A Piece of My Heart

by Richard Ford

  But that was part of the uncertainty, since W.W. was never one to stay at a thing longer than it took somebody, like Gaspareau, to convince him to do something else. He might just have mooned at the island awhile, surmised there wasn’t any use going over, satisfied himself on one inspection of the truck and all its contents, getting a good enough look so he’d remember it if he ever saw it again, and gone home and stationed himself where, when he saw the same truck slip out of some alley, he could let go with whatever artillery he had to let go with.

  Which brought up the prize question. Just how was it W. got caught on in the first place? It wasn’t likely anybody had been at the post office to see the goings-on, and less likely around when he brought her back, since he’d have heard about it by now from Beuna herself. And there was no reason he could figure Gaspareau to be suspicious, at least not enough to hold his own private investigation and come up with precisely the right man and bring him to the camp, then go to all the trouble to stand right up in the rain and concoct a bald-headed lie about some “stranger” he’d caught, since that would just alert him and give him the chance to get out of town. And as foul a soul as lived in Gaspareau, the bastard just wouldn’t have gone to the trouble, and he knew it.

  Which only left her. Which wasn’t smart either, since it was her wanted a trip to Memphis, a shower bath in the Peabody Hotel, and a chance to show her trick. And he figured she wouldn’t ruin that just before she got to spring it, since it seemed like the climax to something everlastingly important to her whole life.

  He drove up the hill to West Helena. The hill was grown up in Kudzu. The road took a short pass below the lip of the bluff before turning up onto it, and he could see back on the town, darkening, the rain glossing the dusk, little furry lights socketed into the train yards, a necklace of vapor lights draped through the heart of things. In the jade sky the rain hung out darkly over the bottoms, a smear of storm and thunderhead sweeping into Mississippi, the bridge in the distance catching the spangles of low sunlight. He made the gloomy turn into West Helena wondering if the getting would get any gooder than it was right now.

  The town was only a couple of poorly lit streets. Each ran a short way in opposite directions and quit. There was a brick millinery, a drugstore, a domino room, and the Razorback Theater, which looked like it might be going. The other fronts that weren’t boarded looked empty. A John Deere was closed on the corner. He thought there had been some people with French names back along the bevel of the hill away from town, and some rows of houses on the west edge where the Negroes lived who worked in the fields toward Sappho, and who rode to work in the trucks that came up from Helena.

  Two motels were set out past the shanties on the highway beyond the Kold Freez, one for colored, where there were plenty of lights and a lot of long cars with Illinois and New Jersey plates in front of some loud-colored cinder-block rooms. And a quarter mile down, four cabins were strung off the road behind a moving green neon on the shoulder showing two mallard ducks batting the air in three separate figurations of flight.

  The man in the office was drunk. He appeared from behind a bead portiere with a plastic cocktail glass and went searching under the counter for a card without saying a word. He finally just shoved out a key, tried to straighten his shoulders, breathing whiskey into the room, and sauntered back through the portiere, where a television was on and a woman’s voice was talking softly.

  He compared the key to the first door, and found his way to the last cabin, where the weeds were rooted in the sidewalk, and the little building was dark blue and nearly invisible. Bullbats were cutting the air after mosquitoes, croaking up in the night. He could hear their little membranous wings flutter above the burble of the motel sign, get a glimpse of them wheeling close to the ground. When he had worked for Rudolph and had lived in the shack on the sluice gate and listened to the radio at night, he had liked to walk out in the dusk with his shotgun, step across the bridge over the barrow pit, and stand on the old man’s levee and shoot bullbats against the orange twilight, where they showed up like razors, gauging shots to hit two birds crossing and spin them into the moss-trussed reservoir like elm seeds, slapping the surface with their wings until they drowned. And in the morning, he went across the pit and down the levee to close the pumps, and he would look out into the strumpy water and see nothing but black turtles stretched along the deadfalls, sunning themselves in the milky light, and hear the grasshoppers buzz in the grass, and there would be no sign of the bullbats, though they always came in the evenings in greater numbers than before.

  He got in the truck and drove back to the Negro motel, where he had seen a cold-drink machine on the outside. He bought a root beer and a package of Nabs, and stood in the drink-machine light listening to music and voices sliding out of the rooms. Parked in front of each door was a dark automobile with an out-of-state plate, the rear ends weighted almost to the gravel with whatever was in the trunk. He remembered seeing heavy cars on the road to Los Angeles, full of black babies and mean-mouthed in-laws packed in the back seats, gawking at the desert as if it were all part of a long dream. And down the road two miles you’d find the cars crippled on the shoulder, one fender hoisted, the wives and in-laws and babies standing off from the roadway fanning themselves while some skinny husband wrestled with a tire, his pink shirt black with perspiration, listening to the radio as the cars whipped by. It was always a joke. They had enough credit for the car, but not enough to finance the tires. So they took a chance. And those big Buicks and Lincolns broke down all the way across the country for lack of tread rubber, which was the last thing a nigger wanted to think about when he got the notion to take off.

  He ate the last cracker and bent and fingered the tread on the car nearest the truck. It was thick and warm and deep enough to lose a nickel in. He took a drink of his root beer and tapped the tire with his toe and went back.

