The day is lit up like an interrogation room, the sun a fierce bulb in an otherwise empty sky. Across the street and down the block, Suzanne Ledbetter is watering her St. Augustine. When she sees Corrine, she switches off her hand sprayer and waves, but Corrine acts as if she doesn’t see. She also pretends not to see any of the neighbor kids who have spilled out of houses and across lawns like pecans from an overturned basket, and she barely registers the crew of men who have climbed out of the moving truck and are standing around the yard across the street.
When she opens the door to Potter’s truck and spots a cigarette lying on the bench seat, broken but repairable, Corrine gasps with gratitude. Quick, quick, she shifts the truck into reverse and pulls it squarely onto the driveway, then fetches up the cigarette and makes for the front door, pausing for just long enough to turn on the faucet. A water hose is stretched across the lawn like a dead snake, the rusty nozzle lying facedown in the dirt beneath the Chinese elm she and Potter planted twenty-six years earlier, the spring after they bought the house. Ugly and awkward, the elm reminds Corrine of dirty hair, but it has survived droughts, dust storms, and tornadoes. When it grew three feet in a single summer, Potter, who had a nickname for everything and everyone, started calling it Stretch. When Alice fell out of it and broke her right wrist, he started calling her Lefty. Every other damn thing in the backyard is dead, and Corrine couldn’t care less, but she can’t bear to let this tree die.
And even if she wanted to, Corrine knows, if she lets the tree go, or she makes a habit of parking Potter’s truck on the grass, or people see her in the front yard wearing the same clothes she wore to the Country Club last night, they might start feeling sorry for her. Pity. It makes her want to kick the shit out of someone—namely Potter, if he weren’t already dead. She thumps his funeral wreath and slams the front door behind her. In the kitchen, the phone rings and rings, but she is not picking up. No way, no how.
* * *
At three o’clock in the morning, they stopped to gas up at the Kerrville truck stop and wandered into the restaurant for coffee and an ice cream cone. After they ordered, he told her that radiation therapy was just a bunch of poison they pumped into your veins. It burned you from the inside out, made you even sicker, and what kind of months would those be?
I won’t do it, Corrine. I’m not having my wife wipe my ass, or run my steak through a blender.
Corrine sat across from her husband with her mouth hanging open. You always told Alice that getting hurt was no excuse to quit playing a game—her voice rose and fell like a kite in strong wind—and now you’re going to die on me? A couple sitting in the adjacent booth glanced their way then stared down at their table. Otherwise, the restaurant was empty. Why on earth had Potter chosen to sit here? Corrine wondered. Why must she share her grief with total strangers?
This is different, Potter said. He studied his ice cream for a few seconds. When he looked out the window, Corrine looked too. Between the diesel stations and eighteen-wheelers and a neon sign advertising hot showers, it was bright as high noon out there. A trucker pulled away from the diesel pump, honking twice as he merged onto the frontage road. A cowboy leaned against his tailgate and gulped down a hamburger, his belt buckle sparkling in the light. Two cars filled with teenage girls rolled slowly through the parking lot.
Potter and Corrine leaned back in their booth and looked at the ceiling. The plaster tiles directly above their heads were covered with piss-colored water spots and a smattering of holes about the size of No. 8 buckshot, as if some jackass had thought it might be funny to discharge his weapon while people were trying to eat their supper. When there was nothing left to look at, they looked at each other. His eyes filled with tears. Corrie, this is terminal.
What in the hell are you talking about? Corrine knocked her fist on the table, and coffee sloshed out of their mugs. Get up and fight! like you always said to Alice, and me too, on occasion.
Well, it didn’t do me no good, telling y’all that. Speaking low and fast, Potter leaned toward his wife. Alice still ran off to Alaska with that boy. You still walked away from teaching, the minute things got hard. All that work, Corrine—when we met, you were the only person I had ever known who went to college—and you gave it up to stay home and read your poetry books.
Her face was crimson with fear and rage. I think I told you a dozen times that I was sick to death of it all.
