by Richard Ford
She didn’t look at him. “Yeah, it’s a shit hole,” she said.
One of the wheelchair women was straining toward the TV monitors with a stack of green show tickets under her watchband, and her jaw swinging, unable to be still. It wanted to smile when there wasn’t anything to smile about. He was nervous the woman had Rae in hock for her clothes.
“Well, since you liked it so much, how about let’s go again?” he said in a hurry.
Rae frowned at the woman in the electric wheelchair. “There’s a lot of geeks around here, aren’t there?” she said.
Quinn had on new fawn whipcords and an eighty-dollar handmade silk shirt from Charnet Street in Bangkok, and he guessed she had him down for a loser trying to get fucked free. But that was going to be her worry.
“You think I’m turned out, don’t you?” Rae said, looking up at the monitor again.
“Of course not,” he said. The wheelchair woman was buzzing toward them. She had a wrist watch on each arm, and they made him feel like his own time was getting short.
“I’m really a scientist doing research on assholes,” Rae said and shook her hair out. “I thought this was the best place to find them, what do you think?”
“What about Mississippi?” he said and smiled at her. “I don’t have all day.”
Rae looked at him in a weary way that made her face burnt out. She knew he’d already figured something out and she was just trying to decide what difference it made if he was right and how seriously she was going to have to take him. She looked up at the monitor, where the track was empty and motionlessly pink, then back up the long line of payoff windows with green and yellow blinking lights signaling the high rollers with good tickets. “We’ll just talk, right?” she said cruelly, and let her win tickets flutter away. “I can have my luggage sent on later.”
They spent the next six days in a roomette in Mississippi City, facing Route 90 and the Gulf. Rae had two ounces of Mexican hash, and Quinn had the best part of nine hundred dollars, and they stayed out on the shell beach every day until dark, then drove in to Biloxi to the bars. Late at night in the room they’d get loaded and drink beer and dance to Chicago radio until early in the morning when Quinn could get to sleep without pills.
Rae said she was a landscape painter from New York. She had spent six years after Brooklyn Academy living in Taos with a boy from New Rochelle who made adobe houses and sold hashish to skiers. She said she was thinking about opening a shop when he got busted and sent to Santa Fe, and she had come down to Tesuque to wait, and got a job caseworking on the Nambe pueblo and teaching grammar-school kids to paint mountain sunsets. She said casework was a lot like being in jail, except hotter, and she hated it, and after a year she got tired of being by herself and moved into Santa Fe with a bureau lawyer who was a Rosebud Sioux from Yale interested in politics and not too smart, but who had a big house and a Mercedes and wanted to marry a white woman. She said she got along with the lawyer until he decided he wanted her to have his baby, and hassled her so that she ended up having to treat him like any other fucked up Indian on her case list with obsessions about never dying, and she began drinking and taking too much mescaline and finally quit visiting the boy in prison, and thought about moving back to Long Island. But one morning she just left with a guy she’d met at a charity rodeo, another Indian, a better one, she said, a Ute named Frank Oliver from Lewiston, Washington, who was an ex-convict, a saddle bronc rider, and a car thief, who laughed all the time and had plenty of money and didn’t care about being immortal if he didn’t have to die right away.
Frank Oliver drove a big blue and silver Southwind that he’d stolen, with a painting of Mount Rainier on both sides and a two-stall horse trailer (a get-up she said they used to laugh about every day), and he pulled the trailer around the country to stock shows and rodeos, wherever he could ride broncs and strip cars for parts. The Southwind had a big stereo and red velour swivel chairs and indirect light, and she said the whole thing surprised her about herself, but she had discovered Cabet and spent one straight four-month period inside the RV, painting landscapes out the window, reading and getting stoned in the mornings with Frank, and riding through towns trying to draw a good mental picture of whatever she’d been doing for seven years and not been able to stay exactly current with. She said she just suddenly got frantic in Santa Fe and had to cut loose from everything responsible, so that it didn’t matter if she lived in a trailer or a house or who she lived with, as long as there wasn’t any trouble and there was some sense of pleasing variety. She said sometimes Frank would come in drunk at night and so banged up from horse falls he couldn’t even laugh, and she’d have to get straight to drive the next day while he laid up and slept long enough to make entry wherever the next town was and get himself connected with whoever was stealing cars. And she said on those days, when Frank was asleep and she was driving, she figured out that what she was doing was simple craziness and nobody in his right mind would be doing it, but it was all she could bear to think about longer than a minute.
