Softspoken

by Lucius Shepard

  “Stay back!” Sanie retreats toward the porch steps, shuffling her feet in baby steps, holding the stick out to menace them. She hooks an arm around a post and heels open the screen door. Will lurches forward and she shouts at him, not threats, not curses, but meaningless noises such as you might yell when driving a dog away from a garbage can. He’s confused by her rage, which is a good thing, because she has to lower herself to one knee and half-crawl, backing down the steps. She hobbles to the gate, checking over her shoulder to see if they’re in pursuit. Thrown into silhouette by the light spilling from the doorway, it appears they’re pawing at Jackson, clumsy as bears playing with a fresh kill.

  Out on the road, charged with the glee she feels at having coldcocked him, she picks up the pace and seems to glide over the bumpy track, nearly pain-free. Son-of-a-bitch, she says to herself. Pissant freak. And what is the deal with Allie? An honorary Bullard? Another victim-in-waiting? Will and Louise, now them she can understand, blood being thicker than water and all. Judging by her brief conversation with Louise, it’s possible to conclude that Rayfield abused her. Which would account for her erratic loyalty. When the cops come, they’ll see she’s not competent and lock her away. That’s sad, if true. But Sanie can’t afford to care.

  She approaches the curve and the pain begins to take hold again. She’s cold, she’s losing coordination. She grows increasingly giddy and disoriented, meandering from one side of the road to the other. The potholes are killing her. She’s into the curve, right in the blind spot where Frank Dean almost ran her down, when she admits to herself that she won’t make it to Snade’s. Not without a rest. She locates the ditch she fell into when Frank Dean nearly ran her over and, laboriously, with rickety grace, she lays herself down and arranges leaves and twigs over her body as best she can. It’s cold and the ground is hard, but the hum of traffic from the state road and the smell of the damp earth and moldering leaves weave a blanket that seems to muffle her discomfort. She drifts in and out. Before long, a car rolls slowly past from the direction of the house. She watches the taillights fade. The SUV. A minute or two later, it returns, going at high speed. She can’t make out who’s driving. Things are hopping at Bullard Hall.

  She brushes leaves from her face so she can see more clearly, not that there’s a lot to see. Big ugly shapes writhe in the clouds, like snakes in pregnant black bellies. She’s still tripping. Solitude closes in on her and a tear leaks out. She wishes someone would help her, that she had someone she could count on.

  Nope, she tells herself. Not going there.

  Tonight self-pity is against the rules.

  Which rules are those?

  Survival.

  Oh, that.

  A friend, though. That would be good. A friend you could count on.

  There ain’t no such animal.

  Fuck cynical! Just because you’re cynical doesn’t make you right.

  You’ve had your chances. With Brittany, Howard, Brenda Havers back in Carboro, and maybe Frank Dean. Plenty of others, too. You always held back, you always chose the wrong people.

  Maybe next time.

  Is that fatalism talking? No fatalism allowed, either. You’re going to be fine. It’s a short haul to Snade’s.

  She remembers going to the store…What was it? The fourth time she went in? Before people were used to her, anyway. Before she was used to them. A teenage boy followed her along the aisles, gawking, and one of the old farts in front, an extremely old fart wearing bib overalls and a baseball cap announcing his allegiance to the Myrtle Beach Pelicans, scolded him, saying, “Ain’t you never seen a pretty gal, son? Whyn’t you learn to be more discrete? That way you might get you one.” When she came to the counter to pay for her Diet Pepsi, he grinned at her and then made a grab for his heart, feigning an attack…A twinge of pain interrupts the memory. She should get going, she thinks. The SUV might make another pass, but she figures it’s more likely, more Bullardesque, that they’ll become distracted and neglect the situation. They’ll spend an hour debating what to do and then both get to screwing Allie while Louise looks on.

  She starts walking again.

  Fifteen minutes and fifty yards into the second leg of her journey, she’s breathing shallowly to avoid aggravating her side. Her thoughts scatter like feathers in a wind. She has to pause on occasion to reassure herself that she hasn’t gotten turned around and is not heading back toward the Bullard house. Under her breath, she sings Tom Petty, Tina, Lucinda Williams, the two Elvises. She sticks to midtempo stuff, so she doesn’t risk catching Dance Fever.

  Heh, heh.

  Thank you, thank you very much.

