Softspoken

by Lucius Shepard

  She buys a tall can of Bud, neatly fitted into a paper sack, and sits drinking it on the porch, watching the land melt down into the dark. Snade’s porch lights are on and moths whirl about the bulbs. The gas pumps gleam like robotic sentries. Male laughter from within, a caucus of bubbas by the cash register. She wishes she hadn’t worn cut-offs…though if she wore jeans or slacks, she doubts Gar would be as solicitous. The screen door bangs open. A man steps onto the porch and takes a seat in the chair on the opposite side of the door. She hears the click of a cigarette lighter and, as if that sound has brightened her senses, the sawing of crickets intensifies in among the scrub.

  “How y’all doing?” he asks.

  “’Bout the way it looks.”

  His voice is nice—quiet and low, a little gravel in it. But if he says something on the order of, Well, if you feel like you look, you must be feeling beautiful, then she won’t even bother to check him out.

  “I guess you must be bored, then,” he says. “Bored’s damn near an epidemic in Culliver County.”

  She puts him at a couple of years older than Jackson, in his mid-thirties. He’s a couple of inches taller, too. Heavier through the shoulders and chest. Less a handsome face than a strong one. Thick brown hair tied off in a ponytail. There’s grease on his hands, his face, and he’s wearing a mechanic’s jumpsuit, also grease-stained.

  “So you’re bored, are you?” she asks.

  “I expect I’ll get there ’fore long, but not just yet.”

  He takes a hit of his cigarette, tips back his head and exhales. His smoke collects about the light bulbs.

  Sanie asks, “You a mechanic?”

  “I own a collision shop over in Edenburg.”

  A silence settles between them.

  “So what’s there to do around here?” she asks.

  “You’re doing it.” He points to her beer. “Me, soon as I wash up, I’ll be attempting to play some music while I drink.”

  “Music? You mean like with a band?”

  He chuckles. “Just barely. Bunch of us get together at a roadhouse up toward Edenburg every weekend.”

  “God, is it the weekend? I’ve lost track.”

  “Friday night. Hard to keep the days straight in these parts unless you got an engagement. It’s not like anything much changes. Maybe a few more drunks on the road.”

  “What’s your band called?”

  “Local Prophet, Junior.” He gives her an apologetic look. “The lead singer’s got delusions of grandeur. It’s a jam band, really. I only do it to keep my hand in.”

  “You were a musician before you owned the collision shop?”

  “I did session work in LA for about ten years…’til about three years ago.”

  “You moved here from LA? What’s wrong with you?”

  “LA wasn’t working out.”

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to…”

  “It’s all right. Perfectly understandable. You gotta be crazy to migrate to a place like this. ’Course I grew up here, so that makes me doubly crazy.” He grins at her. “What’s your excuse?”

  “My husband grew up here, too. We live in Chapel Hill, but we came back so he could have some peace and quiet while he’s studying for the bar.”

  Disappointment flickers in his face when she says, “My husband…” but he covers it. “Peace and quiet’s our chief resource. He should do real well.” He hits his cigarette again. “He gets tired of studying, bring him down tonight. I’ll buy y’all a beer.”

  “I’ll tell him, but he’s pretty locked in.”

  “And that’s why you’re bored, huh?”

  “It’s some of it.” Sanie sips her beer. “But it’s not all boring. We got ourselves a ghost.”

  “You serious?”

  She tells him about the voice, the cat, what her brother-in-law Will said.

  “This Will Bullard you talking about?” he asks.

  She nods. “I suppose now you’re gonna think I’m one of the crazy Bullards.”

  “Will’s got some distances in him, but he’s an okay guy.”

  “How you know Will?”

  “He’s been in the shop. Man’s always getting into fender-benders.” He flips his cigarette off to the side of the store. “I believe he mentioned something about a ghost one time. He said he saw it and…” He shakes his head. “I can’t recall all what he said.”

  “That’s funny. He told me he’d never seen it.”

  He waggles a forefinger. “I remember now. He said he was stoned and caught a glimpse of it. He was taking acid, I think.”

