Taft

by Ann Patchett

  "You slumming?" said a voice behind me. I turned around and there stood a woman I knew perfectly well. She came into Muddy's all the time. I'd shot pool with her. I'd stood her a drink when she was low. Goddamned if I could think of her name. I guess my memory didn't extend to the names of women.

  "Man's got to get out of the house every now and then." I tilted my drink towards her some and she gave the smallest nod of her head. "Again," I said to college boy, who believed that all blacks in Memphis knew one another and now was just that much surer. She backed onto a barstool, leaving one high-heeled foot on the floor. It gave her an uncomfortable look, like she might be taking off any second. College boy put her drink down and had the good sense not to mention that I should pay for it right away.

  "I didn't know you ever left Muddy's," she said. "I heard tell you had a cot set up in the back." She was all smiles, this one, shiny teeth, shiny lipstick. I wondered what she was so cheerful about in the middle of the day.

  "Ugly rumors," I said. "And I thought you had some loyalty. I didn't know this was where my good customers went."

  "Following you," she said. And right there I heard everything I needed to know. Her intentions were so clear that there hardly seemed to be any point in going through with the drinks, sitting there on our stools making bad conversation. It was as good as over. We'd had our drinks and left, done it and gotten up. I had driven her back to where her car was parked. It had to be around there somewhere. As much as I was pleased, I felt tired, the way you will when you've seen it through to the end the minute it starts.

  I tried to think of something I could ask her that would stretch the time out a little. I couldn't ask her what she was doing in a bar in the middle of the day since I was there too. I couldn't ask her what she did for work, or God help me, what her name was, because there was no doubt she had told me before.

  "That's a pretty ring," I said, pointing to a little band of diamonds and some blue stones around her finger. She had nice hands, nice nails. I liked that.

  "Wedding ring," she said, and took a sip off the drink I'd bought her.

  I nodded slowly and she put that same pretty hand on my thigh, just midway up, and left it there.

  I paid off college boy and helped this woman on with her jacket. We walked out onto Beale Street not long after three o'clock on one of the uglier days in memory.

  Of course there had been women. But truly, things had been screwed up on account of my spending so much time going after somebody I wound up not loving who wound up not loving me. I knew the same thing had happened to Marion. We were careful not to get too mixed up in anything else in case we got it all worked out. Or maybe we were tired. The kind of love I'd had in my life was very much the kind I was getting ready for that afternoon. She was quiet and didn't ask where we were going. She took a pale green box of cigarettes out of her purse and cracked the car window before she lit one, which was thoughtful even though I wouldn't have minded if she hadn't. I went Elvis Presley Boulevard instead of the interstate just to slow things down a little. I didn't live but about two miles past Graceland, but I took pride in the fact that I'd never been there.

  "This is it," I said when we got inside. My apartment stayed clean because I was never there, so I didn't have to worry about bringing a guest home. Every time I walked in it reminded me of some motel room in some city years ago where I'd come with a band.

  "You got a kid?" she said, picking up the picture of Franklin on top of the television. "I didn't know that. He looks like you."

  I took the picture out of her hand and looked at it for a minute, trying to see if what she said was true. Then I put it back on the little strip of TV that wasn't dusty and I kissed her, as sweetly and kindly as I was able. I didn't feel like talking, especially about Franklin. I wanted to make her feel like I was too overwhelmed with her to say anything.

  ***

  She was maybe skinnier than I would have liked. After it was done she just stayed on top of me, taking shallow little breaths, and I could see a dark shadow under each of her ribs. I brushed her back with the flat of my hand and she pressed her face into the side of my neck and I wondered why it was that such a thing could make a person feel lonely. You would think two people on top of each other couldn't feel this way for love or money.

  "I like you," she said.

  "Yeah?"

  She nodded. I felt it against my neck. "I've always liked you."