  What Becomes Of The Broken-Hearted is they wind up walking with a stick at an eighth of a mile an hour down a dirt road that might just be the Highway To Hell…

  Not funny.

  If you can’t please yourself, who can you please?

  She doesn’t have the answer.

  Another fifty yards and she’ll see how she feels.

  It takes her more than fifteen minutes to travel that fifty yards, but she thinks she’s found a rhythm. She gets along by plotting a course. Pothole ahead. Jog to the right. Is that a rut? Yes. Better angle left. Fixating on the mechanical process of walking helps her to ignore her physical problems. Occasionally a bright pain causes her to catch her breath, but she manages it. She managed the stairs, after all. Horizontal’s a lot easier than up or down. But it’s a thin confidence. She understands that. Behind it, exhaustion is pressing in on her.

  She spots what she supposes to be a pothole and, forgetting where she is in the road, angles her path to the left. It’s a bad mistake. She’s walking a stretch of road that is elevated a couple of feet above the fields it traverses, and, when she plants her weak leg, her foot hits on the downslope and throws her off-balance. She tries to catch herself and goes reeling across the field, each ungainly step doing damage to her rib and hip, and falls heavily, twisting at the last second to take the impact on her right side. Pain consumes her. She bridges up from the mucky ground, every muscle tensed, but she can’t reduce the pain to a controllable level. It’s like she’s burning, her nerves all firing at once, yielding a white light into which she dissolves.

  On waking, she’s cold, but there’s nothing she can do about it. Her side throbs and she doesn’t believe she can move. Moving’s not on her current Ten Things I Do Best list, at any rate. She discovers she can use her arms without causing herself much pain and levers herself up so that her head is resting against a stump, affording her a view of, basically, very little. Darkness flocked by pinpricks of light. She’s lying in the open, visible from the road, but there’s nothing she can do about that, either. Her body seems to have achieved a precarious inner equilibrium and she’s afraid to disturb it.

  Her legs are really cold.

  Deal with it.

  When the tough get going, the weird turn pro.

  Got milk.

  Militant Bitch!

  No! Fuck you!

  I’m in the mood for (g)love.

  God looks like Bea Arthur.

  …pretty, sexy, chaste, and reckless, taller than the T in Texas…

  If you buy me a beer, I’ll let you…finish my homework.

  This recitation of T-shirts worn during her all-too-brief wild-child phase ends when she reaches: If you love something, let it go…then hunt it down and kill it.

  It’s as if every channel in her brain leads to Jackson.

  That’s going to change, she swears. She’ll scrub him off her and never look back. She tries to think warm thoughts, pictures herself in the Caribbean somewhere, sunbathing in her red bikini, but that doesn’t do it for her.

  What would Jesus do?

  Perform a magic act. Change dead grass into Maker’s Mark. Give himself up to the Roman soldiers.

  Scratch Jesus.

  How about Buddha?

  Buddha wouldn’t have this problem.

  The SUV rolls by again and Sanie tries to shrink, to merge wit
h the ground. Amazingly, they don’t see her. She must be far enough off the road that she’s not easy to see, or else they’re wearing special Bullard Vision goggles. Maybe it’s just too dark. Once the SUV has gone, she collects sticks, leaves, grass, and covers herself as she did in the ditch. She can’t reach her lower legs, so they’re left bare. She’s freezing, but she would rather be here than tied to Jackson’s bed. She recalls how it felt to hit him, the ferocity of the swing, the conviction and accuracy of the blows. Instinct. If she had acted on instinct years ago…but she didn’t. There’s no point in imagining what might have been. She’s spent too much time playing that game as it is. She’s weary, overtaxed, and she doesn’t attempt to resist when a black wave of sleep, or something like sleep, carries her under.

  She wakes and discovers that the sky has washed clear of clouds, gone a deep electric blue. Stars are shining and the moon, a fat silver crescent like a toy canoe, is low in the southern sky. Her covering of grass and twigs begins to itch and she brushes most of it off. The itching subsides, but the bad news is, the exertion wears her out. There’s not going to be any tap-dancing down to Snade’s after a nap. The good news, she’s not as cold as she was. At least she thinks it’s good news.

  A piece of a weed, a couple inches of stem and one shriveled brown floret, is stuck to the side of her hand. Three flowers the size of seed pearls are crammed together, clutched by a vegetable talon, looking like a single bloom until she brings it close. A complex, worthless beauty, its cunning design all for naught. She wipes it off on her coat.