  He backed the truck up to the cabin door and let himself in. The room was damp and smelled hot like the room they had put the old man in. The ceiling fixture gave out a grainy light. He opened the bathroom, inspected the shower, and pulled up the casement to let a breeze circulate the mildew air out of the room. He washed his face, turned the light off, and stood in the window, letting his skin dry. No cars were running the road. The lot was empty. The ducks’ wings were buzzing in a soft green haze of light, and someone had turned on the red NO sign. He took off his shirt, lay on the bedspread, and let the breeze settle on his stomach and soothe his legs.

  He could rent a big Pontiac, he thought. He could get a big room at Manhattan Beach, have a swim and see the movies, and come back while she was excited and love her like he hadn’t been off, make her forget it, say how everything comes down to choice. One day you think you never even made a choice and then you have to make one, even a wrong one, just so you’re sure you’re still able. And once that’s over, you can go back and be happy again with what you were before you started worrying. Though she’d say it wasn’t like that at all, he thought, since women tied themselves to men like men wanted to tie themselves to the world. But if he could make her see that, he could still make her happy, on account of choosing her after he had already had her when there wasn’t any reason to have her now except he wanted to. He lit a cigarette and smudged it and blew the smoke up and watched it sag off in the breeze. He could hear the duck sign buzzing outside. There was some mystery to Beuna still, some force that drew him, made him want to find her out, like a man plundering a place he knows he shouldn’t be but can’t help but be for the one important thing he might find. Something pulled him, over the squeezing and weltering that he thought he could just as easily dispense with now and would if there were some other way to get that close to her. Except that that was all she allowed and cared about and would just as soon for her own pleasures dispense with all that he wanted to save. W.W. came in his mind with the idea that she wanted to punish him and punish herself with one more thing she couldn’t have. Then he forgot it. His eyes closed and h
e slid backward in the breeze, and heard one fast car hiss through his mind and disappear down the road, and then he let it all go.

  4

  The radiator began to tick and whomp at three o’clock, and when he woke up it was daylight and his head was cottony as though the heat were a drug he’d taken to sleep. He put on his shirt and walked out in the lot. Clouds had pushed out ahead of the wind, and the sky was plush, delving over into itself creating a stiff wool of low mist. He thought it would rain.

  He walked to the office to ask the time. The clerk’s face looked withered. His hair was stood up in back, and he had to close one eye as if he couldn’t focus them both but still needed to be able to see. He told the clerk he was leaving for a while and coming back and would be another night. The office smelled like hot coffee.

  “If it had come up cool last night, you would’ve been hollerin for that heat,” the man said, fingering a styrofoam cup and looking sad.

  “Don’t matter,” he said.

  “If you like the weather this time a year, you just wait ten minutes,” the man said, and displayed a wound that had enlarged one side of his mouth and made it gap wide open when he smiled. “It’s gonna rain on us today,” he said, as if he understood it hadn’t rained in weeks.

  He wished he had some coffee.

  “What part of California you from?” the man said, sniffing. His shirt was unbuttoned to his belly and a little bleached-out Indian chief was tattooed into the flabby portion of his chest.

  “Bishop.”

  “I went out December ’47, in the Navy,” the clerk said, gravely staring down at his cup. “Stayed till”—he stopped to count it up—“four years ago. Come back and bought this.” He looked around the little office, admiring it. The man bent over the counter farther and cradled his cup in both hands. “I ain’t getting rich and I ain’t kissin ass.” He raised his eyebrows significantly. “Had me a putt-putt up in Oceanside. But she never liked it in San Diego cause of the spics.”

  He tried to steal a look behind the portiere to see the man’s wife, who might, he figured, know Beuna, and be somebody who practiced recognizing the backs of people’s heads just as they disappeared through motel room doors, and grabbed the phone the second she saw something the least bit interesting. “How’s she like it?” he said, trying to get a good look in through the beads.

  The man ran his hand through his slick hair. “She’s gone to Little Rock to visit her sister,” he said, and concocted a wry little smile on his ruined mouth and let his eyes roam the ceiling. “I’m ex-Navy.” The left corner of his mouth looked red and embarrassing.

  “Yeah,” he said. He pulled out his postcard, laid it on top of the glass, beneath which were a lot of other postcards, picked up the motel’s plastic pen and scratched a note that said: “Be to home Tuesday.”

  The man opened a drawer, tore off a stamp, and pushed it across the counter. “I stuck all them under there from people who’s stayed here,” he said proudly. “They come in and spend the night, a couple of weeks later I get a card from Delray Beach, saying how nice it was in the Two Ducks.” He finished his coffee and wiggled his cup in his hand and looked up in a comradely way. “I’m made hopeful,” he said.

  “Yeah,” he said. He stuck the extra postage to the card, thinking it would get there before he could get there himself, and stuffed it in his pocket. “What time you got?”

  The man consulted his wrist watch. “Four to.” He smiled and the corner of his mouth flapped down like the entrance to a bad place.

