by Richard Ford
“I got to pick up some stuff,” he said.
She faced front, her cheeks pale as if in looking out at the river bottom she had seen something that made her unhappy.
The road made a turn over the bluff into West Helena. An old man on a ladder was changing the letters on the Razorback marquee and had put the word BLOW into place, hunting in a cardboard box for the members of some other word. The bottom line said OPEN SAT MAT.
One or two people were on the street, hurrying to and from the Skelley station. The sky made it seem like the aftermath of some public alarm.
“I hate it up here,” she said, looping her purse around her wrist and glowering out the window. He was silent. “They’s a Kold Freez up here,” she said. “Pull in, I want me one.”
He drove past the motel where the cars had been the night before, everything all gone, and the light in the soda machine was off, and the motel looked as if it had been shut up.
“That there’s the gambling joint,” she said, staring disinterestedly at the motel. “Niggers cut one another up there and pay off the sheriff.”
The Kold Freez was off on the left, in the middle of a rectangular lot that let the cars drive all the way around.
“Gimme a quarter,” she said, throwing open the door.
He fished out a quarter and she sauntered up to the window. A sign above the window said DOGS • BOATS • SLUSHES. One of the girls inside shoved up the screen slide and stuck her head in the opening to see out. Beuna spoke, and the girl stood up and stared at him through both wide panes of glass, then turned around and filled a paper cup from a big silver machine and delivered it to the window-way, where Beuna was leaning, staring up the road and fanning herself with her hand. The girl stood and looked at him again, brushing back a strand of strawberry hair out of her eyes, then disappearing behind the machinery into the private rooms of the building.
Beuna shoveled down in her seat with her knees on the dashboard, drinking something out of the cup with a striped straw. “Wasn’t no change,” she said.
He drove to the motel, backed into the last cabin, and cut off the motor.
“Is this the dump you’re stayin in?” Beuna said, surveying the lot over the window sill, having another sip on her straw.
“Come on in for a minute.”
“My ass, too.” She threw the cup of ice out the window.
“I don’t want nobody to see us,” he said.
“This here’s a goddamned cathouse,” she said loudly, and shot out her lip. “Brashears don’t give a shit if you take a goddamn sheep in here. He knows. You paid for a double.”
“I ain’t paid it,” he said softly, and looked up at the office.
A truck of Negroes passed, headed for Marvell, men all standing against the side slats peering out like convicts. One of them yelled at the truckdriver and waved his hat, and he could hear the rest of them laughing, and the driver honked the horn and some of the others took up whooping.
Beuna looked through the side window, her head turned so her chin looked like part of her breasts. He grabbed her arm suddenly and pulled her over and kissed her on the mouth, but she kept her arms unbent and her neck stiff, and when he looked at her she was staring at him, a smile trying to figure on her lips. He ran his tongue behind his teeth. “What the hell’s got the matter with you?” he said. He took another grip on her arm until he could see white radiating away from his fingers.
Her eyes got big and her pupils flattened and welled up, and she started to tremble and moaned. “I don’t know you,” she said, losing her breath, tears pearling off her face, disappearing between her breasts.
“Yes you do,” he said. “You know me, sugar.”
She gulped. “I thought we was going, and we ain’t,” she said, and covered her face with her hands. “We’re just going in that room.”
He pushed his thumb up through his eyebrows and stared at the floor. “Everything didn’t work out just right.”
“Why can’t we?” she moaned.
“I can’t be running off now to no Memphis,” he said.
“I can,” she bawled, another gout of tears breaking loose, flooding her cheeks.
“I want to, sugar, but it’s just some things can’t be.”
“You little bastard,” she said. “You ruin everything for me, tearing up my hopes.”
“Come inside,” he said softly, looking back up at Brashears’ office, turning the door catch behind him.
He led her in where it was cool and green shadows. The bed was jumbled and his sack of clothes was dumped on the chair. The light in the bathroom was on and Beuna went in and shut the door.
He took off his boots and listened to her rattling things in the sink and running the toilet. He looked for a radio but there wasn’t one. He wished he had some coffee and a sandwich, and decided that after a little while they could drive out to Marvell and get groceries and bring them back. He peeked out the curtain and saw his truck alone in the cool rain breeze. The sky was smoky, and the sun had inched higher into the clouds. A black Cadillac passed toward town and disappeared beyond the two ducks.
Beuna emerged, her lips swollen from crying and her dress flapping in the back. She had left the light burning and stopped so it was behind her and he could make out the silhouettes.
“I ain’t mad at you,” she said, and sniffed. “It don’t make no difference about no Peabody. I wanted to look like a young girl to you, to take to Memphis with you. But it don’t matter.”
He watched her legs shift and twitch behind the gauze dress, and felt everything floating.
“Come here,” she said. She pulled one hand from behind her, holding a little bag in her fingers.
He came to where she was and she clenched her hands behind his head and kissed him on the mouth and forced his lips back against his teeth so that his ears whirred. He got a hand at the bottom of her spine and moved her legs and she held his head and squeezed.
“You come in,” she said, breathing in big gulps. She led him into the fluorescent bathroom light and turned on the shower and held her hand in until it was warm and steam started spreading.