  She was good about getting dressed. She understood I had to get back to work and, clearly, she had someplace to be herself. I drove her back into town. She told me where her car was and I managed to get a spot right next to it. When I started to get out to open her door she put her hand on my sleeve and I thought, Here it comes.

  "Don't worry about it," she said in a kind way. "I can get there just fine."

  "You'll be coming back down to the bar," I said.

  She nodded. "Sure, sure. Nothing changes."

  I gave her a kiss. Nice woman, had her head together, kept things straight. She opened the door and had one foot out, but then she turned around and looked at me.

  "What?" I said.

  "Nothing," she said, but she didn't go anywhere.

  Maybe for a half a second I was flustered, but then I caught myself. I leaned over and kissed her and she kissed me back. "Okay," she said, and picked up her purse from the floor. She was hoping there was going to be something more, something better, and at that moment she'd figured out that she wasn't going to get it. "Okay."

  I stayed and watched her get inside her car and drive away. It was all spoiled now. She was sad when she left and that ruins everything. I felt the weight of every name Marion had ever called me. I was that man.

  I was going to head straight back to the bar, but I got out of the car instead and walked down the steep hill to the river. There was no point to it, but there hadn't been any point in anything I'd done so far. The Mississippi was better-looking on a day like this than it was in the summer. For one thing, the cold kept it from really smelling the way it will, and for another the general lack of light made the water look a nearly blue shade of gray instead of the regular brown. All along this stretch the paddleboats were docked, party boats made up to look like fancy cakes that take the tourists down to nowhere, turn around and bring them back. It was better in the winter. People didn't like to come down to the water when it was cold. They kept their power boats locked up in rented garages. It just looked like a river now, with plenty of room for working barges to get through. Marion didn't like me taking Franklin anywhere near the Mississippi. She thought it was nothing more than a flowing child killer. But Franklin liked it. I'd bring him here on the days we came down to the bar, so he was already swearing not to tell about all sorts of things anyway. Boys like rivers and bars. Boys always like the Mississippi. When he was little I used to tell him it was his river, the river Frank, and he believed me. Kids have no idea what it means to own something at that age. I would say that it was good of him, letting all those boats on his river, and he'd nod his head. Even later, when he'd caught onto things, he would still call it the river Frank.

  I stayed long enough to get good and cold and half get the woman out of my mind. Then I headed back and drove my car into the alley behind the bar. Almost five o'clock and not a thing had been done all day.

  Inside, the girl in the puffy jacket was sitting on a barstool drinking a Coke. She didn't have her hat on, but I could see the top of the pom-pom sticking out of her pocket. I had forgotten about her altogether, even though I'd spent half the night thinking of her. And even though it hadn't been what you'd call a redeeming day, it warmed me to see her sitting there. The way her face looked when she saw it was me, all bright and relieved, it warmed me.

  "You're the new waitress," I said, like I wasn't sure.

  "Fay," she said.

  "Fay. Right. And you've been sitting here all this time waiting on me."

  "You didn't say when I should come in. You just said before happy hour was
all. I wasn't sure."

  Her face wasn't exactly as I had fixed it in my mind. It was paler in real life and not quite as fine. I wanted to ask her again how old she was, now that I'd seen her in her stocking cap, but I didn't figure she'd tell me the truth.

  "Did Cyndi show you around?"

  The girl shook her head.

  "Cyndi," I called down to the end of the bar. "Didn't you show her anything for Christ's sake?"

  "Show who?" she said, not getting up from her barstool. She held my gaze dead on and then went back to reading a magazine.

  "She's not from around here," I said to the girl in the jacket. "She just has an ugly mouth on her. She won't give you any trouble."

  "I'm not from around here either," she said. "I behave just fine."

  I nodded. She had a point if you thought about it that way. "You said yesterday you were from out of town." I didn't want to seem like I had too much time on my hands, that nobody around here worked, but like I said, it was our quiet time of the year. I sat down on the stool next to hers, which I meant to be the sign that I wanted to hear the rest of it, but she didn't catch that. "Where're you from?"

