by Richard Ford
On the sixth of December he drove into the yard before 5:00 A.M., when it was still dark in the orchard. The light was left on in the kitchen and in the dog cages, and the car was gone. In the kitchen there was a note taped to the window above the sink. It said: “Dear Warden, Just too dark in your woods. Love, R.” He took the paper off the window and put it on the sink top and read it again. He had on his green state-issue parka with the silver badge, and shining out of the glassy darkness of the window, he thought he looked good enough and up to things, even though he felt just at that precise moment like a man falling, all out of attitude and disposition, from somewhere he didn’t remember toward someplace he couldn’t see. He walked back outside and across the frozen yard to the kennels. Both pens were empty and the spotlight over the gate was left on to warm the air. He looked inside the shelter but the dogs weren’t there. The concrete had been scrubbed and ice had formed in the depressions, and the dog smell had gone thin in the cold. He walked back inside and went into every room in the trailer, turning on lights and opening closets. He turned on the radio in the kitchen to get the weather. He had the idea he should go in the basement and check the pipes and the water heater in case it snapped off cold. But when he got down the stairs where it was still and moist he turned on the bulb and looked at the water heater white and shining in the corner as if it were alive, and something seemed odd to him about it, something obstinate and repelling. He went back out to the Scout, opened down the gate, got the AR-16 out of the case, and went back to the basement and down the steps. He stopped at the bottom riser and chambered the first round, put his arm through the sling, flattened his back against the wall, found the water heater in the irons, and opened up on it like a range dummy, hitting it all over, blowing the fixtures off the top, blowing the brass medallion out and back inside the tank, and blowing the heater all the way off its base into the soft cement wall behind it. When he finished he turned off the light, put the gun back in the Scout, went inside, and ate some toast and stood watching the light grey up. When he’d washed the dish, he went back down and turned off the gas and the water in the basement, came back and took off his shirt, pulled out the phone, did sixty pushups, and got in bed.
And he thought, lying there in his pants, what was his father’s favorite thought, that every move was a necessary move, an emblem of something that needed to be fixed or set right in the everyday scheme of things, like a hand needing to come off, and what Rae had done was try to spark her luck the best she could by making a move. He didn’t blame her for it, and even though it left him feeling for that moment like he was alone and falling someplace he couldn’t see, like a dream in the dark, it didn’t make him unhappy as an idea. The best thing you could do was to take events one at a time, in order, and hope one event by itself wouldn’t cut you up too bad.
At eleven o’clock he woke up with the radio blasting Johnny Paycheck all over the trailer. He put on his parka, got the dead-dog crate out of the Scout, and brought it inside and shoveled the pieces of the water heater in it. He made coffee and stood in the living room with the door open, in the cold foggy light, listening to the furnace loading up and clicking, trying to keep the trailer warm, the flies buzzing at the windows, then took the crate out beyond the kennels into the snow and weed stubble and dumped it. Fog was expanding off the snow and clouding up into the alders at the top of the orchard. He took the box back to the Scout, shut the kennel gate, went inside and changed his uniform, and drove in to Eastport the way he dreamed he would when he had been asleep.
11
QUINN WANTED THE MONEY put away fast. Money gave him nerves. It was too important to fuck with. He got down on the bathroom floor and cut the grouting with his clasp knife. He took out six tiles and scooped a cavity in the dirt and laid in the four bundles of hundreds taped in sandwich bags. He raked the dirt back to level, packed it with his shoe heel, reset the tiles, and grouted them with Ipana he had bought in the Centro. He got up and turned the shower out onto the floor and let the water drain. He checked the tiles behind the toilet grail where he had the pistol. The paste there was moist and the tiles gave easily but not too easily that the moza would disturb them. The tiles were his own idea. He liked them.
Rae was sitting on the bed, her hands in her lap, the empty Varig bag on the floor. She looked confused and stoned. The room was dim and smelled like DDT. The moza had come and made the bed, but he hadn’t noticed it until now. It was stupid to miss things. He was dropping habits.
“What have you got behind the toilet?” Rae said, without moving, her hands in her lap.
He wiped his hands on his pants. “Ordnance.”
“Always a tough guy, right?”
“Eagle Scout. We always lead the survivors out,” he said. He leaned on the doorjamb and squeezed dirt off his fingers. “It keeps me straight.”
Light was failing except for a square, gold panel of sunshine on the floor in the living room. It made the bungalow appealing.
“You don’t have any vices, do you, Harry?” She gazed at him as if she wasn’t interested in the answer. “I thought you got cocaine from Colombia, not Mexico. Baranquilla. Isn’t that right?”
“This is the peewee league,” he said.
“What did they do to him?” she said.
He traced his finger down the rough door molding. “Nothing interesting. I think they tied a roach bag on his head. I’m not sure. He didn’t know anything, he just had the right stuff.”
“That’s nice,” she said.
“They try to be humane down here.” It seemed like a waste of time to talk about Sonny. He stood in the doorway and admired her features relaxing in the green air.
“How do you feel?” she said, looking at him. “You look a little peaked.”