Rae said her brother was in Los Angeles playing Industrial leagues basketball and her father was a landscape painter in Bay Shore, and that she didn’t have any plans. She said she could have stayed with Frank or not stayed with him, and that while it wasn’t necessarily any good, it wasn’t necessarily bad either. Until Frank broke his reins hand in a calf rope in Houston and had to lay off riding. She told Frank she would go to work painting street portraits if he’d buy her an easel and some brushes, and instead he had driven them to New Orleans and gotten in touch with an Italian he knew who was exclusively stealing Alfa Romeos and loading them on boats to Venezuela, and told her she didn’t have to work and put her up in the Monteleone Hotel. Though after the first week he’d gotten busted, and when Rae bailed him out of the Orleans Parish jail she told him something would have to change or she was splitting, and he had taken her to the dog track and stood her under the TV monitor in the middle of the main pavilion and told her that when she got ready to, she could start making money the best way she could, using the Southwind out at the end of the parking lot under the row of palmettos.
She smiled at Quinn in the half-light and stretched her long arm up into the cool shadows. “I was resisting not being young anymore. I was almost thirty. It’s textbook. It’s my penance.” She was just waiting to find the reason not to take him seriously, but she had a sweet unpretending elegance he felt at ease with, and she talked not because she thought it was important, but because they passed the time in an amusing way. “Maybe I’m a bum,” she said. “I just missed being a hippie.”
He could see the little pit fires on Ship Island twinkle in the night like stars. They didn’t remind him of anything, and he was at ease for the first time he could remember. “You can’t call yourself a bum,” he said. “Somebody else has to do that. You don’t get it both ways.”
Rae sighed a long sigh. “But is that what you think about me?” she said, not interested in it. “You’ve been protecting our country’s honor. You should be an authority.”
“I don’t know you well enough,” he said, and ran his hand over her flat stomach.
“No judgments on the first date?”
“I’m not an authority on anything,” he said. “That’s all.”
“That’s nice,” she said, and kissed him sweetly on the mouth. “Don’t let me put any pressure on you. I don’t want to do that. This’ll be over soon enough.”
She told him that when he saw her standing under the monitor she’d been there four hours holding the same win tickets, watching every race and the empty track in between, and trying not to get uptight, but hoping all the time something would come along to improve her prospects before the lights went out. She said turning her out was just Frank’s way of saying good-bye, everybody had a way of saying good-bye, and if when Quinn showed up they’d have gone out and looked for the Southwind with the painting of Mount Rainier, it wouldn’t have been there.
“Those little self-contained systems
just get smaller,” she said, when Quinn was almost asleep. “They’re fine. But they don’t tolerate enough. You know what I mean? You don’t, do you?” He could hear her in a drowse. “They’re like Frank. They make things simple. I thought I could get along with that. I should have figured it out a long time ago that I couldn’t.”
The Fourier she had was a loaner from the New Orleans Public Library, and she left it in a Tote-Sum in Mississippi City and didn’t ask to go back and get it when she found out it was gone.
He was drawn to her. She was his first serious business since he’d come back, and she made him feel hooked up, even if he hadn’t planned on a permanent guest. He wasn’t sure what exactly he was doing with her, but it didn’t feel like the wrong thing, and it beat Route 90 in the Alamo Plaza rolling for beers, hustling fat coon-ass girls, then lurching back drunk at 5:00 A.M. by himself with no place to go but Seconal-land. Rae’d get stoned after midnight with the light on in the little pink hotel room and tell him there was something interesting about him from having been in the war. He didn’t seem, she said, at all ready to kill anybody and loud noises didn’t make him duck. He was like a doctor, she said, who cured exotic diseases and who had some of the disease left on him, but only enough to make her not want to split right away. Splitting, she said, had gotten to be a specialty.