  “Peyote’s more likely. He say what it looked like?”

  “Tell you the truth, I was so busy ragging him about not being the most reliable witness, what with him being trashed, I didn’t pay much attention.”

  Sanie sips her beer. “Maybe he was trying not to scare me—that’s why he said he didn’t see it.”

  “I suppose that’s possible. Will’s a gentle soul.” He pushes up from the chair. “Well, I need to get washed up ’fore I go make a fool of myself.” He offers his hand and says, “I’m Frank Dean.”

  “Sanie,” she says.

  “Pleased to meetcha.”

  He turns to go down the steps and she says, “Better tell me the name of that roadhouse. Y’know, ’case we can make it.”

  “The Boogie Shack. You drive toward Edenburg, you can’t miss it. Got a big neon sign.” He stands with one foot on the steps, one on the porch. “I wish you could see us play, Sanie. Be nice to have a new face in the audience.”

  It’s not until he’s gone that she realizes how closely his voice resembled the ghost voice she’s been hearing…especially when he said, “I wish you could see us play, Sanie,” which was so reminiscent in substance of what the ghost has been saying. She toys with the idea that he might have been a visitation, but ghosts don’t drive black panel vans and leave cigarette butts lying in the gravel next to Snade’s Corners. The thing that concerns her is what she was doing asking him so many questions. You’re a musician? And you’re in a band? Flirting with all the sophistication of a high school sophomore. God! Did she flutter her eyelashes? Yet she’s pleased that she felt an attraction, even a mild one, though she’s not sure she didn’t talk herself into it, given the temperature of her thoughts before Frank Dean came out onto the porch. In the end she decides that what matters is she felt a tickle, a chemical whisper that proves she’s not a ghost, not yet reduced to a sliver of instinct and emotion. It’s something she can warm her hands over until she makes a more significant decision. She nurses her beer, delighting in the heat, the crickets going crazy out in the darkness beyond the gas pumps, headlights passing with beastly roars, the sheen of sweat on her thighs, luxuriating in these sensory treasures as if newly opened to them. She toys with the thought of driving to the Boogie Shack. The Boogie Shack, for God’s sake! Down here it’s like the Doobie Brothers never went away. Like Steppenwolf is still riding high on the charts. She won’t go. It’s not in her to take that risk, but she enjoys tempting herself, imagining how it would be to walk into the place and stake out a barstool, the air conditioning cool as nirvana after the swampy night air, the two-legged flies starting to circle, beer ads glowing red and haloed like Satan breathed out smoke rings made of Hell’s finest Havana and they hardened into words and logos…She cuts this vision short, knowing that if she indulges in it much longer, she’ll begin to question what she’s risking by not taking such a risk.

  FIVE

  Sanie’s in a mood all the next day. Will annoys her. Louise, whom she catches unawares in the kitchen, annoys her by blurting, “I’m sorry,” and rushing out the back door. When she calls her best friend Brittany on her cell, Brittany annoys her by being too busy to talk. Jackson, in particular, annoys her. After she tells him about the ghostly voice, the cat, what Will and Frank Dean had to say, he takes off his reading glasses and gives her that reproving yet temperate Atticus Finch through-his-eyebrows look she once thought was sexy and sa
ys, “Frank Dean? You mean Frank Dean Irving? You were talking to him?”

  “I don’t know about Frank Dean Irving,” she says. “Frank Dean’s all he told me.”

  “That’s what everybody calls him. Like Tommy Joe. Billy Bob. He was a few years ahead of me in school. The guy was an egomaniac. He thought he was a rock star because he played in some ridiculous band.”

  “Well, I guess he was a rock star.”

  She tells him about Frank Dean’s session work in LA.

  “What’s he doing now?” Jackson asks.

  “He owns a collision shop in Edenburg.”

  “Some rock star.” Jackson puts his glasses back on. “You watch yourself. The guy’s a hound.”

  Hound, she thinks. Back in Chapel Hill, Jackson would have used a more decorous term. Ladies man or womanizer. He must be getting in touch with his roots.

  “So you’re suggesting that I need to be more restrained in my behavior? My natural sluttishness puts me at peril?”

