by Larry Brown
She eased up on the wooden steps and touched the doorknob. It turned under her hand and the door swung open. On silent feet she walked into the living room and pulled the door almost closed behind her. A tiny red dot was lit on the face of the stereo and somebody was moaning the last lines of a song, and then a deejay chatting conversationally in the hushed room. The voice of somebody talking who was not mad at her and it comforted her. She didn’t want to wake them up. She didn’t want them to think she was trying to steal anything. She just wanted her shoes and her purse, and, if she could find it, the dollar.
Another song started up. The door tried to swing open in the wind, bumped back against the frame, and she caught it and pulled it shut. Nobody got out of bed and came screaming at her. She moved across the floor to the kitchen and past the stove. Grease had congealed on it, plates thick with sodden paper towels and half-eaten fries spattered with ketchup. Bent and empty beer cans sat on the counter. She was hungry again and she picked up a french fry and ate it.
There was a light in the hall, a miniature bulb inserted into a wall socket with a plastic shield covering the top half of it. At the door to the bathroom her hand found the light switch and flipped it up. The bathroom was lit by bright bulbs in a row above a mirror. There her shoes were beside the tub. She turned to see if anybody was coming. There was nothing to hear but the music. She couldn’t remember where she’d put her purse, but on the lavatory top a wet dollar bill lay. She picked it up. She thought it looked like hers, so she folded it and put it back inside her bra.
She got her shoes back on sitting on the commode lid again, and her hair was a little drier now. She broke one of the laces again and had to rethread it down to the bottom eyelets, but she thought maybe it would stay on her foot.
When she eased out into the hall and turned the light switch off, she heard the baby make a faint cry and then nothing. Back at the stove she could see her purse sitting on the couch. She walked to it and picked it up. That was when she heard a dull groaning, half words, the soft sounds of bodies moving. All she had to do was walk out the door. But the sounds pulled at her, and she knew she’d never heard anything like that before. She wondered what it was that would bring such sounds to the mouths of people. It was near, just beyond the dark corner of the other hall. She moved one step at a time, and her feet made no noise on the floor. Just down past the corner a bit of yellow light spilled onto the linoleum in the hall and it came from the same place as the sounds. And she grew nearer and nearer and put her face just past the edge of the door and there were three of them, the blond boy on his back and the woman bent over him, her wet mouth stretched open and sliding up and down on him and the driver kneeling behind her, the skin of her big ass trembling and shaking as he slammed into her with his face turned toward the ceiling and his eyes pinched shut.
She drew back as quietly as she had come, one step at a time, back across the living room, easing the door open and shut softly, down the steps into the yard and past the lawn chairs and up the path toward the drive, walking faster once she was away from them, and then running almost blindly in the blackness, her purse swinging from her hand, down the rutted drive toward more night while the voices of the crickets and tree frogs told her to hurry, hurry, that it was late, that morning was near.
IN POCKETS OF their own shade the trees stood clumped along the pasture fence and a hot wind stirred the grass at her feet. The concrete was throwing the heat of the sun back into her face after only two hours. She could hear the trucks whining long before they got to her and she was keeping off the highway so as not to be hit from behind. There was a deep median of grass between the lanes and she had been watching the orange tractors for a good while now, the trucks with their flat beds parked and the groups of men in hard hats from a distance.
She had rested for a time just on the edge of the city limits at dawn after asking directions at a gas station just as a man was opening the door. He had pointed, told her to go west to Batesville, then south, and he had gone on in and started turning on the lights. She stood there for a minute, looking around for a hose or a water tap, but there was only the concrete island with the gas pumps and the cubicle of glass with racks of cigarettes and the man sitting there fiddling with the register. So she went on down the street and out to the intersection and started following the highway west, the way he had pointed.
She was very thirsty now and the grass was littered with Styrofoam cups, aluminum cans, shredded pieces of truck tires. She stepped around a crushed armadillo with its shattered shell and hairy legs, the toes splayed on the stones along the roadway. Off to the right she could see some white horses gathered at a trough and drinking from it. One raised its head and shook its mane, then lowered its head again. But she didn’t guess she was ready to be drinking from a horse’s trough just yet and she kept on walking.
She didn’t know if she could walk all day in this heat or not. She had done it before, though never when she was feeling like this. The headache had been steadily climbing up the back of her skull and now it had settled into a place somewhere just behind her eyeballs and it caused her to grind her back teeth together in an effort to keep her jaws clamped tight so that maybe her footsteps wouldn’t make her head fly apart.
She could feel the blood jolting in her legs and sometimes she weaved as she walked. What she had seen beyond the door the night before was still running like a fragment of a movie in her head and she could still hear the sounds they had been making. She hadn’t known such things could be done, two men with a woman like that, and she wondered now which one was the father of the little child she had held.
