A Piece of My Heart

by Richard Ford

  “How do you know he didn’t have a woman?”

  “Don’t say that.” He moved opposite her where he could see her more precisely. “Why do you have to believe that? Why does everything come down to a fast fuck with you?”

  “How do you know he didn’t?” she said coolly. “Some little Choctaw up in Tupelo might’ve looked good, something else in Hammond, something else in Tuscaloosa? My father knew a man who worked for Gulf who was married to a woman in Mobile and had a whole other family back home. Something kept him alive. Two-sevenths just isn’t enough. I don’t care how much he loved her. There had to be something, even if he didn’t care about it.”

  “That’s wrong,” he said.

  “All right. What was it, then?”

  He stalked back across the boards. “His pleasures somehow just got grafted on his pains. That’s what happens to you if you don’t look out. They grow together. That’s what worries me.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” she said, tapping her fingernails on her overnight case. “It’s just some idea you’ve concocted.”

  “What the hell do you think anything is? How the hell are you supposed to understand a fucking thing if you don’t figure it out yourself?”

  “It just doesn’t make sense,” she said.

  “Nobody gets laid, that’s what’s the matter. He didn’t know what the hell was going on. It was just something that happened. Who knows what might’ve happened to his brain otherwise. When I was little we had a flat tire right on the bridge at Vicksburg, and my mother grabbed me and held me so tight I couldn’t breathe, until he had fixed the tire. She said she was afraid of something happening.”

  “She thought he was already crazy, right?”

  “She already knew about those rooms.”

  “She was afraid he might decide to kill you all?”

  “I don’t think she knew it. But it’s possible to decide some things are just that awful and not be crazy at all. She just knew the limits to things. He never found out because he adapted.”

  “That’s very romantic, but what does it have to do with you?”

  “It frightens the shit out of me.” He tried to make out a look on her face but couldn’t. “I don’t want everything the same. Your past is supposed to give you some way of judging things. So it has to do with me because I say it does.”

  “There’s no need answering you,” she said.

  “Shouldn’t I have something besides the assurance that everything will eventually be the same? I ought to marry you, then, or kill myself like your old man. I’d get rid of a lot of worries either way.”

  “So?” she said, flipping the handle of her overnight case.

  “I’m lonely, that’s what’s so.”

  “And what are you doing?”

  “What do you mean, what am I doing?”

  “To find out what you need to find out, whatever it might be. If it’s so important, I’d think you’d do something about it.”

  “I’m worrying about it.”

  She lay back, her elbows against the sash, looking at the soft haloing lights. He could hear her breathing, the mist of breath on the pane, tiny circlets widening and withering. He felt his body sag as if his torso were slowly falling toward the floor. He felt like a fixture in the immobile darkness.

  She stirred over the sheets, her toes touching the floor, her figure rising into the window frame. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said.

  “It’s complicated,” he said, feeling sad.

  “Go to the island,” she said cheerfully, as if that had been an acceptable option all along, and she were just rehearsing it for the record.

  “And do what?” he said irritably. “Run through the woods screaming while they shoot at me?”

  “I don’t know what,” she said. “But there isn’t anyplace left for you to figure out whatever it is you seem jinxed into figuring out, all that dismal mess you were shrieking about. If you aren’t prepared to move into a cleaner place, screw me and be pleasant—this is all I have to offer.” She smiled.

  “If you can’t hump it, why bother?”

  “It seems to me I’ve bothered,” she said, “and all you’ve done is act insulting and indulge yourself. I’m tired of arguing with you.”

  She got up. He stared at her out of the shadows.

  “What would I do?” he said.

  “It’s a very good place to go to compose yourself, or do whatever you’d like. It’s Mississippi in its most baronial and ridiculous. You can go tonight if you want to; all I have to do is make a call to the boat camp.” She set her case on the bed and snapped the clasps to search for the number.

  “Stay off the phone!”

  “Are you expecting a call?” she said, bothering through her case.

  “Some asshole calls me all the time and asks me if I know where my wife is, then hangs up.”

  “I’ll call tomorrow, then. I’ll be back by then. I’ll tell Popo you’re coming but he shouldn’t expect you until he sees you. That’ll be nice.”

  “Nice for whom? Why don’t you just say I’m presently in an institution for the morally unsure and won’t be released for some time?”

  She closed her case again and refastened the clasps. “You should call Mr. P. H. Gaspareau, in Elaine, Arkansas, and tell him who you are and that you would like him to tell Mr. Lamb you’re coming at my invitation.”

  “Then what happens?”

  She smiled, letting her case swing down.

  “What the fuck do I do down there?” he said.

  “Strive to come back in a better humor,” she said. “You’ll have to tell the bus driver to stop at Elaine, otherwise he’ll go right by.”

  “Wait a minute!”