Baby, I don’t think you understand how serious this is. He reached across the table, but Corrine snatched her hand back and folded her arms across her breasts. Don’t you dare call me baby, Potter Shepard, or I will kill you myself.
I’m already dying, honey.
Screw you, Potter. You are not. Never let me hear you say that again. And they sat in stupefied silence while the coffee went bone-cold and the ice cream turned soupy.
When they pulled into the garage the next morning, they were greeted by the same musty smell of cardboard boxes and Potter’s old army tent, the same click and whir when the motor on the deep freeze switched on, the same old tools gathering dust on Potter’s tool bench. Nothing was different in any way, except they hadn’t slept in nearly twenty-four hours, and Corrine looked like she had aged ten years, and Potter was dying.
While she made a skillet of corn bread and warmed up some pinto beans, he set a jar of chow-chow and a plate of sliced tomatoes on the kitchen table. He pointed at the heat shimmers on the other side of the sliding-glass door. The heat in August, she said, it’s a special kind of hell. It’s a wonder any of us survive it. He laughed gently, and the two of them fell silent.
After breakfast, they set the dishes in the sink and went into the bedroom, where he turned the swamp cooler on high and she pulled the draperies closed. They crawled into bed, Corrine on her side, Potter on his, and in that strange midday dusk they lay next to each other, fingers twined and minds numb with terror. They waited for whatever was coming next.
* * *
Thinking it might help with her hangover, she tries to make herself a fried egg sandwich, but she sees the yolk wobbling in her cast iron skillet, a watery yellow eyeball, and her stomach roils. Instead, she holds her hair back, lights her cigarette on the stove burner, and leans against the icebox while she waits for the nicotine to help bring the previous night into focus.
It had been a slow night at the Country Club and by midnight, everyone had gone home except Corrine and the bartender, Karla, along with a few diehards, men with nowhere to be and no one waiting for them once they got there. She’d be damned if she was going to make small talk with any of these fools, so she watched Karla polish glassware while the men talked football and oil prices—1976 looked like it was going to be a damned good year for both—and discussed Carter and Ford—hated them both, one was a dipshit and the other was a pussy. Nixon had been their man, and now, with Watergate in the rearview mirror, the men were beginning to understand that they’d not only lost their leader, they’d lost their war against chaos and degeneracy. Black Panthers and Mexicans, Communists and cult leaders, people who fucked right in the middle of a street in downtown Los Angeles, for chrissakes.
Talking shit, Corrine mused, same as any other group of men anywhere else on the planet. She figured she could parachute into Antarctica in the dead of night, and she’d find three or four men sitting around a fire, filling each other’s heads with bullshit, fighting over who got to hold the fire poker. After a few minutes, it was all just low, male murmuring.
Karla! Corrine thinks now as she stubs her cigarette out in the kitchen sink. It was Karla who called earlier, or maybe Ginny’s kid, who calls almost every morning to see what Corrine is doing, and whether she might not like some company.
* * *
On the last day of 1975, they stood on the back patio after supper and watched the stray carry a white-throated sparrow across the backyard. It was a female, rarely seen this far south, and they had been listening to its sweet, singular song—Old Sam Peabody, Peabody—since early November, just
a few days after they brought Potter home from the hospital. For the last time, he said when they were still sitting in the hospital parking lot. Corrine hadn’t even got her key in the ignition when he leaned over and tried to pat her knee. I gave it a shot, for you, he said, but this is the last time. No more treatments, no more doctors.
He didn’t feel up to driving to church for the New Year’s party, and she had never wanted to go in the first place, and by four o’clock, they’d eaten supper and put on their sweatpants. While Corrine enjoyed her cigarette, Potter leaned heavily on his new cane. The cat sat atop their cinder-block fence like he owned the place, his fur turning gold in the last bit of daylight. Potter said that he couldn’t help admiring him. Most strays didn’t last a week before they were run over on Eighth Street, or some little boy shot them with his .22. The black stripes across the cat’s face made him look a bit like an ocelot, he observed. He’d probably be good company, Potter said, if you got him fixed.