The cars kept passing her and even if she’d had her thumb out there was no place for them to pull over except for the places where side roads entered the main highway. She could see houses set back from the blacktop but no people moved in the yards. She was closer to the orange trucks now and she could see the mowers canted up on the hillsides and a thin stream of shorn grass and weeds spraying out behind the tractor, a cascade of green bits and pieces.
She waited until the road was clear, then stepped out into the highway and walked across the center line and down into the grass of the median and went toward the orange tractors again. She could hear them now, the diesel chug and the steady swish of the Bush Hog and she could see the black smoke jetting from the pipe as the driver turned to make another pass. The trucks were parked in a flat turnaround between the two sections of road and a few men were loading portable signs printed with large block letters MOWERS AHEAD and the cars kept whizzing by on the road above her, her head about level with the pavement now, walking through the clipped grass and the torn bits of aluminum from the shredded cans and here and there jagged bits of glass she had to watch for, the soles of her tennis shoes so thin now and not able to turn away something as sharp as that.
The men climbed into the truck and it pulled away, one man riding on the side step, a red light flashing on a dome mounted in the roof. The tractor climbed out of the wide ditch and went along the shoulder against the traffic until it had gone past the turnaround and then it swerved down and once more the grass began to fly out behind it.
An air horn blared on the road above her and she looked up at the moving face of an older man watching her from his high cab. The truck changed gears without slowing and rolled on. A car passed it. There was not one bit of shade now and the sun beat down on her shoulders and the top of her head. She swung the strap of the purse up on her shoulder and kept walking. The orange truck had gone ahead and she couldn’t see it anymore. There was just the man on the tractor still mowing. He went at a slow pace, back and forth in narrow sweeps, ever deeper into the grass valley until he too went from sight and there was just the exhaust pipe with the smoke drifting from it to show her his location. He crossed to the other side and she saw him start making his passes, climbing steadily toward the road.
She stopped and sat down on the side of the hill and hung her head between her arms and her knees. Her
breath was coming hard and a tick was crawling on her ankle. She picked it off, tried to rub it off her finger, finally flicked it away with her nail. The thing about catching a ride was that you never could tell who was going to pick you up. If they stopped and you didn’t like their looks, then you had to tell them to go on, that you didn’t want to ride after all. She saw that she was going to have to be careful of boys now and that she’d been lucky the night before. And then sometimes they’d cuss you if you didn’t get in with them after they’d stopped, call you a bitch or a whore or say Fuck you, then, or throw gravel on your legs when they spun off from the side of the road.
She didn’t want to keep sitting there and she didn’t want to go on. The tractor had climbed out of the ditch once more and it was going over the hill where the truck had gone and in another minute she couldn’t see any of them. Fay knew they had water. Men who worked in the sun all day had to have water.
She wished she’d taken a few extra cigarettes from the pack on the dash of the truck last night. She didn’t have any now. She’d already looked through her purse, hoping, but she’d known there weren’t any more in there before she’d even looked. And they cost more than a dollar. She thought they cost about a dollar and a half.
Another horn blew at her up on the road, kept blowing, faded away down the highway and then it stopped blowing and she could hear the rush of its tires on the pavement. Far away down the country in front of her the road curved into the distance of a pale green mass that lay at the edge of the sky and that sky was the lightest blue she had ever seen, almost without color, and in that emptiness one small black form drifted with wide wings spread, turning in the currents, riding loops down and then lifting, stalling for a moment before it rushed downward again. She looked up at the buzzard and muttered, “You gonna have to wait a while if you waitin on me.”
She almost didn’t hear the car for the noise of the other vehicles on the road, but she turned her head from where she was sitting on the edge of the grass and saw a set of wheels slowing to a stop behind her, pebbles embedded in the treads, and then she looked up at the whole car and saw who was driving it and her heart sank fast. She stood up quickly, brushing at the back of her skirt.
The trooper stopped the car in the center of the turnaround and picked up the radio mike and said something into it and then he was getting out, reaching back in for his hat, and she saw the black tips of his boots coming out from behind the door. Then he was standing there with his neatly pressed gray trousers, a blue stripe down each leg, a gun on his hip and a crisp shirt, his nameplate and his shiny brass and all the authority she feared. He put the hat on and then his face was in shade. She could see the short dark hair just under the rim of the hat and his clean-shaven cheeks where tiny red vessels had come to the surface of his skin and her own distorted face twinned in the sunglasses with the cars on the other highway passing into and out the other side of the little gold rims. He touched the brim of his hat with his fingers, nodded.
“Can I help you, ma’am?” he said.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I was just out walkin. I ain’t done nothin wrong have I?”
“I don’t guess.” He glanced up at the sky for a moment. “Mighty hot for a stroll. You headed somewhere in particular?”
She didn’t know anything about cops except that they rousted you from the park benches and stared at you when they saw you walking down the road. And sometimes they pulled over and asked you where you were going, like this one. She didn’t want to say the wrong thing. She knew he had all the power.
“I’m headed to Biloxi,” she said. “I was just settin here. I got hot. I wanted to rest a little.”