  He turns to his book. “I’m saying you don’t want to give a guy like Frank Dean the wrong impression. And all it takes to give the wrong impression is you talking to him.”

  She’s standing in the doorway of the study, Rayfield’s study, the walls lined with shelves holding law books, paperbacks, and what appears to be a lifelong collection of National Geographics. The desk is brown wood, the chairs are brown leather, the rug is mostly brown with a delicate yellow Mexican pattern, even the air is brown. Thus it follows, she thinks, that Rayfield must have been brown, a brown soul suited in a lawyer’s pinstriped serge. It’s a color Jackson seems to be growing into. Though she’s guilty at having flirted, she hates him for making her feel the guilt. He knows as well as she that they’re in trouble, yet he refuses to acknowledge it; he wants everything to be according to plan. Wife, profession, house, children. Bumpity bumpity bump. She doesn’t believe she should have to feel guilty over desiring to escape what he would desire to escape if he allowed himself to take stock emotionally, to understand what they’re becoming.

  “What about the rest of it?” she asks.

  “The rest of what?”

  “What I told you.”

  He sets down his book. “Put yourself in my shoes, okay? I’m studying for the bar. I’m under…”

  “I’m aware you’re studying!”

  “…under a hell of a lot of pressure. I’m striving to get myself into a position where I can upgrade our lives. And my bored-shitless wife comes in and tells me she’s having Steven King moments…an experience seconded by my crazy brother and an asshole I haven’t seen since high school. How would you react?”

  “I’d assume my wife wasn’t delusional. That there might be a problem.”

  “Well, that’s you. Me, I assume there’s no problem here that warrants abandoning my responsibilities. But that’s because I actually have responsibilities.”

  His voice is strained. It’s as angry as he ever gets, and she wants to let her own anger out, to make him understand exactly where his responsibilities lie and how badly he’s failing them, how he can do nothing other than fail them, but she knows where this will lead.

  “Fine,” she says. “Why don’t I just leave you, then?”

  A puzzled expression. “What?”

  “I said why don’t I just leave you to ’em. Your awesome responsibilities. That be all right?”

  She stalks off into the hall, momentarily satisfied by this small venomous triumph, but stops outside the door and has to fight back tears. What in God’s name, she asks herself, is holding her here? A vague sense of purpose moves her away from the door, but whatever the purpose is remains unclear. She wanders downstairs and, as usually happens when she wanders, winds up at the kitchen table, staring at the calendar picture of the farmer and his wife. There is, she realizes, a strong proletarian influence in the picture. The red tractor, the farmer’s brawny arms, the honest sweat on his brow, the wife’s earnestness in servicing his thirst: with a more rigorous line, it could pass for Soviet poster art.

  She assigns herself a project: Explore What Has Gone Wrong. It’s a project she’s attempted before, always with the same indefinite result, but this time, maybe, she’ll see something new. One by one, she examines the assumptions she made when she agreed to marry Jackson. Did they represent basic misunderstandings or has he changed? Has she? If they’ve changed, there may be hope that they can change again. Was his intellect vivid, as she once thought, or dronelike, as she thinks now? Were his witticisms originally so standardized, so programmed? Did his good looks have the lifelessness of a male catalogue model the day she spotted him in the student cafeteria? It’s an impossible task, and part of its impossibility lies in the fact that she doesn’t care what the answers to these questions are. And whose fault is that? her mom would ask. Sanie’s never been able to answer that question to her own satisfaction, but now she believes she could. Nobody’s, she’d say. Everybody’s. Fault is in the air.

  …Sanie…

  “Go away,” she says.

  “Sanie?”

  “Leave me alone!”

  Footsteps behind her and she swivels her head about. Will, dressed as for church in a baggy gray suit and foulard tie, standing bewildered by the door.

  “Something wrong?” he asks.

  “What do you want?”

  “I’m going into Edenburg for the day. You need anything?”

  Valium. A shotgun. A one-way ticket to Madagascar.

  “A coffeemaker,” she says. “And some decent coffee.”