We ought to poison the little bastard before he kills every living creature on the block, Corrine said. She handed her cigarette to Potter, who held it stiffly between his thumb and index finger. He had quit twenty years earlier, and they’d been fighting about her habit since. But all his griping hadn’t mattered a bit, she thought sadly as she walked over to sweep up the bird carcass. She was going to outlive him after all.
* * *
While Karla polished glassware and cut limes, Corrine smoked one cigarette after the other. She ran her thumb across the names and phone numbers carved into the mahogany bar. On one side of the room, large plate-glass windows overlooked the golf course. The wildcatters who bankrolled the project in the late sixties had originally planned on eighteen holes, but construction ceased abruptly amid a sudden glut in the oil markets. While a bulldozer and irrigation pipes sat rusting on what would have been the tenth, club members made do with nine holes. And now, seven years later, with the price of oil ticking up, they might finally get those other nine.
When Corrine folded her beverage napkin and slid her glass to the edge of the bar, Karla brought another Scotch and Coke. Was it her fifth, sixth? Enough that she hooked her toes around the bar rail when she reached for her drink, enough that Karla set a bowl of cocktail peanuts on the bar in front of her.
One man said, just as plain as day, What we have here are two competing stories, a textbook case of he said, she said.
A second sipped his beer and set it down hard against the bar. I saw that little Mexican gal’s picture in the newspaper, he said, and she didn’t look fourteen.
Corrine paused on the number she had been tracing with her finger. They were talking about Gloria Ramírez, the girl she and Potter had seen at the Sonic. We watched her climb into that truck, Potter said, and we sat there like somebody had sewn our pants to the seat.
You okay, Mrs. Shepard? Karla was watching her from the other end of the bar, dishrag in one hand, empty mug in the other.
Yes ma’am. Corrine tried to sit up a little straighter, but her toes lost their grip and her elbow slipped off the edge of the bar.
The men looked at her briefly and then decided to ignore her. It was the best thing about being an old lady with thinning hair and boobs saggy enough to prop up on the bar. Finally, she could sit down on a barstool and drink herself blind without some jackass hassling her.
That’s how they are, a third man said, they mature faster than other girls. The men laughed. Yes, sir! A lot faster, said another.
Corrine felt the heat climbing up her neck and spreading across her face. Potter must have talked about Gloria a dozen times, usually late at night when the pain was so bad he got out of bed and went into the bathroom and she could hear him moaning. All the things he wished he’d done. Could’ve, would’ve, should’ve, she had told him. That’s all we needed, you picking a fight with a man half your age.
But Potter insisted that he had known right away something wasn’t right. He’d worked alongside young men like that for twenty-five years, and he knew. But they sat there and watched the girl climb into that truck, and then he and Corrine drove home. Two days later, when they saw the man’s mug shot in the American, Potter said that he was a coward and a sinner. A day after that, when the newspaper published Gloria Ramírez’s school picture, he sat in his recliner for a long time looking at her straight black hair and tilted chin, the gaze she directed at the camera, the little smile that might have been a smirk. Corrine said there ought to be a law against putting that girl’s name and picture in the local paper—a minor, for God’s sake. Potter said she looked like a girl who feared nothing and nobody, and that was probably all gone now.
While Karla eyed the tip jar, Corrine downed her drink in several long, throat-searing gulps. She signaled for another. Karla Sibley was barely seventeen, and she had a new baby at home with her mama. She was still trying to decide whether to cut Corrine off when the old woman pushed her barstool away from the bar, wobbled mightily and tugged at her shirt until it hung straight against her large chest and hips.
Never mind, Karla, she said. I’ve had enough. She turned to the men. That girl is fourteen years old, you sons of bitches. You gentlemen have a thing for children?