  "East Tennessee," she said. "Coalfield, outside of Oak Ridge. Nobody would know Coalfield."

  I could see it then. She had a kind of hillbilly look. The straight hair that was trying to be brown but wasn't really, the pale, pale skin that you could nearly see through. I shook my head. "Nope."

  "That's why I say east. Nobody in Memphis has ever been to east Tennessee before."

  I told her I had. Knoxville, Oak Ridge, Jefferson City. That was one ambitious band I had been in for a while. We thought touring was going to be our answer. It was a long time ago.

  "Well," she said quietly, "you're the first one, then."

  As a state, Tennessee was nearly as screwed up as Texas, in that a man's allegiance wasn't to the whole state, just that little part he came from. People got stuck in the mountains. But in Memphis there's a river running through the middle of things. It takes people out, brings other ones in. That's why mountain people keep to themselves and delta people make love in alleyways. That's why there were boys like Eddie doing flips out in the street. In Memphis people pay money to see Eddie, but if he tried it in Oak Ridge I imagine they'd bundle him up and take him inside. When Memphis people went east they were likely to be run out of town. They got loud drunk. They slept with women they didn't intend to marry. But you put somebody from the east down in Memphis, it wasn't likely that anyone would notice.

  "So how'd you manage to come out here?" I said. I thought it was a fair question, seeing as how she so clearly would prefer to be home.

  "Accident," she said, and then folded her lips into her mouth and bit them in a dreamy way.

  I showed her around the place. I showed her whatever came to mind. I told her things she wouldn't have to know. I took her back behind the bar even though she'd probably never pour drinks. I showed her where the fuse box was, where we kept the bags of syrup for the Coke machine. I showed her the big cans of nuts and the five-gallon jars of maraschino cherries, which she seemed especially to like. I took the lid off and gave her a few and she chewed on them slowly while I talked. We went through the swinging doors into the kitchen.

  "Bring the plates back here," I said. "Put the glasses in the rack. You run it through the washer yourself if there's nobody back here. Mr. Tipton washes dishes on weekends and during the week in the summer."

  She nodded, listening, taking it in. It wasn't so much to remember. It was just that she seemed intent on not having to ask me anything. The more I watched her, the more I started to think this girl had never had a job before. But what were you going to do? Call the references, see where she's been? Leave that for the FBI. Besides, I didn't have any of those forms when she came in. I figured anybody who paid that much attention to what I was saying about where to stack dishes was going to be a good worker.

  It was her face, though, more than the lack of jobs, that troubled me. It was a tricky face as far as age was concerned. One minute I thought she was twenty, but when I caught her from another angle she had high school written all over her. There's nothing illegal about it, as long as she's not drinking. I knew for sure she was at least seventeen.

  I was showing her where the aprons were when the back door opened up and Rose came in. Rose was the cook, and for as long as she'd worked at Muddy's the only time I'd seen her go in or out the front door was the day I hired her. She went out back to the alley to smoke her cigarettes. Rose thought that nobody knew she smoked, though it didn't make any sense since nobody would have cared.

  "Rose, this is Fay. Fay's going to be waiting tables."

  Fay stuck out her hand. It was so little, short nails and no rings. Rose gave a bit of a start, but she shook and said hello.

  "Rose is always trying to turn us into a real restaurant," I said to both of them. "She's always slipping something fancy on the menu."

  Rose shrugged. Then the three of us sort of looked at each other and I thought what a nightmare it would be to serve out your life with two such quiet women.

  "Well, I'll take her back out front," I said. "Let you work." But Rose had already wandered off towards the walk-in. I doubted she'd even heard me.

  "She's not from around here either," I said to Fay when we were out of the kitchen, thinking that it might make her feel more at home. I didn't know where Rose was from. She told me she'd worked in a boarding school in the north, that she knew how to make a lot of things for a lot of people, but I never checked that one out either.