After six days Quinn drove back to Morgan, checked out of the Alamo Plaza, rented a little railroad house on stilts outside the levee up Six Mile Palourde and moved Rae in, then went back running pipe to the rigs on Atchafalaya. Rae hit St. Vincent de Paul’s for furniture, bought an easel, and sat out afternoons drawing from National Geographics and Audubons out of the Parish bookmobile, and playing the Eagles into the cypress swamps, stoned.
There was a feeling Louisiana was just another place for her, like Bay Shore or New Mexico, and she simply adapted right. But he felt like there was some hollow place in him where she made a feeling come at night. Whatever he wanted to do, it seemed like in her judgment she wanted to do it, though it was clear to him it didn’t matter to her who she was with as long as she got adjusted for what she was doing moment to moment. She was locked in present time, he thought, and she was calm and deliberate as if she understood that, even understood the desperation to it, desperation she knew all about and could recognize but didn’t need to acknowledge, as if it was obvious to anybody who knew her and perfectly natural and something to smile about, even if what he felt was the same desperation, only for different reasons.
Sitting out on the high porch with the music, watching her row herself patiently, with long, graceful arms and a green paisley scarf on her head, out into the black water of the Palourde to sit and fish for crappies in the sunshine, he figured she made up what she needed as she went, the complicated parts included now. Nothing got by her. And she seemed older than he was, with a view of the world she had learned to put herself into with ease, and, if he wanted her to do it, could put him in, too, though that wasn’t absolutely necessary to her survival, since she wasn’t waiting for anything else to come along that hadn’t already come once.
After three months with her he took papers as a fitter’s helper and began taking extra days filling spots on the rigs when somebody was slow turning around. It started to make him feel dangerously in something to be in the house seven days, eating and sleeping all alone with her, listening to her mellowed-out music and sitting watching her paint from magazines slowly and calculatedly. Awake at 2:00 A.M. listening to the lizards on the porch and the mosquitoes zizzing through the dense blanket of air, he would start to drift away, and she would suddenly moan out in the darkness and flinch hard and hold him until he couldn’t breathe. And he had to get out of the room and stand on the porch where the air was cooler and get calm. He thought with anybody sooner or later you got to an end point, one last event in a series of events at the end of which there was just a wall of empty air and things got invisible, and then you were in it with them, like it or not, and you had to make up whatever else came along. That was what Frank Oliver had figured out when he left her standing with a handful of win tickets. In the war you maintained your crucial distance from things and that kept you alive, and kept everything out in front of you and locatable. It was why Frank had his cars and his saddle broncs and his Southwind, and why he got scared the moment he even thought he might lose them. He could see all that and negotiate it. He probably hated to lose her. But he saw how much he was losing control with her, and he couldn’t handle it. It was like losing track of a rule, not even that she wanted it lost, but just that she didn’t need a rule herself. And mornings, when he would wake up in the bed, he’d be sweating and as far away from her as he could be, his shoulders and his fingers aching, his head full of noise. And he’d lie in the grey swamp light, feel her breathing, and wish he could move off on some other safer plane of existence, someplace maybe not too far, but far enough to be safe.
On the rig they told him that in L.A. if he could make the airplane factories and the Exxon rigs up the Catalina Channel and kept his name alive, something would pop open in a month. He had eight thousand in the Morgan Bank, and if he stayed four more months he could double it on layoffs, and if you were taking chances what you needed was money. But he thought he needed to make a move. If he was going to stay with Rae—and he wanted to—he needed to get someplace where there was a legitimate outside and where the outside risks were higher than the inside ones. Because where he was now all the risks were the kind you couldn’t see, and those were the ones that scared him. It was his own doing and not hers, he knew. But everything was your own doing one way or another, and you had to live by yourself with the results at the end.
