Rhoda

by Ellen Gilchrist

  “Well, no she doesn’t,” Rhoda said. “She’s just an old white trash country woman and if Momma knew where I was she’d have a fit.”

  “Your momma is a very stupid person,” he said. “And I’m sorry I ever let her raise you.” He turned his back to her then and stalked on out of the woods to a road that ran like a red scar up the side of the mountain. “Come on,” he said. “I’m going to take you up there and show you where coal comes from. Maybe you can learn one thing this week.”

  “I learn things all the time,” she said. “I already know more than half the people I know . . . I know . . .”

  “Please don’t talk anymore this morning,” he said. “I’m burned out talking to you.”

  He put her into a jeep and began driving up the steep unpaved road. In a minute he was feeling better, cheered up by the sight of the big Caterpillar tractors moving dirt. If there was one thing that always cheered him up it was the sight of a big shovel moving dirt. “This is Blue Gem coal,” he said. “The hardest in the area. See the layers. Topsoil, then gravel and dirt or clay, then slate, then thirteen feet of pure coal. Some people think it was made by dinosaurs. Other people think God put it there.”

  “This is it?” she said. “This is the mine?” It looked like one of his road construction projects. Same yellow tractors, same disorderly activity. The only difference seemed to be the huge piles of coal and a conveyor belt going down the mountain to a train.

  “This is it,” he said. “This is where they stored the old dinosaurs.”

  “Well, it is made out of dinosaurs,” she said. “There were a lot of leaves and trees and dinosaurs and then they died and the coal and oil is made out of them.”

  “All right,” he said. “Let’s say I’ll go along with the coal. But tell me this, who made the slate then? Who put the slate right on top of the coal everywhere it’s found in the world? Who laid the slate down on top of the dinosaurs?”

  “I don’t know who put the slate there,” she said. “We haven’t got that far yet.”

  “You haven’t got that far?” he said. “You mean the scientists haven’t got as far as the slate yet? Well, Sister, that’s the problem with you folks that evolved out of monkeys. You’re still half-baked. You aren’t finished like us old dumb ones that God made.”

  “I didn’t say the scientists hadn’t got that far,” she said. “I just said I hadn’t got that far.”

  “It’s a funny thing to me how all those dinosaurs came up here to die in the mountains and none of them died in the farmland,” he said. “It sure would have made it a lot easier on us miners if they’d died down there on the flat.”

  While she was groping around for an answer he went right on. “Tell me this, Sister,” he said. “Are any of your monkey ancestors in there with the dinosaurs, or is it just plain dinosaurs? I’d like to know who all I’m digging up . . . I’d like to give credit . . .”

  The jeep had come to a stop and Joe was coming toward them, hurrying out of the small tin-roofed office with a worried look on his face. “Mr. D, you better call up to Jellico. Beb’s been looking everywhere for you. They had a run-in with a Teamster organizer. You got to call him right away.”

  “What’s wrong?” Rhoda said. “What happened?”

  “Nothing you need to worry about, Sister,” her father said. He turned to Joe. “Go find Preacher and tell him to drive Rhoda back to your house. You go on now, honey. I’ve got work to do.” He gave her a kiss on the cheek and disappeared into the office. A small shriveled-looking man came limping out of a building and climbed into the driver’s seat. “I’m Preacher,” he said. “Mr. Joe tole me to drive you up to his place.”

  “All right,” Rhoda said. “I guess that’s okay with me.” Preacher put the jeep in gear and drove it slowly down the winding rutted road. By the time they got to the bottom Rhoda had thought of a better plan. “I’ll drive now,” she said. “I’ll drive myself to Maud’s. It’s all right with my father. He lets me drive all the time. You can walk back, can’t you?” Preacher didn’t know what to say to that. He was an old drunk that Dudley and Joe kept around to run errands. He was so used to taking orders that finally he climbed down out of the jeep and did as he was told. “Show me the way to town,” Rhoda said. “Draw me a map. I have to go by town on my way to Maud’s.” Preacher scratched his head, then bent over and drew her a little map in the dust on the hood. Rhoda studied the map, put the jeep into the first forward gear she could find and drove off down the road to the little town of Manchester, Kentucky, studying the diagram on the gearshift as she drove.

