Beatrice snapped the book shut. Dr. Devlyn wasn’t teaching the fall semester. She’d lost her chance. She slipped The Singing Heart into her bag, walked out and closed the door behind her. As she passed the Dean’s Office, she could see Marge, the receptionist, smoothing lotion up and down her wrinkly arms. Marge had straightened out Beatrice’s summer school schedule last June, and Beatrice had begun to confide in her. Beatrice laid these lapses in her usual restraint to being a schoolgirl in blue jeans three days a week. She stopped in the doorway.
Marge squinted at her. “Hard final, huh?”
“We didn’t have one.”
“So why are you looking so washed out? Don’t tell me you didn’t get the book signed.” Marge frowned. “Look, just give a party if you want to get to know him. You look real good, and I know you must have a nice house. Just be casual.”
“He wouldn’t want to go to a party,” Beatrice answered. “The book was my only excuse to approach him.”
“That’s what’s wrong with you. You think you need an excuse. I knew you were a lady the minute you walked in here in June. Don’t your friends tell you that?”
Beatrice let her bag slip to the floor and sank into the plastic chair in front of Marge’s desk. No, her friends never talked to her like this.
“Look, Beatrice—” Marge leaned across her desk and whispered. “This Dr. Devlyn may have completely petrified, living out there in the country so long. He may have a PhD from State and some publications, but his books aren’t the kind that really make a career—too poetic, not enough footnotes. Forget this guy. There’s a new botanist coming in next semester.”
Beatrice lifted her bag to her shoulder. “Maybe I should just drop by his house and ask him to sign it.”
“Oh? A house call, huh,” Marge said, “That’s not casual.”
“Being casual wouldn’t do this man justice! What is his address?”
“Don’t snap at me. I’m just saying, it’s not your style.”
Four days later she guided the car onto the shoulder of the section line beside Dr. Devlyn’s ordinary white rural mailbox, its red flag down. The house was a small ranch style, set back maybe a hundred feet from the road. She’d passed by before. Because of the ditch along the road, the only approach to the house would be to walk up the driveway. His car, all the shine scoured off by the sandy wind, was parked in front of the garage.
She put her hands in her lap and stared through the windshield. There were no trees on this road, just waving grass, one neighbor’s mailbox a quarter mile on down and then the horizon. The sun was sinking into a band of purple which stretched above a strip of pale greenish blue just above the earth’s edge. She mustn’t arrive after dark. That would be forward.
She turned off the engine. The racket of crickets sprang up around the car. She rolled down the window then wrapped her arms over the top of the steering wheel. The odor of baled hay was on the breeze. She’d lived all her life in this county. Maybe a thousand people in town and in the Methodist Church would say they knew her. She touched the book. He’d read a long passage in class, a poem about pulling turnips in the cold wind, the rough stems against work-tortured fingers. His rapt attention to each word made her grit her teeth against a pang in her jaw.
The sun had slid beneath the purple band and now shimmered, a liquid orange pressing the black earth. There were only a few minutes before dusk. She started up the drive, but stopped. Marge was right. This wasn’t her style. She stepped onto the low porch, knocked, and held the book against her pounding heart.
The door opened almost immediately. “Yes?” He leaned forward to see her through the screen of the aluminum storm door. It was dark behind him.
“I failed to ask you to sign the book the other day, then I found out you weren’t teach—”
“Mrs. Patterson?” He pushed the screened door open, and she could see him—tall and serious in jeans, his shirttail out. He was barefoot. In the orange light of dusk his narrow face looked older, deeply etched. She had never stood this close.
She stepped forward, putting her shoulder against the weight of the screened door’s spring. “You were a wonderful teacher,” she said and swallowed hard. He looked down at her with a mild squint. Angry? Embarrassed? He didn’t invite her in. She’d made a mistake, put herself in Anna Robie’s place, felt understood and attended to. “You seemed to care so much about her.”
“Robie? Yes, I did.”