  It’s a test. Assign a task and see if it gets done. If he performs in typical Bullard style, she’ll end up buying it herself.

  Will looks buffaloed. “You want me to buy a coffeemaker?”

  “I can’t stand another cup of instant.”

  “How much are they?”

  “Jesus Christ, Will! I’ll pay you back. Don’t worry about it.”

  “I was just wondering. I never bought one and I don’t want to get screwed on the price.”

  “Is there a drugstore in Edenburg?”

  “Yeah, sure. They got everything there.”

  “Go to the drugstore. Buy a coffeemaker. Shouldn’t cost more than twenty or thirty bucks. Whatever it costs, buy it. Then go to the supermarket and pick up some French Roast coffee. Make sure it’s the kind that works with the coffeemaker. Can you handle that?”

  “You don’t have to be pissy.”

  “Sorry.” To soften the atmosphere, she asks why he’s all dressed up.

  “Going to the movies. I got a date.”

  Woe betide. Another generation of Bullards in the offing.

  “Who’s the girl?”

  “She works in the bakery at the Piggly Wiggly.”

  The scheme of Will’s life seems to sketch itself out before her, asymmetrical and haphazard, full of odd knots and interconnections, like a web woven by a schizophrenic spider.

  “Y’all have fun now,” she says.

  “She’s pretty. Not as pretty as you, but she’s…” He appears to be struggling with a matter of degree.

  “She does it for you,” Sanie suggests.

  “Yeah,” he says, brightening. “Yeah. A lot.”

  “Well, y’all have a nice time.”

  Will hovers. “Her name’s Allie. Short for Alexandra.”

  Sanie says, “Uh-huh.”

  “You want to meet her, I can ride you in some evening. She gets off at five. Actually, I could ride you in…”

  “Will?”

  “…Tuesday.” He blinks rapidly. “What?”

  “This isn’t a good time right now.”

  “Oh.” He backs up as if warned away from a poisonous snake and bumps against the door. “Okay. I’m…I’ll go.”

  “I’ll talk to you later.”

  “Sanie?”

  “Yes.”

  Will’s hands fumble with the air as if he’s trying to describe female curves, then he says, “I wish there’s a way to stop things you know are hap
pening from happening.”

  Sanie understands from this that Will has noticed Jackson and her are having problems. “Things’ll sort themselves out,” she says.

  “I know. That’s what Louise tells me, but I always get the urge to try and help.”

  Wanting to change the subject, she says, “How come Louise won’t talk to me?”

  “She don’t like talking to people. She’s been like that forever.”

  “She talks to you. I’ve even seen her say a few words to Jackson.”

  Will’s jowly face droops, acquiring a morose expression better suited to the face of cartoon dog. “I don’t reckon she thinks of us as people.”

  SIX

  Almost all the magazines littering Will’s room, to which Sanie retreats in midafternoon, contain articles about ghosts. They speak of cold spots, horrid noises, blood weeping from ceilings, flowers withered by the touch of immaterial fingers, messages that fade from notepaper, harridans with gory knives and skeleton grins, soldiers on insubstantial steeds, but nowhere a mention of a barely audible voice that tends to repeat itself again and again, a few simple phrases and their variants. Perhaps such a minimal presence falls beneath the notice of magazines—more spectacular phantoms are their stockin-trade. Or perhaps the voice is atypical of lost souls. She’s curious why Will has so many articles dealing with ghosts. Has he researched the subject? Does he, as Frank Dean implied, know more than he’s telling about what’s going on in the house? Unable to provide answers to these questions, Sanie’s interest flags. She dozes in a velvet chair and wakes to hear Jackson calling to her. Knowing he wants food, sex, beer, laundry, or something fetched from town, she tiptoes to the door and shuts it. It’s coming on dusk, the fields dissolving in carbon-colored gloom. She observes the process distantly, standing at the window and half-listening to Jackson. Once he stops shouting, she sneaks down the stairs and out the front door and walks briskly through the buzzing, stifling dark toward Snade’s Corners. The store’s becoming a sanctuary, a place where she feels detached from the marriage, from the Bullards and their dysfunction.