by Charles Rose
When she came back to the kitchen, she saw Mr. Green had pushed his plate away. He had only eaten one chicken wing. Michael had one chicken wing left on his plate. He set his teeth into the greasy flesh, gravy dripping off his lips. “I tried to talk sense into Clifford. I asked him, is this woman worth it.”
“And after that?” Mr. Green said. “What happened then? He didn’t tell you what he was going to do?”
“Clifford got in his car and drove off somewhere. That was the last I saw of him.”
Clifford hadn’t told Michael he would drive back to Eddie Nunn’s and put a bullet in Eddie’s gut. The man with the tie clasp, Mr. Green, wearing that comical smile on his face, she was listening to him run Clifford down.
“You ever ask yourself how stupid he was. That car of his was about to break down.”
“I told you Clifford didn’t show up here.”
Michael was done with his chicken wing. He set down the bone and gristle.
“You know, that stupid brother of yours must have known that steering belt would bust. Maybe that’s why he didn’t use your pickup truck. Because he wanted a car he knew would break down, one he could actually run off the road. So he could come here, hide out with you.”
“My brother, he ain’t that big a fool. He would have headed on out of the county.”
“But he needed some way to do it.” Mr. Green drank a little Kool-Aid. An inch of pink Kool-Aid was left in his glass. “Clifford won’t walk to Atlanta. But he could be driving your pickup truck, if you were stupid enough to let him do it.”
She saw Michael’s thick neck tensing, the eyes gone hard and flat. For a minute she thought he would hit Mr. Green. She felt pulled away from where she should be, putting chicken wings onto her own plate now, dishing out food for her kids and herself while the men said what they had to say. But she had to say something to calm Michael down. She had to think, break the tension. She heard herself talking to Mr. Green, as if he were someone she really liked, a man she were really trying to please.
“Clifford could take someone else’s car. Like yours, Mr. Green, your new car. You want to see if it’s still in the yard?”
Mr. Green looked at her, smiling. He pushed his chair back and stretched his legs. “You know I keep my car locked, Eileen.”
Michael’s eyes were set on her now, but that didn’t keep her from saying more. “Locks can be picked, Mr. Green. Maybe you ought to check on your car. See if it’s where you think it is.”
Mr. Green touched his tie clasp. She made herself keep on looking at him. “I know my car is where I think it is. That’s why I keep it locked, Eileen.” Mr. Green closed up his notebook. He clipped his ballpoint pen in his shirt pocket. “You have anything else to tell me, Michael?”
Michael pushed his plate away. The two plates on the oilcloth, their rims were hardly an inch apart. “Maybe it’s time for you to go.”
Mr. Green scooted his chair back and got up from the table. He slid the chair back so the back was close to the table. “I hope you’re telling me the truth. I’d hate to see you back in prison.”
“You won’t. That won’t happen.”
She followed them out of the kitchen. She knew she shouldn’t go to the door; her place was to let Michael do it. At the door, Mr. Green turned and said to her.
“Them chicken wings were mighty fine, Eileen.” He didn’t say Mrs. Reece; he said Eileen.
She was washing up plates and glasses. She left Michael’s shirts on the line outside, but she did sweep up the kitchen floor. She sponged grease stains off the oilcloth, and the circles made by Michael’s Kool-Aid glass. Her children had left the house. Melissa was in the trailer, with the baby, keeping to herself. Eileen didn’t know where Dennis had gone. She emptied the grease in the skillets, poured in a half-inch of cooking oil. She dropped five chicken wings into the popping grease.
Sheriff Conroy had come by late last night. Michael had pulled on the T-shirt, put the pants on he was wearing today. She hadn’t gotten out of the bed last night. She’d waited for Michael to come back to her. He had sat down on the edge of the bed, told her what Clifford had done. She remembered him, in the T-shirt, how she’d run her fingernails down his back, along his shoulder blades, trying to keep him there. But he wouldn’t get back into bed with her.
The fog had come in, in the morning. She was up; she had put the coffee on, warmed up the biscuits from last night. Two men were standing in the fog. At first she couldn’t really make them out, even though she knew who they were. She saw Michael talking to Clifford, saw her husband gripping Clifford’s arm, steering him past his pickup truck, through the fog to the door of the trailer. Melissa would always turn on the trailer lights if a fog set in in the morning. Then Melissa came to the door. She opened it and moved away, and Clifford entered the trailer. Then Michael came back, found her waiting for him. She had a plate of biscuits and gravy for him, but he didn’t sit down to eat. He asked her to let Clifford stay in the house. When she told him no, he turned away from her. She followed him into the bathroom. She watched him move a razor along his jaw. Not in my house, she had told him.