“It made me think you—”
“Really? You thought I—”
“I thought you could read women.”
“No. I have a bad record on that. I don’t even try to read live women. Not anymore. I’m sorry. I preached a lot of intimate insight about a woman who wasn’t present to straighten me out. Look, my house is a wreck. I can’t ask you in. I’m glad to sign the book. Is that what you wanted?”
Beatrice stood very still and waited.
Finally, he took in a long breath. “You drove all the way out here, so I guess what you really wanted—” He paused squinting at her.
She said nothing. She was a grown up. She could do this, stand toe to toe and wait. It was dusk now on the prairie.
“So I guess you wanted company.” He was nodding, encouraging himself. “You wanted my company.” He was studying her, taking her in.
“Do you want to go get a root beer?” she asked
He nodded again. “Let me get my shoes.”
§
Hillary O’Brian’s
Cadillac Voices
The clipping from the old Transcript about the boys joining up for WWI touched a lot of people, who sent in interesting historical details about their families as well as sorrowful accounts of grief and loss. This piece is from the descendant of three generations of veterans.
CIVILIAN
My great grandfather, a soldier in WWI, married a volunteer nurse he met in an army hospital. Their only son was my grandfather who fought in WWII and came back to the University of Oklahoma where he married the girl who had waited for him. Bobby, their only son, my father, went to Vietnam when I was two. He didn’t come back.
We are a thin line, a sapling of a family tree of which I carry the sole remaining seed. Reading that clipping from the old newspaper made me think about war and children.
I am 38, unmarried and childless. I have not served my country, and am now too old to do so. I want to find a wife; I want to be a father, but I haven’t the luck to find the right woman, or to have ever met the kind of woman who would wait four years for me while I huddled in rainy fox holes on the other side of the world.
Our family luck began to sputter when my father was taken prisoner by the Viet Cong. My mother once told me, knowing he was a prisoner was worse for her than finding out later he was dead.
She watches me out of the corner of her eye. She asks me how I’m doing. She never asks me, “Where are my grandchildren?”
Gene Hunter
Cadillac resident since 1975
AS TRUE AS ANYTHING
Behind the kitchen here at Marvin’s Truck stop, there’s a small room where we used to throw broken tables and chairs and store the cases of beer. About ten years ago a prostitute ran a lively business back there until the highway patrol cruised in and took her away, so last year I was surprised to see a little Asian gal moving in a high table and a lot of white sheets. Marvin told me she was a masseuse, and she showed up every Monday night around 9:00.
Offering massages to truck drivers seemed odd and risky. If she was a whore, the smokies would soon sniff her out, and if she was offering real massage for your health, then why was she coming out here instead of staying in the nice place, Cadillac Nails & Spa, where she worked in town? Marvin, who was always thinking of ways to bring in more business, said she’d come to him and they had made a deal.
I’d taken her for Vietnamese, there being a lot of them now, but she told Marvin she was from the Philippines, had married an airman at Clark Air Force Base maybe twenty years ago and m
oved to the U.S. when he transferred to Tinker Field. I got the feeling she’d left him in Midwest City and moved here. She was a hit with the truckers—some detouring down from Kansas. I could have come up with the $20 for 30 minutes but I didn’t want to give up the way my mind imagined it. Her name was Rose.
My name is Sonny Higgins. I’m the dishwasher at Marvin’s, and except for a few wins in the rodeo spaced out over my lifetime and some jobs not worth mentioning, my resume is pretty thin. It’s not like bull riding and breaking horses prepares you for much in later life except bar fights, and even that’s more than I can handle these days. My back is still strong, but one of my shoulders rides a little higher than the other, and I’m stiff pretty much all over. The good-looking bronc riders, no matter how broken down, can marry well-off widows who maybe have a trailer and a government check, but the rest of us wash dishes or pump gas.