  It’s going to be okay, she tells herself.

  She hangs with the moon, floating above the line of hickory and elms at one end of the field. There aren’t enough stars to make the usual constellations, so she arranges those available into a sky-spanning one, a Picasso construction. She can’t think of a name for it. The Death Of Don Quixote. Don Quixote Tells A Joke In The Afterlife Cafe. Don Quixote’s Joke Wedded To A Corporate Business Graph.

  It’s more Paul Klee than a Picasso, she decides.

  What will Mama say?

  Look sad, stroke Sanie’s hair, and say, “I should have known.”

  Brittany…Well, Sanie’s taking her off speed dial. Howard will simply gape.

  She drowses and wakes with a start, heart pounding, certain that a car is coming. But no car appears. It might have been an animal noise that disturbed her. A fox or a possum sniffing her toes. The sky’s losing its deep blue, shading to gray in the east. She watches the gray turn pink, conch-shell pink, then rosy pink. They’ll be coming soon. The Bullards. Straight from their appearance at The Psycho Lounge.

  Again, not funny.

  Yet that’s who she married into—the bunch from The Hills Have Eyes, hillbilly mutants with a touch of aristocratic polish.

  Overhead, a cloud is forming, a thready structure spinning itself out of nothing, like a strand of silk woven by an invisible spider. Some crucial portion of her being, part of her mind, her soul, strains toward the cloud, balloons like a sail filling with wind, bearing her outward on a wave of intense yearning, neither sad nor exultant, an emotion free of imperfection, the desire to be everywhere, to touch everything. She rides it up and up, and then snaps back into the body, steadying now. Solid again. The idea that she might have been letting go, that letting go was an option, frightens her. She tries to find something to hook onto, to find an anchor. The moon, bone pale, is almost down, riding in the crown of a leafless elm, as if the silver canoe got caught in it and all that’s left of it is this skeletal memento mori. Her eyes lock onto it for the longest time.

  Wasn’t there a nursery rhyme about a silver boat caught in a tree? If not, there should be. Little Sanie Bullard went away to sea, and her pretty silver boat got caught up in a tree, a family tree, on the far side of Tralee, beyond the Zuider Zee, in a land of mystery…

  South Carolina, Land of Mystery.

  Down every dirt road, a monster.

  The cadence of that thought reminds her of a Bryan Ferry song, “In Every Dream Home a Heartache,” and she tries to remember the lyrics.

  Like when you rub away condensation from a patch of windshield and see an unexpected shadow standing by the hood of your car, she suddenly sees what’s ahead. She can’t see clearly—its outlines and dimensions are indistinct—but she understands, she knows, she can feel the knowledge growing inside her, cold and keen, an ice crystal evolving, its frozen structures spreading all through her blood, and it hurts the way loneliness hurts, it hollows her chest and drops a stone into the hollow and that stone weighs more than her life ever did. Her life was merely the splash the stone made in falling. She seizes up, like a mouse confronting a snake, blinking its black eyes, not sure which way to run. She can’t even say it to herself, she can’t speak its name. Saying would make it so, and that’s her sole remaining refuge now, in stillness and a childlike magic.

  A car engine downshifting, coming from the direction of the house, breaks the spell, and Sanie averts her eyes, not wanting to see Jackson, twice-battered now, resembling a lumped, enraged mutant. The first time she saw him, he was beautiful. She hears brakes applied, a door opening.

  “Sanie!”

  Her vision is still blurred, all soft focus like a Hollywood representation of a dream, but dimmer and flickering at the edges. Frank Dean kneels beside her. When he goes to cradle her head, pain saws though her insides and she cries out.

  “Don’t!” she says. “Don’t touch me!”

  He tugs at her dress. It’s all bunched up around her hips. Everything’s showing and she’s dreadfully embarrassed, she wishes he wasn’t seeing her like this, and she wants to explain. He drapes his jacket over her legs, asking who hurt her, then digs in his trouser pocket. “Shit!” he says. He leans close and says, “I left my cell at the shop. I’m going to get help.”

  “Stay,” she says, fumbling for his hand.

  “You need a doctor. I’m…”

  “Please. Jackson’s coming.”

  “Did he do this?”

  Warmth and wetness between her thighs. She’s peed herself.

  “I’m sorry,” she says, and then doesn’t know what she meant, she has so much to be sorry about.