  She parked beside a boardwalk that led through the main street of town and started off looking for a store that sold cigarettes. One of the stores had dresses in the window. In the center was a red strapless sundress with a white jacket. $6.95, the price tag said. I hate the way I look, she decided. I hate these tacky pants. I’ve got sixty dollars. I don’t have to look like this if I don’t want to. I can buy anything I want.

  She went inside, asked the clerk to take the dress out of the window and in a few minutes she emerged from the store wearing the dress and a pair of leather sandals with two-inch heels. The jacket was thrown carelessly over her shoulder like Gene Tierney in Leave Her to Heaven. I look great in red, she was thinking, catching a glimpse of herself in a store window. It isn’t true that redheaded people can’t wear red. She walked on down the boardwalk, admiring herself in every window.

  She walked for two blocks looking for a place to try her luck getting cigarettes. She was almost to the end of the boardwalk when she came to a pool hall. She stood in the door looking in, smelling the dark smell of tobacco and beer. The room was deserted except for a man leaning on a cue stick beside a table and a boy with black hair seated behind a cash register reading a book. The boy’s name was Johnny Hazard and he was sixteen years old. The book he was reading was U.S.A. by John Dos Passos. A woman who came to Manchester to teach poetry writing had given him the book. She had made a dust jacket for it out of brown paper so he could read it in public. On the spine of the jacket she had written, American History.

  “I’d like a package of Lucky Strikes,” Rhoda said, holding out a twenty-dollar bill in his direction.

  “We don’t sell cigarettes to minors,” he said. “It’s against the law.”

  “I’m not a minor,” Rhoda said. “I’m eighteen. I’m Rhoda Manning. My daddy owns the mine.”

  “Which mine?” he said. He was watching her breasts as she talked, getting caught up in the apricot skin against the soft red dress.

  “The mine,” she said. “The Manning mine. I just got here the other day. I haven’t been downtown before.”

  “So, how do you like our town?”

  “Please sell me some cigarettes,” she said. “I’m about to have a fit for a Lucky.”

  “I can’t sell you cigarettes,” he said. “You’re not any more eighteen years old than my dog.”

  “Yes, I am,” she said. “I drove here in a jeep, doesn’t that prove anything?” She was looking at his wide shoulders and the tough flat chest beneath his plaid shirt.

  “Are you a football player?” she said.

  “When I have time,” he said. “When I don’t have to work on the nights they have games.”

  “I’m a cheerleader where I live,” Rhoda said. “I just got elected again for next year.”

  “What kind of a jeep?” he said.

  “An old one,” she said. “It’s filthy dirty. They use it at the mine.” She had just noticed the package of Camels in his breast pocket.

  “If you won’t sell me a whole package, how about selling me one,” she said. “I’ll give you a dollar for a cigarette.” She raised the twenty-dollar bill and laid it down on the glass counter.

  He ignored the twenty-dollar bill, opened the cash register, removed a quarter and walked over to the jukebox. He walked with a precise, balanced sort of cockiness, as if he knew he could walk any way he wanted but had carefully chosen this particular
walk as his own. He walked across the room through the rectangle of light coming in the door, walking as though he were the first boy ever to be in the world, the first boy ever to walk across a room and put a quarter into a jukebox. He pushed a button and music filled the room.

  Kaw-Liga was a wooden Indian a-standing by the door,

  He fell in love with an Indian maid

  Over in the antique store.

  “My uncle wrote that song,” he said, coming back to her. “But it got ripped off by some promoters in Nashville. I’ll make you a deal,” he said. “I’ll give you a cigarette if you’ll give me a ride somewhere I have to go.”

  “All right,” Rhoda said. “Where do you want to go?”

  “Out to my cousin’s,” he said. “It isn’t far.”

  “Fine,” Rhoda said. Johnny told the lone pool player to keep an eye on things and the two of them walked out into the sunlight, walking together very formally down the street to where the jeep was parked.