I worried about Rose and kept my ear cocked in case she yelled for help. And sure enough, a few weeks after she’d started, a local guy came bulling in, drunk as a skunk, swearing about how he was “gonna fuck her good.” There was a big crowd that night, plenty of beer on the floor and smoke in the air. This bastard almost knocked over old Veronica, who was carrying a tray of burgers, then he paid no mind to the guys waiting in line. I tripped him as he came charging through the kitchen, and he fell and cracked his head on the sink. He was out cold and I threw him over my shoulder. Marvin and I got him back into his car. Our policy is, by the time a guy figures out Marvin’s got his keys, he’s sober enough to drive.
Rose came and stood behind me at the end of the night. I wanted her to place a healing hand on my shoulder, but she didn’t. Her sweet little voice said, “Thank you, Sonny.” I didn’t turn around, just nodded and said sure. Hell, she didn’t need me to protect her. She was getting famous. Truckers don’t have anything to do but talk to each other on their cell phones. And more than this, being near the door to the storeroom, I could tell she really knew what she was doing ’cause every Monday night I’d hear little bits of what was said with each new guy. “Have you had any recent surgery? Are there any injuries I should know about?” And I’d picture her sitting on the folding chair in her jeans and a shirt like the nurses wear in the emergency room, and him, sitting there on the edge of the table, buck-naked, clutching a sheet around himself. You should hear those truckers go on. She never stops them, just lets them run down then says, “Okay, I’ll turn around and you lie down and fix the sheet over you.” A guy who has just reported the details of the worst accident he was ever in or what his dad did to him when he was twelve isn’t gonna give any trouble to the woman whose hands are comforting him. But still, I worried about her.
Hoping to get a woman’s point of view, I asked Old Veronica what she thought about us having a masseuse at Marvin’s and was surprised that all she did was pull in her chins and say, “She’s okay.” I’d thought maybe Veronica, with those ropey veins behind her knees and the arthritis in her hands, would be jealous and say something sarcastic about the younger woman.
“Do you think she’d let me buy her a cup of coffee?” I blurted.
“Don’t be a sucker, Sonny.”
One night I decided to fry Rose some eggs while she was gathering up the dirty sheets. It was about 2:00 a.m., and the cook was out back smoking, so I had the stove to myself. I leaned on the pass-through, watching the top of her head while she ate. She had long straight, glossy black hair. Her feet barely touched the floor under the counter stool. She had broad shoulders and big hands for her size but they didn’t keep her from looking like a kid. Her skin was the color of old piano keys, but there wasn’t a line on her face, and she had a child’s sweet smile.
My cooking something for her before she left got to be a weekly thing, and one cold, snowy night I slid the plate in front of her on the counter and poured us both a cup of coffee. I’d known her for six months, so I sat down beside her and she didn’t seem to mind. “So, Rose, how’d you get into this line of work?”
She sighed like she was too tired to talk, but she said, “My father was a trucker. Had a route from Manila through the mountains north to Sarrat. He supported eleven of us.”
“Gee.”
“When he came home at the end of his route, he’d lie on the floor and I’d sit on his back and rub his neck and shoulders. Truckers lead very unhealthy lives,” she said, then stopped to eat a little. I sipped my coffee and waited until she took it up again, talking easy, the way I’d hoped she would. “They smoke. They sleep in the truck. They lift heavy loads. Too many hours. The noise. Terrible posture.”
“Sure.”
“They’re overweight. No balanced diet. They self-medicate—way too many narcotics and analgesics and antihistamines. Then they get ringing in their ears, high blood pressure, ulcers, hemorrhoids—”
I was getting sorry I’d brought this up.
“He died in his forties.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It was a long time ago,” she said, but I could see she was still angry about his health.
“So you got into this ’cause you took pity on the truckers.”
“And they’ve got no health insurance, and in 20% of crashes the driver fell asleep.”
“Is that what happened, he fell asleep at the wheel?”
“No.” She thanked me for the eggs and took off into the snow.