  He drove off the hill and onto the little gravel streets of white mill houses with board-step porches and pink hydrangeas to hide the water meters. The street was bothered a distance by some young failing mimosas, but across the business spur the trees had been hacked down and a Red Ball store put up, and after that it was business to Main Street.

  He turned a block before Main and drove to the south end, to a row of feed warehouses and the Phillips County Co-op, where the street ended in a weed lot, then turned up to Main and drove back the direction he’d come.

  The street made him nervous right away. He knew the townspeople had gotten the forecast and got their business over and gone home, leaving him out by himself. The sky was higher, but the town seemed sunk and gray, only thin veins of light leaking into the air. He tried not to look sideways until he saw the old man’s maroon Continental angled into a row of pickups, with Landrieu slumped in the driver’s seat trying to stay out of sight. The car was stopped in front of an old two-story glass and granite building that had “R. M. Knox” stenciled on several of the windowpanes. Just as he passed he tried to see inside, but couldn’t make out anything but a high metal desk and a secretary walking around in a skinny skirt holding a flower vase. She disappeared into where the glass was darkened, and he wondered what finalities Mrs. Lamb was making for the old man, whether she already had him moved off the island back to Mississippi, or whether there were laws against hauling bodies across the line, which was why she needed R. M. Knox. It all seemed like someplace he hadn’t ever been but knew about, something away from his life altogether now.

  Two men outside the bank regarded him casually and he raised a hand, and one of them waved and smiled and went back to talking.

  He started watching the other side of the block, where there was a Pure station, the Red Ball storefront, and a cotton broker. The street was almost deserted. A Negro man was stopped looking at the sky and a pregnant white girl walked inside the Red Ball pushing a stroller.

  And then he saw Beuna, past the corner, standing outside a lawn mower store, one foot on the curb and one square in the mouth of the gutter, looking like a white peony blossom.

  Beuna was got up in a white gauze dress with a sateen boat top that looped down on top of her breasts. The dress then belled out to make a gauze skirt with lacy flounces down to her knees. She had on a pair of red shoes and a wide red belt that almost matched, and that was cinched so he wondered if she could breathe or had simply been standing at the curb all morning with her breath inside her trying not to turn blue. The dress had tiny straps holding it up, and she was carrying a big white patent purse. Her hair was down on her shoulders and bunched under, and she was smiling a big rougy smile as if she thought somebody was standing ready to take her picture.

  He let the truck creep across the intersection, checking the mirror and aiming straight down the gutter to where she had her foot. He popped the door as he got clear of the cross street, and she had to get back to miss being smacked.

  She sweetened her big airport smile so he could see her teeth were frowzed with lipstick.

  “How am I?” She spread her legs so he could see through the gauze and make out everything.

  “Like a har-lot,” he said, feeling angry.

  She licked her lips. “Don’t I look like a kid?”

  “You look like a whore,” he said. He took another look at the mirror.

  “Don’t I look like a young girl, Robard?”

  “Goddamn it, get your ass in or I’m leaving you for them hard dicks to pick over.” He flashed at the mirror, expecting to see four or five men charging up the street.

  Her head declined and she quit swinging her purse, and he could see a weal of flesh appear under her chin. She got in the truck and closed the door. “What was it you said I looked like?”

  He could smell a sweet gardenia perfume over everything. “A harlot.” He nudged the truck off from the curb, catching a glimpse of the spectators in front of the bank. They seemed not to be paying attention to anything but a blue and white state police car passing along the street.

  “What’s a harlot?” she said.

  “A slut,” he snapped, watching the police car intently while he slipped through the next crossing.

  “Oh,” she said, and slumped her purse in her lap and poked her hands through the strap. “I thought I’d look like I looked when you and me knew one another at Willard’s.”

  “What come of Willard?” he said. He turned
off Main in the direction of the bluff. The trooper cruised by toward Memphis. The street changed back to low-porch bungalows with old Chevies in the yard and motors hung up on chain pulleys.

  “Him and her went,” she said, nibbling a fleck of lipstick and spreading it over another tooth. “He took empyzema or some such and went to Tucson.” She looked dissatisfied. “I don’t write ’em nothin. I just write you.” She pushed her lower lip out and made a face.

  He started looking for a drop box on the street. He turned back to the street he had come in on, then up toward the hill. At the first corner, he aimed the truck across, slid in under the spout, and dropped the card in the slot.

  “What the hell was that about?” she said.

  “Jackie.”

  “Saying what about?”

  “I was coming.”

  “Huh,” she snorted.

  He pulled back onto the road.

  “You and me’s going to Memphis, Tennessee, tonight, buster,” she said. “I got me some plans that’ll keep you out of circulation tonight.” She looked cagey.

  “We’ll see,” he said.

  “What do you mean, ‘We’ll see’?” she said. “I’m going to be in the Peabody Ho-tel tonight looking out the window at the Union Planters Bank, or by God I ain’t going to be no place at all.” She glared, hiked her skirt, and crossed her legs.

  The truck went a ways along a slip fault in the bluff, and the cotton fields began to be visible, opening away to the river toward the south. From the distance it was impossible to tell the fields were flooded and gummed, and everything looked dark and tilled, ready for planting.