by Richard Ford
“Asshole!” she said, burying her chin on her collarbone so she could see which button matched which hole. “What piss-willy trick you call that?”
“I screwed it up,” he said, shaking his head, but keeping an eye out on the mouth of the alley to make sure somebody wasn’t heading around to see what the noise was.
“You sure as hell screwed up,” she said, minding her buttons, but suddenly snapping her chin up at him angrily. “You just about blinded me with my attainments hung out for all the world.”
“Git in,” he said. “You’re going to have the law out here.”
“I give a shit if I do, too,” she said, slapping at the buttons, flinging the door open and flouncing in.
She wore the same sweet flower smell he had waked up in the night at Bishop and smelled on everything, some little fragrance off the desert he couldn’t keep from giving himself to, imagining her somewhere miles away from where he was at that moment. He touched the finish of her blouse where he could feel the weight of her breast, and she slapped his hand and crossed her arms.
“Leave them alone!” she said.
“I done come three thousand miles for them,” he said in amazement. “You want me to turn ’em loose?”
“That’s right,” she said. “I ain’t going to have you pawing me.”
“Shit,” he said, trying to see her in the dark. “How come you stand out there wagging them around like a puppy show?”
“My business,” she said, setting her chin so the soft flesh on the underside disappeared.
“Well, I’m making it mine,” he said, grabbing her by the elbow, waggling his hand inside her blouse and popping off one button after another.
“Robard?” she said, her legs stiff as stones.
“What,” he said, roaming over her breast.
“I want you to tear me up,” she said, her little blue eyes flat as pebbles.
“I will,” he said, his breath all gone.
“I don’t want there to be nothin left when you get finished.”
“There won’t be,” he said.
“Robard?”
“What?”
“I want to do it in the back of the truck in the dirt and the rocks and the filthiness.”
He dislodged his hand and felt suddenly like a man in a tornado. “We will, hon,” he said, “we will.”
He drove up the rise to Main and turned out of town toward Memphis. He passed a drive-in theater, the fluorescent lights shining in the glass office, then two motels, the long fenced-in limits of the BB-gun factory, and a beer bar at the limits of the fields. Then the town disappeared, and the road took west and north into the delta.
Beuna arranged herself under his arm and stared at the highway, hugging her knees. “You know what I did when I was in high school?” she said, looking up at him as if she were apologizing in advance.
“I couldn’t guess,” he said.
She stared back at the highway. “Well,” she said, pulling at her ear lobe. “We had this teacher in school named Mr. Fisher. M. B. Fisher. He was just a little puny thing, had headaches all the time that liked to killed him. I used to go over to his house on the pre-tense of working on the school newspaper, and he’d get out his little Polaroid and I’d get on the rug naked and spread out, and he’d take pictures.” She looked at him to gauge how he was liking it. “And we’d get them pictures back in a minute or two and sit on the floor and laugh and laugh. I used to say to him, ‘Mr. Fisher, I thought them cameras was only supposed to take pictures of land.’ And he’d laugh and laugh. We had us a good time.” She let her eyes wander on the highway.
“How come you and him never got past the picture-taking stage?”
“We did,” she said. “But that wasn’t as funny.”
“I guess not,” he said, thinking about a motel.
“I don’t see nothing funny about fuckin,” she said seriously. “Do you?”
“I guess not.”
“Where’re we going?” she said.
“Get us a room.”
“I don’t want it!” she said.
He looked at her to see if she had gotten mad without his knowing it. “Why not?”
“It’s like every day,” she said, turning her head away and sitting straight up in the seat. “Get in the bed, turn on the TV, fuck, then go back to watching and hope you ain’t missed nothin.”
“We don’t have to turn on no TV,” he said.
“I done told you, Robard,” she said. “I want to roll in the dirt and the sand and the whatever you got back there and fuck you till you’re blue. You understand that?” She thrust her hand in his trousers and got a fierce grip on him.
“All right,” he said. “What about Memphis?”
“That’s a exception. I want to go up there and have me and you get in one of them showers and get my little bag out. I’m dying to.”
“What’s that about?” he said.
“I’m not telling,” she said. “If I did you might decide you didn’t want to. But if I can get you up there in one of them ritzy twenty-dollar rooms with them shower baths and get ahold of you, you’ll do any damn thing I tell you to.” She squeezed to let him know she could do it. “It chills you, don’t it?”
All his blood was headed down, leaving everything else afloat. He slid onto the shoulder and down onto a macadam road perpendicular to the highway. Beuna started grappling his belt as soon as the headlights illuminated the road.
“What’d you tell Jackie you was doing?” she said.
“I didn’t tell her nothin.”
“You know what I made W.W. do?”
“What’s that?”
“Have a vastectopy, one of them operations,” she said.
“Why’d you do that?” he said, thinking about W. being forced into something else he didn’t want to do.
“Cause that boy ought not to have children,” she said. “They wouldn’t none of them be nothin but baseballs. I don’t need no kids anyway.”