  “Why don’t you let me drive,” he said. “It might be easier.” She agreed and he drove on up the mountain to a house that looked deserted. He went in and returned carrying a guitar in a case, a blanket, and a quart bottle with a piece of wax paper tied around the top with a rubber band.

  “What’s in the bottle?” Rhoda said.

  “Lemonade, with a little sweetening in it.”

  “Like whiskey?”

  “Yeah. Like whiskey. Do you ever drink it?”

  “Sure,” she said. “I drink a lot. In Saint Louis we had this club called The Four Roses that met every Monday at Donna Duston’s house to get drunk. I thought it up, the club I mean.”

  “Well, here’s your cigarette,” he said. He took the package from his pocket and offered her one, holding it near his chest so she had to get in close to take it.

  “Oh, God,” she said. “Oh, thank you so much. I’m about to die for a ciggie. I haven’t had one in days. Because my father dragged me up here to make me stop smoking. He’s always trying to make me do something I don’t want to do. But it never works. I’m very hardheaded, like him.” She took the light Johnny offered her and blew out the smoke in a small controlled stream. “God, I love to smoke,” she said.

  “I’m glad I could help you out,” he said. “Anytime you want one when you’re here you just come on over. Look,” he said. “I’m going somewhere you might want to see, if you’re not in a hurry to get back. You got time to go and see something with me?”

  “What is it?” she asked.

  “Something worth seeing,” he said. “The best thing in Clay County there is to see.”

  “Sure,” she said. “I’ll go. I never turn down an adventure. Why not, that’s what my cousins in the Delta always say. Whyyyyyyy not.” They drove up the mountain and parked and began to walk into the woods along a path. The woods were deeper here than where Rhoda had been that morning, dense and green and cool. She felt silly walking in the woods in the little high-heeled sandals, but she held on to Johnny’s hand and followed him deeper and deeper into the trees, feeling grown up and brave and romantic. I’ll bet he thinks I’m the bravest girl he ever met, she thought. I’ll bet he thinks at last he’s met a girl who’s not afraid of anything. Rhoda was walking along imagining tearing off a piece of her dress for a tourniquet in case Johnny was bit by a poisonous snake. She was pulling the tourniquet tighter and tighter when the trees opened onto a small brilliant blue pond. The water was so blue Rhoda thought for a moment it must be some sort of trick. He stood there watching her while she took it in.

  “What do you think?” he said at last.

  “My God,” she said. “What is it?”

  “It’s Blue Pond,” he said. “People come from all over the world to see it.”

  “Who made it?” Rhoda said. “Where did it come from?”

  “Springs. Rock springs. No one knows how deep down it goes, but more than a hundred feet because divers have been that far.”

  “I wish I could swim in it,” Rhoda said. “I’d like to jump in there and swim all day.”

  “Come over here, cheerleader,” he said. “Come sit over here by me and we’ll watch the light on it. I brought this teacher from New York here last year. She said it was the best thing she’d ever seen in her life. She’s a writer. Anyway, the thing she likes about Blue Pond is watching the light change on the water. She taught me a lot when she was here. About things like that.”

  Rhoda moved nearer to him, trying to hold in her stomach.

  “My father really likes this part of the country,” she said. “He says people up here are the salt of the earth. He says all the people up here are direct descendants from England and Scotland and Wales. I think he wants us to move up here and stay, but my mother won’t let us. It’s all because the unions keep messing with his mine that he has to be up here all the time. If it wasn’t for the unions everything would be going fine. You aren’t for the unions, are you?”

  “I’m for myself,” Johnny said. “And for my kinfolks.” He was tired of her talking then and reached for her and pulled her into his arms, paying no attention to her small resistances, until finally she was stretched out under him on the earth and he moved the dress from her breasts and held them in his hands. He could smell the wild smell of her craziness and after a while he took the dress off and the soft white cotton underpants and touched her over and over again. Then he entered her with the way he had of doing things, gently and with a good sense of the natural rhythms of the earth.

  I’m doing it, Rhoda thought. I’m doing it. This is doing it. This is what it feels like to be doing it.