  “Did you know,” she said, looking abstracted, “in 1911, some poor people went to sleep in Arkansas and woke up in Mississippi. The river changed course at 3 A.M. and everyone was forced to make some adjustments. Popo’s colored man insists he was in the river in a wood boat at the moment of the change, but I don’t believe it.”

  “They won’t know who the fuck I am.”

  “Of course not. But you should have a nice long talk with Popo and tell him who you are and go for several walks with him in the woods, and they’ll both like you fine.”

  She came toward where he was standing and kissed him softly on the cheek. “I’m not trying to get you to screw me this time.” She smiled. “I’m relying on other resources. I think they’re not as good as my others, but I like to believe I’m adaptable. I would never have thought you would grow up to be so serious when we were children. Nothing is that serious. You should learn that, sooner or later, then everything will be wonderful.”

  “How do you know?” he said.

  “Because,” she said, confidently. “Everything is always splendid for me.”

  “What’s the purpose of all this, if you don’t mind my asking?”

  “To bring a little frivolousness into your life. It’s too gloomy in there now. Look at this room—it’s awfully morbid in here.”

  “I like it,” he said.

  “Fine, but you must go to the island and act frivolously. Though I think sometimes, Sam, that if you were any more frivolous you’d be lost.”

  “To whom?”

  “To me, of course,” she said. “Who else is there?”

  “Nobody.”

  “There’s the answer,” she said sweetly. “There’s the answer right there.”

  The train shot through a country station, rattling the doors, and passing the vacant red flasher where there were no cars waiting. He tried, peering down into the lighted streets, to get a reading on the place, estimate if they were out of Kentucky now and into Tennessee, or only leaving Illinois with the hill country yet to go before daylight. But it was no use.

  6

  In Thibodaux there had been a man named Gallitoix who owned a wholesale warehouse for food. And his mother had parked the Mercury in the sun while his father walked up on the loading pl
atform, his back bent, and into the man’s office to sell a boxcar of starch. In the car he sat with his mother and watched the tractor trailers pull away from the high dock in the heat. The seat covers were blue and white and felt and smelled like old straw. She opened the windows and there was no cool breeze, except for the sweet smell of feed riding the hot air out of the warehouse and over the tiny bleached sea shells that covered the lot like gravel so that everything was white. His mother drew a pencil diagram of where the gears were on the steering column, and there, while they were suffocating, he learned to drive.

  7

  The train got to Memphis early with new light hung behind the capitals of the brokerage sheds. Two people got off and scurried down into the station. He looked the length of the platform for a phone, but the one booth at the end of the shelter was in use, and he decided to make his call later.

  He walked down into the vestibule, and found the bus station in the converted depot transept that had been roped off and fitted with plastic chairs. He bought a ticket to Elaine and walked past a Trailways huffing at the depot doors and down Adams Avenue toward the river. The street passed for a time under the Arkansas bridge, and he could hear trucks slapping the girders, and see, across the thick, gravy-colored water, east Arkansas profiled at the bottom of the sky.

  He crossed the boulevard and walked out on the brick apron that paved the riverbank. He went down and squatted and let his hand dangle and felt the water draw through his fingers, and it occurred to him that for all the times he had crossed the river, riding in his father’s old rattling Mercuries off into the opposite delta, and out of the little levee towns, he had never felt the river, never had it in his hand and let the water comb through his fingers to find out just what it was. It seemed now like a vast and imponderable disadvantage, and made him feel like he needed to know.

  He took off his coat and surveyed up the boulevard in both directions. Two men were standing by a long tar-colored barge hove to the bank a hundred yards away, talking, the river panning out in an open Y behind them. Trucks were pounding across the bridge, but no one inside was able to see except whatever was far up the open river. He sat on the bricks, took off his tennis shoes, and stripped his shirt, exposing his belly to the light. He stared at the bridge, expecting to see someone peering over the railing observing him, but there was no one, only the pigeons wheeling out of the girders along the defiles of steel struts. With his pants at knee level, he made a brief inspection of his legs. They were white and billowy and speckled with tiny sores like ant bites. He shuddered and felt unpleasant, and the sudden prospect of going to physical ruin made him agitated. He hugged himself and hunched forward in the breeze. He took a step and tied his brows, and stared at the surface, looking for a reflection of himself and seeing only his shadow frozen on the current.

  He recognized that he was now, for all purposes, risking self-annihilation without even willing it so, and that by all probability armies of people in the grip of doing away with themselves thought simply that they were taking an innocent swim in the river or the bay, or had merely concluded a window ledge was the only place to find necessary peace and quiet. It is only, he thought, afterward when the realities begin to percolate. He felt his toes wiggling. He looked downriver and saw the two men standing beside the barge were no longer talking but were staring at him. Somewhere he could hear a loud honking and turned and saw the Trailways that had been at the terminal come to a halt at the foot of Adams Street. The door swung open and the driver, a short man in a khaki uniform and a campaign cap, jumped out and yelled something that sounded like “woncha-woncha-woncha.” And he immediately dived in.