He put his ear against the adobe. He could feel himself letting go a little. “A little detached. Like I was trying to bust out. I don’t mind feeling that way usually. But I mind it now, I’m not sure why.”
“Do you trust this guy Bernhardt?”
“If I knew him in the States I’d be sure.” It was something the Italian girl had said the night before in the same bed, no reference frame. It was odd to hear himself say it. Someplace in the colonia a sound truck began to play a record of someone singing passionately about love. It was the everyday event. He couldn’t understand the words, but the sound consoled.
“So who do we pay?” Rae said.
“A judge. But it’s Bernhardt’s trick.”
“And what do I have to do?” She lay backward on the bed in the dying light and covered her eyes with her arm. His stomach flinched high up where a pill wouldn’t help.
“Nothing,” he said “You can leave.”
“Maybe I will,” she said.
She turned her cheek against the bedspread and lay still a moment. “This bed smells like your last guest,” she said.
He didn’t answer. His mind wandered back up into the day toward the Italian girl but wouldn’t reach all the way. Everything was the way he wanted it. She lay on the spread without moving, her arm over her eyes, talking into the air. “I discovered something, you know,” she said slowly, as if she could see it out in the blindness.
“What’s that?”
“Love is a kind of loss,” she said. “You know what I mean?” She breathed in heavily. “I never realized that before I lived with you. You probably knew it, though, didn’t you? Not that there’s anything to do about it.” The music truck wove through the terraces and down Reforma hill. She was waiting for him to answer. She knew what he knew. “You don’t have any capacity for small talk anymore, Harry. I’m sorry.” She leaned on her elbows and looked at him, her green eyes dry and blinking. “You used to, when we were in Morgan City. You used to jabber. And then you quit. I thought about that while I was gone.” She let her head fall and swung her hair behind her. She made him feel kind. “Couldn’t we make love?” she said, gazing at the ceiling as though she was talking to him there, somewhere up out of the cool air in the
room. The music truck turned a corner and came closer, on a closer street. He felt transported now, somewhere indistinct, drawn outside of himself. “It’ll change your luck.” She put her hand out and touched his chest, measured his breathing, and smiled, and he felt bad luck moving out of him as if the atmosphere had become too fine for anything inessential to stay alive.
At six o’clock Rae went into the bathroom and stayed a long time. Light was down and the mountains he could see from the bed through the window wore the same smeared patches of black, like silk draped beneath an orange blaze. It was the dangerous time now, the end of day, the time when prisoners in the prisión gave up and started patting their veins. It had become the worst time in Michigan when Rae was gone, desperation time, when the lake changed from the natural sequins of afternoon to dull oyster grey, and the first dim lights of the deep, white-fish trollers froze in through the gloom. It was, he thought, listening to the shower hiss behind the door, a bad time to be anywhere by yourself. It had come to be the time he liked in Mexico, as if the country was the tissue of everyone’s loneliness.
He got up, put on his pants, and walked in his bare feet onto the little pink stone patio that opened on the city and the smooth white-rock roofs terraced into the evening. The air was damp and eucalyptus sweet, and he could see a long way up the hazy valley beyond where the city stretched to an end, to where the light was amber and smokes dwindled out through the palms from the pueblos you couldn’t see in daylight. The city lay out in the dun darkness with no lights burning, as if the space were empty and there was no one alive for miles.
When Rae had been gone three months he had driven into South Bend and caught the train to Chicago to see a woman he’d met in a bar in Charlevoix, whose husband worked for a company that kept him in California. He could remember dozing in the parlor car in the early-morning silence, watching the snow fall in the Indiana freight yards, waiting for the train to move. While he sat, a string of cars was pulled away from near the window and he could abruptly see out in the yards toward the St. Joseph, where a snowman had been put up in the center of the eastbound main line to Detroit. The snowman had been built that morning. Its lineaments were crisp, and there were heavy prints flattening a circle around the base. The snowman was tricked out with gravel features, a blue and gold watch cap, and a half broomstick, and stood between the shining frozen rails, smiling perfectly into the face of its own hot doom.
When he hit Chicago it had stopped snowing and the wind had settled, and the woman came uptown to meet him. He drove them in her car to the South Side into Hyde Park, where the buildings were old and elegant and built close to the street. At a stoplight a block from her house, a long purple Toronado with Indiana plates had eased away from the curb and blocked both southbound lanes, and Quinn had touched the horn to get past. But when he came abreast, the light changed red, and the driver of the Toronado jumped out of his car and ran toward him.
“Why the fuck did you honk at me?” the man screamed at him. He was tall and black and wearing a long leather jacket. He kept looking down the street quickly as if someone was watching him.
Quinn opened his window. “To get you off the dime,” he said up at the man. He glanced back at the light.
The man’s features began to strain, fighting a lawless urge inside himself, an urge that had an old-time hold on him. His mouth seemed to get longer, and Quinn recognized that look. It was the maniac expression of someone about to go to war, the look of fighting off cowardice with insanity. He sympathized, but there was nothing he could do, “You fuck.” The man raged and stamped his feet and ground his hands together. But at that moment the light went green, and he looked up at the man and said, “Can’t help, pal,” and eased away, and the man suddenly swung widely, a hard plunging blow, that hit him on the arm above the elbow and tore a gash through his down jacket and into his triceps, spilling blood and down over the windowsill and making him barge into the other lane and jump the curb. The woman said, “Oh shit,” and he began to feel the blood drying.