She drove herself home, keeping her eyes on the centerline and Potter’s truck ten miles under the speed limit, and it was after three when she finally lay down on the sofa. She pulled an afghan over her legs—she still couldn’t sleep in their bed, not without Potter—and though she would struggle to piece it together, at least until the first rush of nicotine hit her bloodstream the next morning, she had fallen asleep replaying what she said to the regulars and the last words she heard before she slammed the heavy door behind her, Karla whining at the men, It’s not my fault, I didn’t bring it up. You can’t tell that old lady anything.
Fourteen years old. As if there might have been some moral ambiguity, Corrine thinks bitterly, if Gloria Ramírez had been sixteen, or white. She carries her ashtray to the kitchen table and sits down at the table, where she fiddles with a loose puzzle piece and glares at the envelopes filled with money. Potter had worked on the puzzle for hours, his left hand sometimes shaking so hard he had to prop his elbow on the table and form a brace with his right. All those hours, all that effort, and still he had completed only the border and a couple of brown and gold cats.
When the stray wanders across the patio and sits outside the sliding-glass door, staring at her, Corrine picks up Potter’s cane and shakes it at him. She might give the little son of a bitch a pretty good knock on the head, if he doesn’t quit coming into her backyard and killing everything.
* * *
In late February, the cat caught a large male grackle and tore it to pieces, and Corrine nearly slipped on the shiny blue-black head when she took out the trash. The next morning they found a warbler—its head a tidy tuft of gray and black, the bright yellow breast a shock of color against the concrete. Potter paused and watched its feathers tremble in the wind. By then, he had begun to stammer sometimes. Cor—, Cor—, Cor—, he would say, and Corrine wanted to clap her hands over her ears and shout, No, no, no, this is a mistake. But it had been a good morning, no seizures, no falls, and when Potter spoke it was the same voice she had been hearing for thirty years.
Well, he said, if you got him fixed and set some food out, he might stop killing things. He might be pretty good company.
Hell, no, Corrine said. I need something else to take care of like Jesus needed another nail.
Wish you wouldn’t blaspheme like that, Potter said. But he laughed anyway and they looked out across the yard where the cat was lying under the pecan tree. His weird green eyes were fixed on a small lizard that was running along the cinder-block fence.
It was midmorning and sunlight had turned the fence the color of ash. A small wind ruffled the cat’s gold fur. On the other side of the dirt lot behind their house, an ambulance wailed down Eighth Street. Corrine and Potter listened as the sound moved downtown toward the hospital. What in the world are you
going to do without me? Potter asked, and when Corrine told him, with no small amount of sorrow, that it had never occurred to her, not once in their marriage, that she would outlive him, Potter nodded gently. It don’t seem fair, he said.
Corrine started to correct her husband’s grammar—it doesn’t seem fair—same as she always did, but then she thought about his occasional mistakes, his tuneless whistling, his habit of giving a nickname to every goddamn creature that crossed his path, and she sighed deeply. She would miss the sound of his voice. Not fair, indeed! She nodded at him and turned away before he could see her starting to cry.
Potter touched her arm and hobbled over to the shovel that leaned against the house. You might surprise yourself, he said, after I’m gone.
I doubt that very seriously, she said.
In recent weeks, he had started to bury some of the animals they found in the backyard, when he felt up to it. This time, it took him nearly ten minutes to break through the hard-packed dirt and caliche. Corrine asked if he wanted a hand and he said no, no, he could do it. He dug a foot-deep hole next to the back fence, set the warbler in it, and covered it up. Buried it, Corrine still mutters when she thinks about that bird, like the damned thing mattered. Toward the end, her husband had become more sentimental than usual. Right up until the minute he wasn’t, the bastard.
A week later, Potter woke up early and rolled over to face Corrine. He felt good, he said. Like the tumor never happened, almost. He left his cane in the kitchen and went outside to sweep the back patio. He fetched his shears from the garage and trimmed the hedges next to the front porch. After he gathered up the skinny limbs and carried them to the dumpster, he admired his work and Corrine yelled at him for walking around without his cane. If she had been paying attention, she wouldn’t have allowed it for a minute. But Potter grabbed her around the waist and nuzzled her neck, saying, baby you smell so good, and she let him pull her into the bedroom for an hour or two.
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