  The impact took his breath away and he felt himself going uncontrolled and limp while his heart began whumping and his stomach burned like flames. He sensed he had hit the surface too severely.

  The water was colder than he had expected, and below the surface an almost immediate numbing started in his feet, sending dull signals to the tips of his fingers, which were busy flittering to maintain his head above water.

  Simultaneously he was confronted with two very unsettling facts. One was that in the time it had taken to get righted and regain a minimum amount of breath, he had moved a surprising distance from his clothes, which he could just see strewn in a circle twenty-five yards upstream. The other fact was that his shorts were now gone and he was floating with his privates adangle in the cold current, prey to any browsing fish.

  The bargemen had begun walking up the gangplank, from all appearances in no hurry. The bus driver was standing at the curb, pointing out for the benefit of his passengers a man’s head floating with the current.

  Water trickled on his neck and he sensed he was becoming colder while maintaining a constant distance of ten feet from the bank, unable to touch any part of the bottom and unwilling to turn and look at the river, sensing the utter vastness would shock him and cause him to panic.

  Though what surprised him was that on once claiming a breath, he felt relatively little fear while he faced the bank, and was suffering none of the gulping hysteria he feared he might It was not difficult to stay afloat, the current buoying him as it moved him steadily, and he felt unusually relaxed, though cold and still strange that his parts had become potential forage for the fish.

  He could see the bargemen bringing a long wooden boom from the invisible rear of the barge, dragging it in the water as if they were trying to pole against the current. He looked back up to where the bus was standing. Several children had begun running along the bank, though most of the other passengers were straggling back up to the bus.

  The bargemen took up a position at the bow of the boat with the boom trailing in the water and stood watching him with idle interest. He estimated that to avoid slamming into the front of the barge and being dragged below by the current, he would need to orbit several feet out into the river, yet not orbit too far so as to be unreachable. The barge began to get larger, and he squirmed to get beyond its girth, kicking away from the bank with some vigor. He kicked until he saw where a true course would just miss the lead edge of the barge and bring him into line with the boom, and that with modest luck he could catch it as he went by. Though as he reached the forward bulwark of the barge, around which a large tuft of yellow fuzz had collected, the current eddied unnaturally and spun him out from the end of the pole which the bargemen had shoved in his direction, so that he was turned and facing the river, looking at Arkansas in the flat distance. He fished backward, and tried to relocate the pole. The barge was making a thick gurgling sound that he could feel vibrating below the surface. He breathed in a large tuft of the foam. One of the bargemen yelled something, and he felt the sawed end of the long boom scrape his back, causing him to flounce backward, grasping for whatever he could touch, and missing the pole entirely.

  Panic occurred all at once. His ears felt as if someone very close by had turned up a radio on which there was nothing but loud static. He flailed in several directions. His head sank a moment, and he felt his feet enter a denser zone of cold water. His skin grabbed, and he stretched to get his nose up and have a look at the barge and the shore and the Memphis skyline before drowning. As he surged to get his head elevated, a heavy weight twisted along his neck, stopping his breath momentarily, so that he gagged and struck with his fist as if he were being assailed. He felt the current binding it into his skin. He accepted another enormous mouthful of water and felt himself sink. The current was pulling, and he tried to raise his head to see, but the current mounted water in his face and he perceived he couldn’t see without allowing gallons of water to run directly up his nose.

  He could feel himself beginning to be maneuvered sidewise to the current instead of simply dragging against it, and he got rigid, eyes shut, hoping for better treatment. And then the current all but ceased. He raised his head an inch above the water line and saw that he had been hawsered into the slack behind the barge. The surface was being boiled by the barge’s diesel, and the water was slimy and thic
k and tasted metallic, but there was no more pull to the rope.

  He let himself be hauled to the bank and gave up the rope and lulled in the gurgling wake, trying to get a whole breath. He burped up a portion of water, tried to see, and found that the men who had lassoed him were down off the barge now, watching him impassively. He tried to make them out, but the sun had rotated higher in the sky and was shining almost straight in his eyes.

  “No wonder he liked to drowned,” one of the men observed, “he’s so fuckin big.”

  The other man began coiling the rope, dragging it across his shoulder. A heavy canvas life preserver bumped his ear and skittered across the bricks toward the man’s feet.

  “Whyn’t you grab the ring?” the first man said irritably. “I made my all-time-best chunk and you grabbed the rope.”

  He belched up some gamy-tasting water.

  “You like to strangled,” the man said, sounding melancholy.

  He squinted up into the sun and saw that the two men were twins, and were staring at him as if he were a one-of-a-kind fish they had landed and didn’t know quite what to think.

  “Is there a blanket?” he said.

  “Loan a towel,” the twin without the rope said, and walked back up to the barge.

  He pulled himself a little farther onto the bricks. There was a big scaly burn mark on his shoulder and his ear felt like it had grown larger. Some of the numbness was departing his feet, and he was beginning to feel more of a piece.