When he had bailed out, the man had run already to his Toronado and was racing up Kenwood Avenue, leaving Quinn standing in the snow in the middle of the street in terror, wishing he had a gun to blow somebody’s head off.
The cut was superficial and didn’t need stitches. The woman put Merthiolate on it in her bathroom and said she thought he’d been cut with a bottle opener or a key ward, and that the man had been swinging at his face when the car moved, and he had gotten lucky. His jacket was a loss and he had gotten blood on his whipcords, but when he had spent an hour with the woman in her apartment across from Jackson Park and the I.C., he made up a story that he wanted to see a friend who lived on the North Side, and took a cab up to Randolph Street and stayed all night by himself in the Holiday Inn overlooking the lake, unable to sleep until he could see the winter haze begin to brighten and clear toward Michigan.
But it had all given rise to a feeling he had never had before, even late in the war, down to days, a conspicuous undisciplined fear of enormous injury. A peacetime fear. Sitting out nights in the frozen basswoods below Elk Lake, listening for trolling motors easing down into the shallows of the Rapid River, sinking steelhead weirs between the first narrow sand shoals, he would suddenly sense something nearby, something that would hit him and blow him to pieces, and he’d pitch sideways in the Scout to miss whatever it was, though there was nothing. Delivery boys backing a TV out of an appliance-store door would make him scrounge up high in his stomach, ready to receive a killing blow. And at night in the trailer, barely asleep, there’d be the same galvanizing shock that threw him up in bed shuddering from the instinct that he’d almost been hit by something falling, though there was nothing to hit him, and no one in the trailer but him, and his pistol beside the bed. And every time he had the fear, he’d picture in his mind not the junkie who’d cut him on Kenwood Avenue, which he thought was the cause of it, but the snowman in the train yards in South Bend, standing erect and by himself, smiling out at some disaster rising up on the horizon.
He thought now, though, watching the lights beginning to prickle out across the valley and beyond the mountain rim like greying stars, that the threat of death in that instance was only the dark side of something else, something he needed—Rae, maybe—and would have to live with unexplained until he got it, or until he stopped wanting it anymore, and at the same time stopped wanting everything else too, which was just a disaster of a different order.
He began to smell the dense fragrance of other places, the evening coming slowly on the city, the pale nimbus of town light rising into the ash sky. Doves had settled into the eucalyptus branches, and he could hear a bus crawling up the Reforma Hill into the twilight. The music truck was gone and a sweet dirt and cinnamon odor shifted and wandered up through the evening atmosphere. It was the smell of town streets, emptied for the night except for the fruit stands and tortillerías out the Avenue Garcia Vigil.
Rae stood at the glass door, her hair thick and wet against her neck, her skin roughed and pink in the nearly gone light. He smelled her now, the sour streaminess of the bathroom and the sweet oil she used. She seemed taller than he remembered.
“Are we in the tropics now?” She pressed her hair between the folds of her towel, but he didn’t watch her.
“The Torrid Zone,” he said.
“It just feels out of date, to me.” She let her head come to the side, letting her hair fall. “When I was in the shower I tried to think of one act of kindness between Sonny and me, you know, just something little. And I could only think of one.”
He looked at her in the doorway, framed by the table lamp she had turned on behind her. Her breasts were full only to the sides of her rib cage, her head tilted against the doorjamb. Her body had a generosity that making love didn’t have anything to do with.
“One might be a lot,” he said.
Her face became composed. “One time, you know, when we were living in Bay Shore before my father decided to be an artist
, Sonny was trying to hit a golf ball into South Bay, and I was standing too close behind him, and he turned around and said, ‘Get out of the way, Rae.’ And that was all. He thought he was a golfer. Isn’t that pitiful?”
He could feel the air slide past his face into the open doorway. It reminded him of something from when he was a boy, something out of the lake after dark, but he couldn’t think exactly what it was now. Something he’d liked, but lost. “You know what I’d like?” he said.
“Not to talk about Sonny,” she said.
“That’d be all right,” he said. “But I’d like it if you stayed a little longer than tomorrow.”
She stepped across the flat stones close to him, the towel around her breasts. He smelled her skin in the air, felt the whorl of hair in the channel of her back. All the veins were blue under her skin. “Aren’t you afraid?” she said.
“It doesn’t matter,” he said. He heard the clock strike seven in the zócalo and again elsewhere in town, seconds later. A dog began barking in the rich cabañas below the bungalow, a sound like a turkey’s cluck, fast and frequent and disappointed.
“We make love at odd times, you know,” she said softly, coming nearer. “Late in the day’s such an odd time.”
12
BERNHARDT WAS IMMERSED in driving the streets, as though he wanted to avoid something unpleasant. Quinn had left Rae in the Portal watching the Indian musicians preparing to play again in the kiosk. The Centro was crowded with evening tourists, and all the Christmas decorations had been turned on. He had ordered her a beer, and she said she could stand it an hour alone.