A Piece of My Heart

by Richard Ford

  Buck said it didn’t seem like any time until Edwina had him divorced and married herself off to an Italian named Tarquini who was fifteen years younger than she was and wore his suits halfway up his asshole, and whom Rudolph had taken out to the farm two separate times before he found out what was happening on the days he stayed at the farm by himself and left Edwina to her own devices. Buck said Tarquini was just some interior decorator from Chicago that Edwina had hired to re-deluxe her hotels, but couldn’t resist getting in the sack with since she and Rudolph weren’t seeing things eye to eye.

  In the settlement Rudolph made Edwina donate him a room in the R. E. Lee for life and one free meal a day, and when it was over he went back down to Hazen, where he could go to the farm when he wanted to and drive his old grader down the roads and along the bar ditches and run everybody off he didn’t like and spend time figuring out just what had happened to him.

  Buck said he guessed the old man probably used the farm to get back at Edwina by just never inviting anybody she ever knew or that he ever knew when he knew her to hunt with him, and by paying him, Buck, to take people in and out all winter for a thousand dollars a season and letting that information get back to Edwina by mentioning it to the waiters in the dining room when he came into town to eat his free meal and stay in his free room.

  He said the old man would come down to the cabin late at night and have a bottle of Williams and an old R. E. Lee Hotel glass and pour Buck a level and watch him drink it, then sit back and cry like a baby. Buck said he had to just keep on drinking until it was gone, because he couldn’t stand listening to the old man cry and tell the story over and over again. Finally, he said, he’d tell Rudolph his was just a clear case of bad timing, and then go to sleep. The old man sat there, he said, staring out the screen door into his rice fields not able to sleep because he had a problem he couldn’t understand. And Buck said that he never would have drunk so much if it hadn’t been for all those nights.

  He walked around to the side of the house and knocked on the door, thinking he could ask what had happened to the old man and go on. The old woman came to the screen and smiled as if she recognized him, and said Rudolph still had his rooms.

  He thought he ought to forget it and go back. He smiled at the woman and she pushed open the screen and he got inside before he knew it and she pointed up the narrow hallway to the upstairs, and he went up. He felt like he was making a mistake acting like he wanted to see the old man when he didn’t want to at all, and was disappointed to know he was alive still, when he shouldn’t have been alive at all. The door at the top was closed, and a thin pane of light radiated over the sill. He could hear the woman reading her newspaper out loud in the kitchen and the sound of her chair groaning.

  He knocked and the old man said to come in, standing in the middle of the room under a hanging bulb, wearing poplin pants and no shirt, staring wild-eyed as if he were getting ready to make a charge. He looked heavy-chested and bent to one side, his white hair stuck up in tussocks over his ears. He regretted ever coming inside.

  The room was sour. The old man looked at him intently, as if he thought he recognized him, the way the old woman did, but couldn’t be sure.

  “See Minor,” he said suddenly, “about the work. Don’t see me.”

  “No sir,” he said, and pressed back against the molding of the door, thinking about getting out.

  “Who is that?” Rudolph said, and stepped up under the bulb.

  “Hewes,” he said. “I used to work on number two.”

  The old man got a step closer. “Took off without saying whoop-dee-doo, too,” the old man shouted, like it had happened last night. “I come out a week later wonderin where in the shit you was, and there was my house wide open, lights burning, propane still in the pipes.” He took a step back and humped down beside his desk table. “What do you say about that?”

  “I had to leave of a sudden,” he said, fixing his eyes on the single closed window behind the old man’s head.

  “Well, there ain’t no more house!”

  “What come of it?” he said.

  The old man squinted as if he had just decided he was really somebody else. “Remember Buck Bennett?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “Buck Bennett was a crazy son-of-a-bitch. You remember that?” The old man smiled companionably as if he could see Buck at that very moment drunk and falling down.

  “I guess,” he said.

  “He was a drunk, now.” The old man reached down and jerked his white sock up and plowed at his nose. “He took five bone sawyers from New Orleans back in there on two, forgot to light the jet after he’d turned it on. The bone sawyers got there drunk, and they all sat down to wait for shooting time, and every one of them went to sleep and didn’t wake up. They found Mr. Buck’s cadaver on the bed with a doughnut in his hand. He musta eat that doughnut and went to sleep, and all the rest of them just sat out there at the table and put their heads down. They didn’t even get a doughnut.” The old man pawed his face and gawked as if it had been a great inconvenience.

  “When did that happen?” he said, trying to envision Buck’s old face, and unable to work it back out.

  “December, six years ago,” he said quickly. “I didn’t see the bastard for two or three days. He didn’t come to get my instructions. So I figured he was drunk, and went out to his house and there they all six of ’em was, and the place smelled like hell. There wasn’t no way to get it out of the boards. So I went out, after they had carried them all off, with a gallon of gasoline and put a match to the son-of-a-bitch, and burnt it down and plowed it under.” He smiled. “So there ain’t no more house. I put soybeans in there right where you lived.”

  “What do you do with the hunters?” he said, still trying to fathom up Buck’s face.