“What is it?” he said, looking around at the moist plaster.
“Skin off,” she said, and let her dress slide forward off her breasts.
He unbuckled his pants and let them down while she unbuttoned his shirt and pushed it off his shoulders.
The room was full of warm steam crowding out of the tub around his chin, though the floor tiles were cold and hard. It made him feel faint. He wiped the mirror and saw sweat sprouting on his forehead, his eyes pale and unfocused, and he wished he could get outside.
Beuna stood in the tub kneeling on the porcelain, water bouncing off her head, soaking her hair and beading up around her knees.
“C’mere,” she said in a voice that reverberated on the tiles.
He took a step up to where she was holding the plastic sandwich bag and reaching out. “What is all this?” he said, trying to smile.
“. . . this in my mouth,” she said, waggling the bag in the circulating water. “And I want you to go.”
“To what?” he said, straining to see her in the steam and not comprehending what it was she was getting set to do.
“You know,” she said, letting the softened bag empty of water.
He took a step back and got hold of the round of the sink to keep from falling on his back. “What’s the matter with you?” he said.
“I want to, Robard!” she shouted.
“Want to, shit!” He backed another step until his bare behind got out into the cool air circulating off the sleeping room, and almost made him turn around.
“Yes, yes, yes!” she screamed. “You have to!” She shook her hair and closed her eyes.
He got around and out the door while she began doing something he couldn’t think to watch.
5
He lay staring at the amber fruit bowl on the ceiling, thinking about getting out.
Beuna stood fitting her
self back into her white dress. “I used to sit sometimes, conjure I married you instead of him,” she said, her voice straining from drawing on the zipper. “He’s so goddamned dull, you know. I thought, if I just hadn’t married him, me and Robard mighta lived no telling where. Up in Memphis maybe. Oklahoma City, someplace besides a goddamn mobile home.” She shook out her hair. “I had that wrong. I’da ended up out in some goddamn tacky desert living in some tacky little house that ain’t fit for nothin. That’s cause you ain’t nothin, Robard.” She looked at him contemptuously, got a fresh hold of the zipper, and ran it up.
He lay staring at the globe, trying to keep her out.
“I told him you was here.” She pulled the strap of her shoe over her heel.
He raised off the pillow. “What was it?”
“I told him you was at E-laine,” she said absently. “I said you worked at E-laine, and I seen you, and you said hi.”
He stood up and went to the window and took a look out where he could see the truck, the first fat splots of rain just hitting the hood. He gazed at her in the low shadows. “What the shit did you do that for?”
She kept working her shoe strap up and down. “So he’d hate it,” she said, “worry I had me something he couldn’t do nothin about. I thought we was going to Memphis anyway.”
He peered out the window again, expecting to see W.W. standing in the rain. “What’d he do about it?” he said.
She walked to the edge of the fluorescent light. “Nothin,” she said, “except make me go out to that beer bar with him and get drunk and act mean. I don’t like it.”
“Get your goddamn clothes on,” he said.
“They are on.” She picked up her purse and stood beside the bathroom.
“Then come on.” He grabbed up the sack of clothes, opened the door, and stuck his head out in the rain.
Inside the truck, big gray drops were smacking the roof. He took a look up the road and around the lot on either side. He looked suspiciously in at Brashears’ office. “Is he playing ball?” he said.
She looked at her nails and brushed the crystals of water out of her hair. “Less they got rained on,” she said.
He backed the truck around and started out on the highway.
It didn’t seem right that this ought to happen, that he ought to be still worried about getting caught so close to going. It should have been a nice couple of hours and been over with. He wished there had been time to eat.
“You know what the bastard done to me last night?” Beuna said, forgetting everything.
He kept his eyes on the road, which was slick and black in the rain. The row of pink cinder-blocks shot by and he watched at the corner of the last cabin, but no one was there, and he pushed the truck a little, as the first of the dumpy buildings came closer.
Beuna pulled her skirt over her knees and crossed her legs sideways. “He made me go with him to that damned Blue Goose out there where he works, made me sit out there and drink Falstaff beer while he loused around with his nitwit friends till twelve o’clock. And you know what else?”
He couldn’t talk to her. The man on the movie marquee had given up in the rain and had left the west side blank, except for the OPEN SAT MAT in the right corner out over the street.
“What kind of car you got?”
“Shit-old Plymouth,” she said. “They give it to him when he played baseball. I wanted an Impala, but he wouldn’t say nothin.”
“What color?” The road twisted down the face of the bluff, went straight a ways, then angled south along the face of the grade. The Kudzu looked almost black in the heavy light.
“Dark green. Grunt green. Let me tell you, though, what the bastard done to me. Him and his big buddy Ronald commenced playing pool while I was sitting over in the corner minding my business pretending to drink that horse piss. And course they both got piss drunk and started missing the balls and laughing and pouring it on one another. Then all to once they seen another friend of theirs named Tooky Dyre, and he come in and sat at the bar and watched ’em like they was twin monkeys. And W. went over to where he was and whispered something in his ear. And in a little while Tooky come over where I was, and I don’t hardly even know him, cause he is a whole lot younger than me. He come up and reached in his pocket and took out a quarter and laid it on the table right in front of me, and just looked over at W. and said, ‘I’ll be next on this table.’ And they all just died, like I was a damned pool table they all played on.” She looked disgusted. “You think I’m a pool table, Robard?”