  The light is graying overhead. She’s comforted by Frank Dean’s smell of tobacco and strong soap. It seems that several minutes pass before he speaks.

  “Sanie,” he says. “I’ve got to get you some help.”

  Another car coming from the same direction. The SUV pulls up behind Frank Dean’s van. It sits, idling. No one climbs out. The driver shifts into reverse and backs toward the house, weaving, nearly running off the road is his haste to be gone.

  Sanie tries to speak and Frank Dean says, “What?”

  She wants to say, What a dumbass Jackson is! Fie should be hightailing it, not returning to the house. She wants to tell Frank Dean about the Bullards, what astonishing fuck-ups they are, but it would take too long.

  “I know where I can use the phone,” says Frank Dean with quiet resolve. “Don’t you worry about Jackson.”

  She closes her eyes. There are no stars in her darkness, only silvery crackles, thoughts lighting the midnight of a brain. Important thoughts, like lines in a notebook she doesn’t want to forget. Like the ant and the chain-link fence. Lines that stood for something and now she can’t remember what.

  “Sanie?”

  She wants to answer, but she’s slipping away again, being pulled toward something, an irresistible pull…She resists it, anyway, clinging to Frank Dean’s smell, to the memory of an older smell, Vicks Vap-o-Rub, to the solid earth (she can hardly tell it’s spinning), to the image of palm nut in an African hand, a photograph of a tiger, somebody reverently touching her face…

  “Hey, Sanie!”

  …and then she can resist no longer, she releases into the pull, lets the current take her wherever it’s bound, into its great curving circuit…

  “Sanie? Sanie?”

  She wonders why she isn’t more afraid.r />
  EPILOG

  …Sanie…Sanie…

  Mostly Sanie’s not there, and when she is there, she doesn’t know where there is. A house with many chambers, old and ill-kept. It’s familiar, but that’s all she knows, except that she doesn’t like it much. She has the idea she’s being cared for, but she can’t recall by whom, and that she’s recovering from an injury, though she’s uncertain as to its nature. She thinks they’re giving her drugs that impair the memory, or it could be her memory is impaired and they’re medicating her to restore it. She has the same scraped, pared-down feeling that she had on…some drug or another, she can’t recall. Everything seems vague and imponderable. Even common household objects pose mysteries that she must plumb.

  She’s lonely, yet she’s never alone. She has the impression that a number of people are close by. She apprehends them, somehow, but she can’t see them, and she suspects they’re watching her, analyzing her behavior. She doesn’t enjoy being watched, even when it’s for her own good, but she supposes it’s necessary. The only person she does see is the man who calls to her incessantly and follows her about. He seems familiar, too, but she can’t pin down where they met. He’s annoying. He calls and calls, and when he finds her in the kitchen (as he generally does), he loses interest—it’s as if all he wants is to make certain of her presence—and wanders off. She doesn’t like him much, either. She keeps meaning to speak to him, to tell him that she doesn’t appreciate him hawking her, but when they’re together, she’s intimidated, she refuses to look at him, she doesn’t want to make things worse.

  …Sanie…

  She feels disappointed when she’s there. And not just a little bit. Horribly, miserably disappointed. What she’s disappointed about is not so clear. It’s like a word on the tip of her tongue, one she’s certain she’ll remember soon, but that she always forgets to remember. And maybe that’s a blessing, she thinks. She has the sense that it’s something she wanted to forget. So she feels disappointed…and pulled. Drawn toward the kitchen. The man’s nagging voice nudges her that way, but it’s more as if she’s being pulled by a force that she can’t fathom, a current that carries her along. Once she’s better, she’s confident she’ll understand why she’s disappointed and why she has to visit the kitchen. Actually, her time in the kitchen is the one thing she enjoys about being there. After the man has gone back to wherever he goes, that is. She sits at the table and stares at the Cumberland Farm Supplies calendar on the refrigerator. It’s open to the November page. In the picture a woman stands on the porch, holding a mixing bowl and scanning a barren field, as if she is expecting someone or searching for signs of life. The field is huge, a thousand furrows, a dirt front yard that stretches away to a dark line in the distance. Trees, one would imagine, but it could be a vast army or a wall. The woman is stirring the bowl as she looks out across the field and, though it’s a cheerless image, Sanie thinks it’s intended as a reminder of Thanksgiving, that the woman is a farm wife putting the finishing touches on her meal, concerned about her family, hoping the turkey won’t dry out by the time they return.