Rose’s list of what was wrong with truck drivers made me think about the deterioration of men from their work. And I mark that night as the beginning of looking hard at myself, beyond the physical damage and asking myself what I had to offer as a man. I was decent, whatever that meant, but did I have courage? Maybe I was just bull-headed the way my mother had always said I was. Go ahead and climb on that wild horse, you damn fool! I can still hear her.
I knew how to comb my hair and put on a clean shirt and sweeten up my breath, but all that seemed superficial and temporary. I lay awake nights pondering all this and wondered how her dad died and why she wouldn’t tell me. My life went on this way until I realized that Rose was all I thought about and all in this world I wanted.
I carried on cooking for her every Monday night and sat beside her while she ate, but she seemed to drift farther away from me and talked less and less. At first I laid it to being winter, when some people get grumpy, but it got harder to hang on to any hope of getting to know her because she gave me no encouragement but a muttered thanks.
One night when the place was packed with truckers waiting out a rainstorm, I could tell she was really low. She had plenty of business, and though she looked completely beat, she didn’t even sit down, just took one look at the eggs and toast and walked out in a way that made me think that was it. She wasn’t coming back to a place where she had to eat supper with the dishwasher. It was a mighty long week for me, waiting for the next Monday to see if she’d show.
But she did drag in. Whatever was on her mind had her bent like an old lady. I stuck to business, no eggs, just kept my hands in the sink.
Around 2:00 in the morning she came up behind me so quiet, I jumped. “I need some help moving,” she said.
My stomach went cold, and I whipped around to face her. “You’re leaving?”
“No, just a new place.”
I bucked up with the idea that I would see her place, and I didn’t say anything and may have looked a little goofy as I was picturing myself carrying a huge couch on my back with no help from anyone.
“There’s not that much stuff,” she said, as though I’d been stalling.
“No, no. Course not. Sure.”
“When are you off?”
“Same as you.”
“Okay, Tuesday noon. Okay?”
“Sure.”
I was not surprised to see that she was very organized. Her little place was small and dark, but clean as a whistle, and she had everything except for the furniture in boxes labeled kitchen, towels, photos. In less than an hour we were done putting things in the truck she’d borrowed from
her friend Tina and were rattling down the highway, me at the wheel.
After we got everything inside the new place, a sweet little duplex with lots of light, I tried to open a box labeled kitchen, but she said no and sat down on top of it, not gonna let me see her stuff. She motioned to a kitchen chair for me to sit down, but she had her arms crossed like we were about to have a fight. I made for the door. “Wait,” she said, “what do I owe you?”
Nothing could have hurt more. “Not a dad-gummed thing!”
I am not a greenhorn when it comes to women, but I have shit for luck. I was married twice by the time I was twenty, first time when I was seventeen, a false alarm. Her folks handled the divorce for us. The next time lasted four years. My wife and I danced, drank, fought and followed the rodeo until one day she took off with a trick rider who had a Crown Marquis convertible. I was pissed and tried to find them, so I could, at least, knock his pretty teeth in, but honestly, I couldn’t blame her; she was only twenty-one, and I already had a limp. The real truth is, she would have stayed if I’d treated her better. At the divorce I gave her everything except my horse and saddle. I took full custody of the guilt. I had girlfriends after that, but I knew I wouldn’t make a good husband.
I was still standing, not knowing whether I was going or staying. Rose just sat there on the box, very straight, arms crossed, jaw clenched, looking past me out the window. The setting sun shone on her shiny black hair. I sat down in the kitchen chair.
I couldn’t say I’ve learned much about the differences in the sexes. I get lots of time to think while I have my hands in the warm dishwater, but my schooling was brief and poor, and I don’t read anything but the newspapers the truckers leave behind. I stood up again to go, feeling stupid for having had thoughts about our putting the dishes and pans away, maybe even putting the bed together and tucking in some sheets. Stupid. Stupid and insulted. I grabbed my jean jacket.
Cadillac, Oklahoma Page 15