  “This doesn’t hurt a bit,” she said out loud. “I think I love you, Johnny. I love, love, love you. I’ve been waiting all my life for you.”

  “Don’t talk so much,” he said. “It’s better if you stop talking.”

  And Rhoda was quiet and he made love to her as the sun was leaving the earth and the afternoon breeze moved in the trees. Here was every possible tree, hickory and white oak and redwood and sumac and maple, all in thick foliage now, and he made love to her with great tenderness, forgetting he had set out to fuck the boss’s daughter, and he kept on making love to her until she began to tighten around him, not knowing what she was doing, or where she was going, or even that there was anyplace to be going to.

  Dudley was waiting outside the trailer when she drove up. There was a sky full of cold stars behind him, and he was pacing up and down and talking to himself like a crazy man. Maud was inside the trailer crying her heart out and only Joe had kept his head and was going back and forth from one to the other telling them everything would be all right.

  Dudley was pacing up and down talking to Jesus. I know I had it coming, he was saying. I know goddamn well I had it coming. But not her. Where in the hell is she? You get her back in one piece and I’ll call Valerie and break it off. I won’t see Valerie ever again as long as I live. But you’ve got to get me back my little girl. Goddammit, you get me back my girl.

  Then he was crying, his head thrown back and raised up to the stars as the jeep came banging up the hill in third gear. Rhoda parked it and got out and started walking toward him, all bravado and disdain.

  Dudley smelled it on her before he even touched her. Smelled it all over her and began to shake her, screaming at her to tell him who it had been. Then Joe came running out from the trailer and threw his hundred and fifty pounds between them, and Maud was right behind him. She led Rhoda into the trailer and put her into bed and sat beside her, bathing her head with a damp towel until she fell asleep.

  “I’ll find out who it was,” Dudley said, shaking his fist. “I’ll find out who it was.”

  “You don’t know it was anybody,” Joe said. “You don’t even know what happened, Mr. D. Now you got to calm down and in the morning we’ll find out what happened. More than likely she’s just been holed up somewhere trying to scare you.”

  “I know what happened,” Dudley said. “I already know what happened.”
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  “Well, you can find out who it was and you can kill him if you have to,” Joe said. “If it’s true and you still want to in the morning, you can kill him.”

  But there would be no killing. By the time the moon was high, Johnny Hazard was halfway between Lexington, Kentucky, and Cincinnati, Ohio, with a bus ticket he bought with the fifty dollars he’d taken from Rhoda’s pocket. He had called the poetry teacher and told her he was coming. Johnny had decided it was time to see the world. After all, that very afternoon a rich cheerleader had cried in his arms and given him her cherry. There was no telling what might happen next.

  Much later that night Rhoda woke up in the small room, hearing the wind come up in the trees. The window was open and the moon, now low in the sky and covered with mist, poured a diffused light upon the bed. Rhoda sat up in the bed and shivered. Why did I do that with him? she thought. Why in the world did I do that? But I couldn’t help it, she decided. He’s so sophisticated and he’s so good-looking and he’s a wonderful driver and he plays a guitar. She moved her hands along her thighs, trying to remember exactly what it was they had done, trying to remember the details, wondering where she could find him in the morning.

  But Dudley had other plans for Rhoda in the morning. By noon she was on her way home in a chartered plane. Rhoda had never been on an airplane of any kind before, but she didn’t let on.

  “I’m thinking of starting a diary,” she was saying to the pilot, arranging her skirt so her knees would show. “A lot of unusual things have been happening to me lately. The boy I love is dying of cancer in Saint Louis. It’s very sad, but I have to put up with it. He wants me to write a lot of books and dedicate them to his memory.”

  The pilot didn’t seem to be paying much attention, so Rhoda gave up on him and went back into her own head.

  In her head Bob Rosen was alive after all. He was walking along a street in Greenwich Village and passed a bookstore with a window full of her books, many copies stacked in a pyramid with her picture on every cover. He recognized the photograph, ran into the bookstore, grabbed a book, opened it and saw the dedication. To Bob Rosen, Te Amo Forever, Rhoda.