He let the truck ride to a stop in the field. He could smell Folex in the air, mingled with the sweet smell of Beuna.
“Why not?” he said.
“Cause I don’t,” she said. “You think I ought to raise some kid up like me? I’ll just have me a good time and let the next bunch take care of theirselves without adding to the misery.” She stared out the window and went back, cradling her knees. “Tell me something,” she said.
He inspected the mirror for some sign of headlights back up on the highway, a mile off. “All right.”
“What kind of tube is your Fallopian tube?” She sharpened her eyes to warn against making a joke.
“It’s inside you,” he said, and rubbed at his stomach. “That’s where your eggs get hatched.”
“I thought it was one of them little tubes in your ear.”
“Something the matter with yours?” he said.
“I was reading about it in a birth control magazine they give W. It said I could of got mine tied instead of him getting his cut, but I would of had to go in the hospital, and all he had to do was come in the doctor’s office without eating nothing, go to bed early one night, and keep from using his thing for two weeks. He never did know what the thing was for anyway.”
“That’s too bad,” he said, shoving down in the seat and getting his face in her breasts.
“You like my attainments, don’t you?” she said, opening her blouse and pushing her chin up in the darkness so her breasts got firmed.
“You’da thought I never seen any before,” he said, tasting the salty bottoms of them and pushing in between them.
“Let’s get in the back,” she said.
He elbowed the door open and held her hand while she climbed out. The road had turned into moist clay and grass that smelled like dust. On the highway headlights were leading north toward Memphis, the cars hissing away in the night. An odor of rotting plants rose on the breeze and held back the smell all over Beuna. He tried to see out in the moonlight to where the water was sta
nding, but could see nothing but the sallow glow of Helena on the sky.
She climbed up in the truck and stood in the bed and took off her blouse and stretched her arms, her body bulky and pale. She faced across the fields with the light to her back, and he could see the failing whorl of hair along her backbone.
“Robard?” she said.
“What?”
“I told W. if I hadn’t of married him I would’ve married you.” She looked at him gravely. “Now I want you to get up on here,” she said, releasing the snap on her shorts and wiggling them out of her crotch and looking at the little curlicues of hair on her belly as if she thought they might not be there this time.
He looked at her and thought maybe the best thing to do was to get back in the truck and out of there right then, and not waste another minute. Except that whatever it was she had, badness or disappointment or meanness, was the thing that was indispensable now, and he wanted to draw in to her and glide off in infinitude and just let loose of everything.
He sat on the side panel and unbuttoned his pants and let the letter fall out of his shoe without caring. She got him quick between her thumb and her first finger like a string on a bow and held his neck and pulled him off the side of the truck. She chivvied him, the corners of her mouth frozen, her breasts clutching his ribs, straining her jaw, pressing his feet with hers, gouging as if she were trying to wear away the bone. Sweat came all at once and he got his pulse in his throat and couldn’t get a breath. He took a hold up on her thighs and felt his body winding up and spread his feet trying to get purchase somewhere. There was a soughing sound, and his back got quavery and the air across his neck chilled, and she began to rock him with her legs, and he could feel her throat vibrating against his lips, the sound out of his ear slipping into the air. He let her rock him, her feet standing his like stirrups, with each traction sliding on her knees as if a gravity were drawing him backward and a new contraction would trickle up his spine until she drew him again and supported him again in the fork of her legs. And in a while she let him fall off on the bed, and went limp, let her feet splay and raised her arms behind her and fingered the post of the jack below the window and made a little humming sound and got quiet, breathing almost not at all, her arms cool and dry.
He moved his hands, which had been driven in the gravel, and sat on his heels and looked at her staring in the shadow of the cab, her belly moist and her breasts sunk into her rib cage. He licked his knuckles and wiped the sweat where it had gotten trapped, and let the breeze dry his forehead. He felt like he’d been pushed through a cave of flashbulbs but couldn’t see any of the pictures.
She drummed her fingers against the jack and stared at him down the length of her body. The wings of some large bird flapped up into the night as though it were using a great effort to pound its body into flight.
“What’s that?” she said, looking around over her head.
“Somebody’s soul done took flight.”
“Shit,” she snorted. “What the hell is it?”
“A hawk,” he said.
“Doing what for?”
“Flying off, I don’t know,” he said, staring at the air.
“Uooom,” she said, and crossed her arms and let her head lie back so she was staring up. “I got scratches all over me.”
“You didn’t need to have,” he said softly, wishing he were somewhere else. “We coulda got a motel in Marianna, or someplace.”
“I didn’t want none,” she said. “I wanted all them scars.”
“What’re you going to tell W.?”
“Tell him I been sleeping on a bed of nails. He wouldn’t know the difference, he’s so dick dumb.” She took a little bite at her thumbnail.
“Whatever happened about his baseball?”
