though so late at night, Laurel thought uneasily of the meal in her stomach: fried fish, hush puppies, potatoes. Rick was asking for a substitution, fresh beans instead of hush puppies.

  She sat looking at her son, wondering why she could not have done the same thing. She knew why: The waitress might not have liked her. Absurdity, she told herself again.

  A country man with a loping walk came in wearing khaki clothes. He greeted the black woman cook boisterously, and they went on laughing with one another. “What you been doing, Mister Ken?”

  “What I shouldn’t-a been doing. What you been up to, Lucille?” In a while, he swung round on the counter stool. “That your little dog out yonder? She like to tore me up when I passed the car.” And he looked speculatively at Laurel from beneath his billed cap, taking in the points of her breasts beneath a knit top and her knees in a short skirt. “You a long way from home.” His eyes twinkled, wondering what she was doing here. She bent to the plate the waitress set down.

  “Mush,” Rick said presently, about his beans.

  “You know they still cook them here the old way, all day long.”

  “Hicks,” he commented.

  “OK, Dad.”

  “How many times are you going to read that article?”

  “I just can’t stop feeling for this man and trying to imagine his life in a Mississippi prison. He went to prep school in the East, it says here. Choate. And to Chapel Hill. He’s from one of Delton’s most prominent families.”

  “Prominent how?”

  “You know, important. Like Dad’s family. Only his is prominent on a worldwide scale. These people have a big plantation in Mississippi. I think I went to a high school sorority party there once.”

  “What’s a sorority?”

  “Oh, you Yankee hick. If you grew up in the South you’d know sororities and fraternities are organizations that are great fun if you get into one and break your heart if you don’t.”

  “What’s this guy doing in prison?”

  Laurel took a bite of food. “He killed his teenaged stepson.” It sounded so awful stated baldly.

  “What? Why?”

  “I don’t know why. He’s in prison for manslaughter. That means it was not on purpose.”

  “Jesus.” Rick went on eating. She wondered if Hal had done other writing, his article was so beautiful; she would like to find out. “Let’s go,” Rick said. “There’ll be enough light I can still shoot frogs when we get there.”

  When they stood at the cash register, the waitress said, “You folks not going to eat some of Lucille’s homemade pie?” The man swung round on his counter stool again, to rub his knuckles atop Rick’s head. “Boy, you better eat you some of that pie and put some meat on them bones.”

  “’Bye, hon. Come back to see us, hear,” the waitress said.

  Rick went out in the country man’s loping stride, sticking a toothpick into his mouth. Laurel followed behind, thinking of the times they left restaurants and her mother would be furious about her father having a toothpick wagging in his mouth, not waiting for privacy to pick his teeth. It seemed there had always been some argument to spoil every outing.

  The square was dabbled with red from the sign blinking Café. They turned from town over the road that was no longer gravel. Or dust; she remembered how dust once rose up in yellow whorls. They passed cabins dotting the roadside that had been there all her life. Now Rick could say, “I’ve been waving to people in those same cabins ever since I’ve been coming down here. They don’t recognize us in the new car.”

  Black people sitting on raggedy porches and little children in bare dirt yards waved back anyway. In bottomland along Gray Wolf River a greater darkness had come, ringing with insects. People stood on its banks fishing with long poles. Trees seemed impenetrable in the growing dark. At this point, they always turned off the air conditioner and rolled down the windows. They wanted to smell the sweet scent of a baked evening beginning to cool, to hear cicadas crying their warnings. “You forgot to say clickety-clack,” Rick said.

  “Oh.” They had crossed a small concrete bridge over Gray Wolf River which in her childhood had been two planks laid over a chasm, the brown slow river below; always, the ends of the planks rose and fell with a clatter beneath the car’s weight. “Clickety-clack,” Laurel said.

  “How come you forgot?” Rick said. She would not tell him another time she was thinking about the article, and told him she was tired.

  Between dips in the road, darkness had come. They crested hills and faced the sun going down, always receding from them. She began to sing, “Down de road. Round de bend. I’m just go-o-o-ing home. Tired and blue. We-e-e-ary too. I’m just go-o-o-ing—”

  “Mom.”

  “Sorry about that. I forget you have musical ability.”

  “Here’s my place.”

  “OK, pup.” Laurel drove off the road into the turnrow of a cotton field and slid over, while Rick came around to the driver’s seat. He sat up as tall as he possibly could and began to smile. “I wish my friends could see me.”

  “Honey, you been driving down here since you were eight years old.”

  “I know it. How come you let me?”

  “You wanted to.”

  “This year I’m driving to town by myself. Gran says she drove everywhere when she was
eleven.”

  “There weren’t any laws back then.”

  “Can I?”

  “I guess so. If you just drive from our place to Loma’s store. Nobody much cares here what you do.”

  Town reared up ahead, four small stores with their gas pumps, the lights murky as if they shone through heavy rain. The road they turned off to their cabin was sparsely settled, with few lights at all. They talked about known places and inhabitants: about Mister Zack’s cornfield where he kept beer hidden from his wife; about the curve where Rick spun them off the road and down a bank two years ago and only thick kudzu kept them from turning over. He still talked about the fingernail marks she left in his thigh, clutching him as they went. He’d phoned William excitedly with the details, how they slipped off a rain-slick mud road and went in slow motion down an embankment. William asked to speak to her. “For God’s sake, Laurel. The boy’s ten years old.”

  “I know it. You’re right. He shouldn’t be driving.” Then they went away from the pay station beside the road, with Rick at the wheel. She had carried with her the sound of teletypes like castanets in William’s office and the muffled and elusive sounds of horns on the avenue below him.

  Rick turned up a bumpy driveway now between tangled rambler roses with pastureland stretching invisibly into darkness on either side. Faintly, she saw the white faces of cows.

  He said, “Can you unpack alone so I can shoot frogs?”

  “OK. Look. Buff’s sniffing round her same places.”

  “Will you sit on the car with me for a minute first?”

  “I want to get this stuff unpacked while there’s still some light.”

  “Please. And hold my hand.”

  “All right. But what’s up?” As Laurel sat on a fender and reached across the hood for his hand, she could see his face as a dim spot.

  “When we go on trips, I pray we’re going to get there safe. And now that we’ve made it, I want to thank God.”

  “Sure,” she whispered. “But you know I get to cry.”

  She went out onto a small porch later and was unable to make out Rick’s figure in the pasture. The pond had disappeared into night; in the porch light she saw shapes of willows brooding toward the water in curvatures. There was no reason to worry about a boy in this countryside, yet it was dark and Rick was gone. He could hit a bull with his BB gun if he had to. She heard its popping every so often and wanted to laugh, it seemed so ineffectual in comparison to the enormous night, the way everything did. After she called him, he spoke to Buff, and soon two dark shapes moved up a path toward her. Rick stood on the lighted porch laughing at her apprehension.