6
HE FELT FEVERISH for the first time now. His bowels had begun to quease and his mouth was sticky, and he had a sweat up. Sick was dangerous, he knew that. Sick never made you scared, just reluctant, and that was worse. Everybody in Vietnam had been sick, but the rhythm had geared down gradually, and the war had finally been run on sick time. People depended on each other according to sick intervals, watched each other with the expectation of diseased response. But in Mexico it was dangerous. It singled you out. Only assholes who drank water or ate candy off the urethane sheets on the street corners got sick. And he was on top of that. He had put a Halazone in every glass of water and considered every bite before he took it. The one thing you didn’t want to be was sick when things began to happen, and right now he didn’t quite have it.
Bernhardt had let him out in the Centro opposite the statue of Admiral Antonio Leon, facing the west, and drove off to check on Deats, whoever he was. Oaxaca was built to the medium municipal standard of small Mexican cities, two parks and a church, catty-cornered, with an open-air portal squaring everything. Americans drinking at the outdoor tables said you could see everyone in Oaxaca in a matter of an hour, and everyone you ever knew in a year. But that wasn’t enough of an inducement. A group of women had gotten out of a yellow and green tour bus across the zócalo park and were setting up their aluminum easels on the eminence of the cathedral. They were crisp in the way they stood easel legs between the cobbles, as if they had pictured doing it every night for a month. They looked like Americans, and they looked anxious. They intended to paint the cathedral in the straight noon light, which was a mistake, he thought, but it was serious to them.
His stomach began to cramp vigorously, and he walked across the alameda and down Hidalgo to a pharmacy. It was wrong to be in town past noon. Bad light, rain, and then it got lonely, not like an American city, and he wanted to get up the hill to the bungalow and lie down. He bought a plaquette of Lomotils and took three, standing in the farmacia doorway. Bad customers. You took Lomotils furiously in Vietnam, and they shut you down eventually and made you melancholy and forgetful. After a while they were worse than being sick. But he thought with luck he’d be out before his insides collapsed. “Kill the body, the head dies.” It was a joke then.
He walked back up Hidalgo toward where the street
s changed names, to the cabstand. The streets changed names at the Centro and made the town hard to learn. He wanted to wash the prisión smell and the Italian girl off his skin before Rae showed up. And he needed to sleep, to let Sonny settle out. It would be raining in an hour, and he wanted out of the middle of things.
The Centro was crowded, and the streets were noisy and full of motorbike traffic. The air libres on the Portal were all open. Waiters stood in the arcades, snapping white napkins sullenly toward the few empty tables. Quinn walked out of the Portal and into the warm sunlight. There was a thick rain smell out of the park and the center of town felt too active with tourists and American hippies hanging with the Mexicans. There was a sense of anticipation he didn’t like. The fountains were turned on. The Zapotec women were seated on the plaza plaiting their children’s hair, and there were a lot of blue police at the perimeter of the park in their swaybacked hats and dirty ascots, waiting for something wrong to happen that they could stomp on. The second-class buses that had been out on the highway were arriving, clogging the arterial streets, with greasy faces still at the windows and soldiers asleep in the step wells. The wire mesh Christmas bells were strung all the way round the zócalo, and there were lights in the jacarandas, and a big silver tree stood riotously on top of the band kiosk. Mexicans thought Americans wanted it to be Christmas every day and they were happy to provide the illusion.
The American women who had set up their easels beside the cathedral were already in the Portal having coffees, sitting in the oily shade admiring their intentions. At the door to the cathedral two girls in white communion dresses waited to step through the high door. While he watched, a Mexican boy in a red T-shirt appeared at the wall of the cathedral. The boy stared at the easels for a moment and at the girls standing on the stone steps, then darted down the row of easels, kicking the third legs so that the easels were all flattened in ten seconds, the paints spilled over the stones, and the boy vanished back in the crowds down Bustamante. One of the women in the Portal screamed, but most of them just sat still when they saw the easels go. It was efficient work, a nice symmetry. The women should’ve been able to tell, he thought, that precisely that event would take place. But they couldn’t. It was what made them tourists. They looked and didn’t see.