  The crowd was picking up a little for happy hour and I needed to get behind the bar. I turned Fay over to Cyndi, who was none too pleased.

  "Let her follow you around, watch you some."

  Fay followed Cyndi at a careful distance, just close enough to hear what was being said over the music, which I had finally remembered to turn back on. Later, when Cyndi gave Fay a table of her own, it was two women together, the kiss of death for tips for sweet-faced girls.

  "A beer," Fay said to me from the bar. "A strawberry margarita."

  "What kind of beer?" I said, and off she went to ask. Most of the mistakes she only made once. She was fine.

  When things settled down I told Cyndi to pour the drinks and I went back to the office, figuring Marion would be home from work by now. I wanted to see how Franklin was feeling, make sure there hadn't been any complications. My office used to be a storage closet, but it was deep and there was a little window, which seemed lucky to me. It was back through the kitchen and up three stairs, far enough away from the noise for me to sound almost like I was calling from home.

  "Hello?" Franklin said.

  "Franklin?" I said, and sat up, surprised by his voice. "Frank, it's me. Hey, how's your eye there, son? You were asleep already when I talked to your mother last night or else I would have had her put you on. Is it doing all right?"

  "Fine, I guess," he said. "It's a little sore, but not really. Mom makes me take the aspirin whether I want to or not."

  "That's good," I said. "Listen to her. She knows what she's talking about. Did you go to school?"

  "Oh, sure. It's not so bad. I got seventeen stitches."

  I thought about the needle and the eye. I thought about it seventeen times. "Did it hurt?"

  "The shot hurt," he said, his voice getting excited, "but then you can't feel anything on the whole side of your head. You can see the needle coming down and you know it's going in and out but you can't feel it."

  Jesus. "Was the doctor nice?"

  "He's somebody mom works with. He's okay. He says the scar won't be too bad since he took so many stitches."

  "You're not running around with rough boys, are you?"

  "No, sir."

  "You've got to look out for yourself, you hear me?"

  He told me stories about two boys he knew, Kevin and Jamal. He told me they made good grades in school, and that Jamal had a dog and that they took the dog out for walks in the afterno
on. He was trying to soothe me. I knew that. I was surprised how. clearly he would know what I wanted to hear. He was trying to make me worry less by explaining that Miami was the city of good boys.

  "You want to talk to Mom?"

  I didn't. I'd talked to Marion plenty. "Not tonight."

  "Oh," he said. I could hear a little disappointment in his voice. He always thought his mother and I were getting back together, which made sense, seeing how many times we had. I told him good night. I told him I loved him. When I hung up I noticed how loudly the light buzzed and I wondered if there wasn't some way to fix it.

  I didn't like to talk to Franklin from the bar because after I never felt like going back down again. Sometimes I'd find ways to stay up there for hours, shuffling papers and filling out orders. There were things to do. Cyndi would be waiting for me when I came down. She'd say I was hiding. That was what I was doing. I opened up the desk drawer and tried to find the form to get more of those employment applications. That way I wouldn't have to worry in the future about how old my waitresses were. The desk had one huge drawer where everything seemed to wind up, deposit slips and the night deposit bags, pens and rubber bands and boxes of staples and a snub-nosed .38 revolver. The gun had come with the desk. It belonged to the doctor who owned the bar. Belonged to him in that he paid for it, not that I thought for a minute it was registered to him. It was his idea of installing a security system, to leave a gun in the manager's desk. All I did was move it from side to side like the scissors and the telephone book when I was trying to find something in the drawer. Sometimes, if a night seemed especially rough, I would take it out and set it on top of the desk while I counted up the money. Then it made me think of a dog, a big black dog who sat by the door and showed its teeth.

  I spent a good half hour looking for things that weren't there and then I figured I should go back downstairs and make sure nobody'd set the place on fire.

  "That girl looks too young to be working," Rose said to me when I was walking through the kitchen.

  "Do you think?"