“I didn’t like it,” she said. “I didn’t like all that batting around we was doing. I come back here and rented me a little trailer. And the end of August when he got done up there in Tacoma he come on back and went to work at the BB. They sent him a contract after Christmas, and I told him I wasn’t going to no Tulare, California, or to no Tacoma, Washington, and he just tore it up, that’s the last I heard about it. Some fella called him from Arizona and asked him why he wasn’t out there, two months ago, and he said he wasn’t coming. And he ain’t heard no more from them. He’s done had his baseball career. He’d been trying to get brought up six years, and flubbed his one chance he got.”
“You think that makes him happy?”
“Makes me happy,” she said. “That’s who I watch out for. Let him worry about W.W.”
A breeze picked up off the fields and dragged through the weeds and raised the flesh on his arm.
“What’re you doing at E-laine?” she said.
“Running folks off an old man’s island. It ain’t much.”
“How long you thinking about?”
“Turkey season. A week.”
“You done had it with Jackie?”
“I don’t know,” he said, thinking about it. “I don’t think so.”
“You’re just like me, Robard,” she said, smiling as though a perfect picture of something had formed in her mind.
“What’s that?” he said.
She laughed and pushed back so that her bare spine was against the wale of the truck and she could see him straight. “You want to screw who you want to screw. But there’s a difference, too.”
“What’s that?”
“It don’t bother me,” she said.
“How come you think it bothers me?”
“Cause you got a dead-dog look, like you was afraid of something,” she said, and smiled.
“I ain’t bothered about nothing,” he said, feeling aggravated.
“There’s something,” she said. “I could tell on the phone, and I’ll tell you something else, too.”
“What’s that?”
“I don’t give a shit.” Her face got taut, as though something had frozen it in stone. Though as she was frowning, it began to leach away and her lips drifted forward a little and she sighed against the breeze. “Robard,” she said in a small voice.
“What?”
“It wouldn’t take nothin else for me to be happy.”
“What else is there?” he said.
She slid on her hands and knees until her head was laid against his leg and her body curved around his feet. “Get me a divorce,” she said, lifting her eyes and smiling until she looked pretty.
“Look here,” he said.
“It don’t matter.” She reached and grabbed him and pulled. “When can we go to Memphis?”
“When I get done working.”
“All right,” she said, beginning to kiss the muscle up his thighs. “I love it, Robard, I love this so much.”
Somewhere in the air the hawk made a dipping turn toward the defile of trees at the border of the field, where the air was thicker, and cried, and Beuna looked up, as though she were hung on the fine edge of disappearing.
6
He drove back after midnight, parked the truck, and took the boat across. A long grainy strand of mist hung above the water and the boat slid smoothly into the hidden space beneath it. At the island he beached the boat, turned it on its top, and stood out on the shingle looking back through the willows into the mist. He could hear one of Gaspareau’s hounds strike a rabbit in the woods and get joined by all the others, until they were all silenced by a sharp blat sound and then quiet eased out on the long bend of water and captured everything and held it suspended.
He tried to fathom what had ruined her. It seemed like she could rule her life to the point of perfect control, which was the point of purest despair, and after that she had lost it all and suffered as if something indispensable had been grabbed away so quick she didn’t know she had had it or ever could have controlled it. And that ruined her.
He didn’t like the idea that whatever had turned her life into a hurricane had turned his the same way and made a part of his own existence sag out of control down
into the sink of unmanageables. Because if nothing else was clear, he thought now, that much was. Either by diligence or intuition or just good luck he had brought his life to order. And it satisfied him that doing it hadn’t called on anything more than his own good instincts.
She had had him drive the road to Marvell, toward Little Rock, and pointed to the side of the road at a little gravel spin-out that dipped into the trees, and had him stop. At the bottom of a path leading off in the dark he could see a pine lean-to opened to the highway. She said she wanted a quarter, and got out and went down and stood up under the shelter, and he heard the coin drop inside a tin can and she materialized out of the trees.
“What was it?” he said when she got back inside.
“The Gospel Nook,” she said as if she thought he ought to know what it was.
“What the hell is that?”
“Where you go pray for whatever you want,” she said. “Whenever you want. That’s why they put it out in the open.”
“What’d you pray for?” he said, amused by the whole business. He took another look and saw the shape looked like an outside toilet.
“My soul,” she said.
“What’s wrong with it?” He pulled the truck around back onto the road and aimed it toward town.
“Nothin,” she said. “But if I got one, I want it took care of right.”
“Why didn’t you pray for Robard?” he said, feeling good and skinning his hand up the soft inside of her legs.
“I prayed for him,” she said. “I give a quarter to St. Jude.”
“Who’s he?” he said.
“The one for the lost causes,” she said. “They got a list of saints stuck to the wall. I don’t know nothin about them. What difference does it make to you?”
“It don’t make one in the world,” he said.
“That there’s why I done it,” she said.
Part IV
Sam Newel
1
He heard Robard go down the steps, walk to the Gin Den, pick up the gun and the box of bullets, and leave. Somewhere back of the house Mr. Lamb started yelling for the colored man to start the other jeep, and in a few minutes he heard Robard head back up the road in a hurry.