  “Put ’em in Minor’s house. He’s got sense to keep a fire lit. I don’t employ no more drunks.” The old man’s tiny blue eyes seemed to hold tears in them.

  “Buck said he wouldn’ta drunk so much if you hadn’t brought him the whiskey,” he said.

  “He’s a goddamn liar,” the old man shouted, rising out of his chair, his eyes snapping. He grabbed the backing on the chair and squeezed it until the cane cracked. “Buck was on the goddamned hooch the first day I seen the bastard, and it was hooch that killed him by muddying his goddamned mind so he couldn’t even remember to light a goddamned pilot.”

  “He figured you give it to him so he couldn’t do anything else and so you wouldn’t have to pay him nothing. He couldn’t do nothin about it, Mr. Rudolph, but he knew it.”

  “Buck went to California—you know that, don’t you?”

  He watched the old man’s face twist out of one angry expression into another one.

  “He went out there and learned how to be a soak and come back here and tried to turn it into a skilled trade,” the old man said.

  “Some people ain’t lucky,” he said, watching the old man grow madder and madder, and feeling better.

  “Some people don’t know when they’re good off.” His eyes flashed. “They have to fuck it up. What’re you doing here, Hewes—trying to fuck up something?”

  “I wanted to look at you.”

  “What the hell for?” The old man was hunched up underneath the bulb, glaring.

  “If I had a good idea, I might just think about twistin your head off.”

  The old man smiled instantly. “Old Buck might not of known very much, but he knew how to kill hisself good enough. You don’t even know how to do that, Hewes.” Rudolph’s smile broadened until he could see dark splotches on his gums.

  He looked at the old man in the cone of scaly light, leering out at him, until he felt the urge to go away and come back in the night and burn the house down and everything with it.

  He went back out through the kitchen all the way to the truck without stopping. But when he got in, he tried to think about Buck killing himself, waking up in the cold little house and looking out and seeing nothing at all, kno
wing that in an hour or a half hour the doctors would be there, and there was nothing to look forward to beyond sitting there with the old man while he stared at the fields and cried, until he himself went to sleep and the old man sat there mumbling half-awake about Edwina and Tarquini and how he let it get away from him. And he thought that might finally just have been enough to make him turn on the propane and go to sleep, that it was all just a kind of weariness, and the best thing to do was to go to sleep. He sat in the truck and tried to think what all that meant to him. And he sat for a long time, listening to the trucks hiss on the highway to Memphis, and decided that while it made him feel bad, it didn’t mean anything to him, and didn’t affect his life at all.

  12

  When he had worked in the switchyards at Helena, the old heads used to say that once the river had been where the town was now, and that the town was set up on the Kudzu bluff that overlooked the present town, and where the town of West Helena is now. They said one night the river simply changed its course, removing itself five miles to the east, leaving a thick muddy plain for the residents of the bluff to stare at and get nervous about. They said little by little the people on the bluff ventured down and started establishing themselves where the river had been, and building stores and houses. And after a while everyone moved down and they changed the name of the town to West Helena and called the new one in the bottom Helena. The men in the yard called this movement The Great Comedown, and swore that the town, by coming off the bluff, had exercised bad judgment and would have to suffer misfortune because, and it seemed to make good sense, the town now existed at the pleasure of the river, and they believed anything that owed to the river would have to pay, and when it paid, the price would be steep.

  When he had told Beuna she gave him a pained look and said, “Ah, shit, Robard. We’re all dying sooner or later. Them assholes think they figured the reason. But I’m satisfied there ain’t no reason.”

  He got to Helena at noon and drove straight down the bluff into town, the sky pale and hot, and kept straight on through, uneasiness brewing inside him. The streets were wove up with country people in town for lunch. He thought everybody who noticed the truck was noticing him, and anybody who noticed him was a threat. He watched the doors and the alley mouths, in case W.W. should suddenly come striding out of some beer bar and stand mooning at something in the traffic he thought he recognized but couldn’t figure why, but would if he had another minute to ponder it.

  When he had shown up in Tulare, W. had gotten gloomy, as though some bad idea was trying to hatch out in his mind that he wasn’t going to let live because of the slowing effect worrying had on his fast ball. Instead W. had gone around moping and frowning and acting as if he had a quince in his underlip and couldn’t talk, but was still highly agitated. He had tried to stay where W. could see him anytime he wanted to, thinking that might dewire whatever W. was trying to figure, but couldn’t quite get clear.

  In the hot grandstand he asked her if she thought W. might be thinking, and she laughed so hard her flesh had gone into violent quivers. “What with?” she said, in the meanest voice she knew. “His mind ain’t nothin but a baseball. Baseballs don’t get suspicious, far as I know.”

  Except, he figured, watching people traipse back and forth across Main Street in the sunshine, W. might not turn out to be so altogether slow if he found out what was happening to his wife while he was screwing parts in BB guns. All those years when he could’ve been cashing big pay checks, but instead ended up building air rifles for three-eighty an hour and pitching Industrial League at Forrest City, might just have built a big reserve of unrelieved nastiness that he could start relieving if he could just catch somebody diddling his wife and figure out a way of getting a shot off.