The radio chattered loudly inside the cruiser but he didn’t pay any attention to it. He was as good-looking a man as she’d ever seen and she wondered how old he was. She put a little tease in her voice, trying it out. She was loose now. She could talk to men now. She didn’t think she wanted any boys.
“You ain’t gonna arrest me, are you?”
“I don’t reckon so,” he said. “You feeling okay?”
She wasn’t, but she didn’t want to tell him that. He might take her somewhere, do something with her.
“It sure is hot,” she said. “I wanted to catch up with them fellers to get some water if they had some but I can’t catch up with em.”
“Who?”
She pointed. The road crew was nothing but a knot of men with a truck beside them, vague and hazy through the heat.
“They been cuttin the grass but I can’t catch up with em. I thought I could but I’ve done about give out. That’s why I was settin down.”
She looked up at him but could read nothing on his face. He seemed to be waiting for something else.
“I didn’t know whether to try and catch a ride with somebody or not,” she said. “I don’t know who to trust and who not to.”
He watched her and didn’t say anything. Then he turned and leaned into the car and picked up the radio mike again. He took off his hat and tossed it onto the front seat beside some papers and a clipboard. She could see a shotgun in a steel rack behind the seat, a steel mesh divider in back of the gun. He said something into the mike and waited for an answer, and somebody replied, a woman’s voice, and he spoke into it again and then hung it back on the dash. There were handcuffs on his wide belt and she could see the imprint of his wallet in his back pocket. When he came out he was taking the cap off a plastic bottle of water, which he handed to her.
“Here,” he said. “You’ll get dehydrated out in this sun.”
She turned a drink down her throat and felt it come alive again, and swallowed and swallowed again, and took it down and gasped for air, and then turned it up again and then it was all gone. The bottle was light, almost weightless in her hand. She gave it back to him.
“Thank you,” she said, and wiped her mouth. “That was mighty good.”
He tapped the bottle against his leg and looked down the road, just a glance, and then he turned back to her.
“My car’s got an air conditioner in it. Why don’t you get in and sit down for a while?”
She was almost afraid to get in, but she figured she’d better do what he said.
“Okay. Yes sir.”
He walked around with her, opened the door on the opposite side, and she looked in and stopped. He leaned in and pushed it all over to his side and got back out of her way. She sat down and was enveloped in a waft of cold air. He shut the door on her and she sat with her purse in her lap. The glass was tinted and now the outside world was not bright and hot like it had been. He got in on the other side and buckled his seat belt and told her to put hers on and she looked down at meaningless straps until he saw that she didn’t know how to do what he was talking about and bent toward her, his arm brushing against her, pulled the strap across her without touching her again and fastened it into the holder on the seat.
“There,” he said. He reached up for the shifter and then stopped. He slumped back against the seat, tapped his fingers on the steering wheel. He took a pack of cigarettes from his shirt pocket and when he saw her looking at them, shook one loose from the pack and offered it. She took it and said thank you again.
He pushed in on the lighter in the dash and looked across the road at the newly clipped grass.
“Are you in trouble with somebody?”
“I don’t reckon so,” she said. “I just didn’t want to stay where I was at.”
The lighter popped out and he reached for it, held the burning red coil up to her and she bent her face holding the cigarette with her fingers until it was lit. He lit his own and rolled the window down six inches. The car looked and smelled brand new and except for the papers on the dash it was very clean. She couldn’t even hear it running.
“This sure is a nice car,” she said.
He turned his head a bit when she said that. He seemed amused for a moment.
“You ever rode in one of these before?”
She took
that to mean had she ever been arrested. She cracked the window and tipped her ashes out, but they blew back into the car. She fanned at them.
“Don’t worry about that,” he said.
“I don’t want to mess up your car.”
“It’s not mine. I just use it for a while and then they give me another one. You never have rode in one?”
“No sir. I never have been in no trouble.”
“Why are you out walking down the road?”
She looked down at her lap. The cars were going slower on the highway now. The only reason she was scared to tell him the truth was because she was afraid he might take her back and as close as she could figure she’d only made it about fifteen miles maybe. In twenty minutes she could be right back.
“I left because of my daddy,” she said.
He relaxed in the seat and she studied him. There was a wedding band on his left hand and there were some fresh scratches on his right forearm, tiny black lines scabbed in little arcs.
“And you’re headed to Biloxi?”
“Yes sir. They said it was a long way. But I heard it was nice down there. They supposed to have a beach and all.”
“Who said?”
“Some boys that picked me up last night.”
“Some boys? Where’d they pick you up at?”
“It was on this road close to where I used to live.”
“Did you know these boys?”
“No sir. I didn’t know em. They just stopped and picked me up.”
She could tell he was getting agitated but she didn’t know why. Maybe he could tell that she’d been drinking the night before. Or maybe she was keeping him from doing his work.
“How many boys?”
“It was three of em. They had this boat in the back of their pickup and they had a big mess of fish they’d caught.”
“And you didn’t know them.”