“I don’t know what you are.”
“That’s sweet,” she said. She opened her purse, took out a book, and started reading. The book had a photograph of a naked girl on the cover, swinging on a trapeze above a bunch of men in clown costumes.
He wanted just to let her out where there wouldn’t be anybody to pay attention, and get out of town as quick as he could. The hill road wound down into the same muddy streets with the little postage-stamp lots and one-step weed porches that ran all the way back to the middle of town. At every crossing he looked down the street to see if he could see W.’s Plymouth, but there wasn’t anything to see down any of them. He had his old picture of W. framed up in his mind again, inside the little pink bungalow in Tulare, wandering room to room in his white and orange uniform like he had a quince in his mouth and couldn’t get it spit out. He had left out the back screen in the middle of the night and driven back to Bishop without a minute’s sleep.
“Where’m I taking you to?”
“Turn right,” she said.
“Where we going?”
“I’ll show you,” she said, flipping a page in her book and biting off a sliver of fingernail.
He went down a block, and encountered a street exactly like the one they’d been on, low-roofed wood houses with cars in the yards, leading to town. He could see the docks at the Piggly Wiggly and didn’t see anything was unusual, except a queasy feeling in his chest like a sound he couldn’t hear setting up vibrations in various of his organs. His heart had begun to bump the wall of his ribs. He wished now he had hung on to the old man’s pistol instead of laying it in the Gin Den, since it might do him some good if things all of a sudden got hot.
In the next block the street got bad, and the old houses changed into little farms, with stumpy Bermuda lots ending in woods, and chickens and goats penned inside little square-wire fences. The rain had made the small animals go back inside the pens. A goat was standing in the rain, grazing nonchalantly, staring at nothing. The road slipped into a clump of gum trees and he could see where the first driveway opened right, though couldn’t see any more buildings for the gum trees.
“Where we going?” he said, watching the mirror and seeing nothing but pillowy clouds shielding the light.
“Home,” she said, closing the book and dropping it in her bag and giving him a big red smile.
The truck cruised to the end of a red dirt drive and he could see a trailer up amongst the stumps of the gum trees, set on cinder blocks with a propane tank at one end. W.W.’s Plymouth sat empty at the corner nearest the woods. There seemed to be a lot of sawdust on the ground from the cutting.
It made him furious. “Get the fuck out!” he shouted, reaching past her and shoving the door open, letting in the rain.
“I wasn’t going to walk in no rain,” she said, picking up the red pump she had let dangle off her toe. He raised his foot over the seat and kicked her in the shoulder and drove her straight out, sprawling onto the wet clay, her purse strewn over the seat and littering on the ground. Her red shoe was still inside, and he grabbed it and threw it out where she was just getting turned around in the mud, her hair smudged against her forehead and her gauze skirt up over her waist, showing her bare behind to the rain.
He revved the engine. She had one hand in the purse, pressing it down onto the mud, and the other fouled in several plastic sandwich bags that had spilled out. Mud clung to her eyebrows and under her chin. “You shit lick!”
&
nbsp; “It ain’t me!” he yelled. “It’s you, goddamn it, that had to do it.” He hit the gas again.
Out the end of the trailer came W., dressed in a bright orange and blue baseball suit, his hair cropped like an onion, his long arms supporting a short little rifle that looked half the size of any gun he’d ever seen before.
He watched the rifle through the open door as W. came thrashing, trying to make out just exactly what it was, and deciding it was a BB gun. He gave W. an interested look, and pulled the truck slowly down into first. W. W. suddenly dropped to one knee, fitted the gun to his shoulder, and fired one loud round that broke in the passenger’s ventilator and went out his own window, filling the cab with a fine spray of glass, leaving both windows with ugly pucker-shaped holes and the rest of the panes intact. Beuna started shrieking, “Shoot him, shoot him,” and he let the clutch snap off his shoe and pinned down the accelerator until the floorboard began giving way under his feet, and the truck started bucking like a buffalo, and him shoveling himself in the corner ducking another shot, glass sprouting out the side of his cheek like tiny trees in a forest.
A dozen yards by the trailer the road offered one alternative to going back, and he twisted off to the left and went careening back in the direction of town. He took a fast look back and saw W.W.’s green Plymouth wallowing out the drive, exhaust furring the ground, the gun barrel stuck at an angle out the driver’s window. He could just glimpse Beuna, who had simply crawled to one side of the driveway to let the car get by, still sprawled in the wreckage of her white dress, looking as if she had dropped there out of the sky.
The roadbed ran out through another patch of gums, past a second sector of farm lots and rained-over houses that weren’t meant to be farms, with the goats and low-roofed chicken houses alone in the little scratches of stumpy acreage.
In the mirror, W.W. came skidding, the Plymouth flailing in the wet clay, already losing distance.