  The only alternative then was just to be smart and stay off. He had figured that out long ago. But waiting for the light, thinking everybody who walked in front of the truck was having a look at his license plate and a longer look at him, he could see just how much business he didn’t have idling around town. He would have to come after dark, collect Beuna, and run her to someplace where they wouldn’t have to jump up every time a bug hit the screen or start grabbing clothes for fear it was W.W. coming to pick up his cleats or leaving his pail before going off to hit fungoes. He figured he had to park the truck, back in to a wall, and not get near it until he had to, since every time he got in it he ran a risk, and every time he got in it with Beuna, he was pleading to get shot.

  He pulled through the intersection, stopped, and made an inspection back up the street, thinking if he waited he just might see a face. When he didn’t, he got out, stepped inside the drugstore, bought a newspaper, and drove full tilt out of town, keeping bandaged to the road.

  A mile and a half past the last motel, he stopped at a drive-in and parked on the side away from town. The restaurant was a little pink cinder-block with a red and white keyboard awning strung out the back. A girl came down under the awning, took his order, and went off. A breeze picked up off the fields, stirred the dust, and made the awning groan and sway over the struts.

  He opened the paper and stared at the Help Wanteds. There was a job in Helena to install linoleum tile, another one in Helena for a drag-line crew with the Corps of Engineers, a job to relocate in San Bernardino, a job in Elaine to guard somebody’s land, offering two meals and a room, and a job running a stamping machine in the BB-gun plant.

  He hinged the paper over the steering wheel and stared out under the awning toward the fields, back of which he could make out the low perimeter of light green softwoods, beyond which was the river. The awning buckled softly in the breeze and the sun rolled behind the clouds, and he could smell his sandwich frying in the cinder-block kitchen. He tried to think just what it was he was doing. Without even intending, he had gone straight for a job, just like finding one was bone-hard necessity. It was aggravating. Because what was supposed to happen to Jackie, lying back in her room thinking God knows what? Making plans not to see him again, gone by now to where he wouldn’t ever find her? It had seemed to him that when breaks came in your life, the decisions got made ahead of time. Judgment was supplied and the sides were weighted and one got chosen on balance. And that was the way he understood life got run, not counting the unforeseen. When he left Hazen, it had been at the end of a long time spent thinking and puzzling. Sides were added and the answer found, though it came in the middle of the night and seemed like foolishness even though it wasn’t. But he wondered if decisions didn’t really get made in reverse, acting one way, then supplying the reason based on the number of people who got maimed or made happy. And if it wasn’t just ignorance to think decisions got made any other way. In this very case, there seemed to be no decision to make at all, only things to do for which he could supply reasons later, when he saw how it worked. So that the only thing he could do about Jackie, lying back there making plans, was just to see what happened and write a postcard.

  The girl came back, supporting a tray with a beer and a sandwich. She smiled and fitted the tray to the window and wiped her hands on her pants.

  “You going to want something else?” she said, tearing a check off and laying it on the rubber mat. She had a little wisp of mustache on her lip that she bleached.

  “Which way is that BB-gun plant?” he said, trying to make her out through the condiments.

  The girl stared back toward town and pointed. “Thataway,” she said, frowning toward Memphis.

  “Then which way’s E-laine?” He licked the mayonnaise off the rim of the bun.

  “Thataway,” she said, pointing down the highway that ran in front of the drive-in and disappeared into the softwoods. Her cheeks were rouged up and she had peppered brown all around her nose to be freckles. “Twenty miles,” she said. “Ain’t nothin but a store and a quit gin, and some old man’s fishin camp over the levee. I used to go down there when I was married.”

  “Ain’t you married no more?” he said, wondering who’d marry her in the first plac
e.

  She shook her head and looked put out. “I quit him,” she said.

  “What for?”

  The girl removed a strand of dry hair from her cheek. “He cramped my style.”

  “Well, would you say that E-laine was about as far away from that BB-gun factory as I could get?”

  She turned and stared up at the cinder-block restaurant a moment and faced him again.

  “I’d say there’s lots of places you could get farther away from that BB-gun plant than E-laine, Arkansas, though I doubt if you could find a worse one.”

  “I need me a place to be low and still get out to the plant when I need to.”

  “You ain’t going to find you no lower place than that,” she said.

  “That’ll do it,” he said, and smiled at her, and the girl tapped the tray with her fingernail and walked away.

  13

  The River Road ferried out along the telephone lines into the marshed fields and pecan orchards eight miles, then angled back through the cypress and followed the shingle of the old river, a long shining horseshoe stoppered at both ends by green-and-orange shumard swamps.

  The road twisted finally back into the fields, past standing cotton wagons and silver ammonia tanks on trailers, frosted in the sunshine. He surveyed the long grass levee, amber and flat, reaching away from the tip of the swamp down the margin of the true bottom, back of which was the dark invadable land the levee had been built to guard.