Michael’s pickup truck was in the repair shop—that’s what Michael had told Mr. Green. Mr. Green would have already seen it in front of Buddy Plott’s Auto Repairs. He would have passed it in his new Escort, coming out here on the county road. She remembered Mr. Green’s final words just as Michael came in the front door. “You give Buddy Plott your business, fine; me, I wouldn’t give him a nickel.” The pickup was half a mile down the road, sitting out in front of Buddy Plott’s.
Clifford was sitting in Mr. Green’s place, his legs spread out from her kitchen chair. He had a bottle he kept stashed somewhere out in the woods. Clifford filled half of his jelly glass. He squinted at whisky in the glass; then drank it down. He slammed the glass on the table, moved it slightly on the oilcloth while he went on about his girl friend, things Eileen didn’t want to hear about. She was turning chicken wings. Michael was drinking more Kool-Aid.
They would take the pickup truck at Buddy Plott’s. They would drive the truck to Atlanta. But first she had to feed Clifford. She had to be here and watch him drink.
She turned the gas down on the burners, she found her way to the back door. They were talking about Atlanta, what Clifford would do when he got there. They wouldn’t care whether she left or not as long as she fed Clifford chicken wings. For a little while she stood on the back steps, still feeling the kitchen light on her dress. The yard with its smell of newly mown grass seemed to pull her toward her sunflowers. She didn’t see them, but she knew where they were, forty feet or so from the clothesline. She moved away from the kitchen light, raising the clothesline as Michael had, feeling a dry shirt against her skin. She was lowering the clothesline behind her, approaching the row of sunflowers.
She used to spend an hour or so out here thinking of Michael. On the days she would get a letter, after reading it in the morning, she would read it again at night. Her children would be watching television, or off somewhere, did it matter? She would wash the dishes, mop the floor. She would sit at the kitchen table, read Michael’s letter in the overhead light, tracing her finger along the page, up and down the snarls in his handwriting. She would come out here to think of him. Stand here, hearing the sunflowers sway, in a nice breeze, absorbing night sounds. What would life be like for her if she lost Michael for a second time?
The letters would come from the prison. It was a medium-security prison; he was up for parole in five years. You never get used to it, he said, the last time she went to visit him. She was left with her children to raise. She’d done things she was ashamed of, gone out with men she didn’t love. Her life was like it was before Michael came to fill it. She blamed Michael because he’d left her alone.
That was before the letters came. First it was just a line or two. He would write her about the prison food, how he wished she were
fixing his dinner. Then he wrote her about wanting to be with her at night, and she stopped going out with other men. She wrote him about things at home; her job waiting tables at Mr. Steak. When she saw him they had little to say; they repeated things in the letters. Michael kept on writing her. He started sending her some of the themes he wrote; he was taking a course in composition. He had written a theme on good and bad guards; that was one of his assignments. One thing Eileen remembered—and only yesterday morning she’d thought of it—he had written this in a letter once, what the warden did when a fog set in. If a fog sets in he locks us down. Because they know we’d be out of here.
This morning she’d seen the fog in the road, so thick you couldn’t see the pines. The light had been on, in the trailer. These two men out there, in the fog they had looked almost alike. She had hardly been able to tell them apart. She put one hand on a sunflower. She couldn’t stay out here by herself. And if Michael went back to prison this time, his letters wouldn’t matter. She couldn’t wait for him to get out again.
She saw Michael blocking the kitchen light, his hands on the frame of the open door, leaning out with his legs spread.
Returning, she moved toward the kitchen light spilling out of the open window. She felt it seeping into her skirt. In the kitchen, the heat closed in on her, the smell of whisky and male sweat. But she had to stay there, in the kitchen. She had to look after her house. In the living room, there were photographs. There was the overstuffed chair, the throw rug, the floor she had mopped that morning. She watched Clifford pour Michael a drink. The whisky was rising in the glass; then the bottle was back on the table.
For the second time she was feeding another man. She set a plate of her food in front of Clifford, chicken wings, home fried potatoes, the last two slices of light bread. Clifford’s hands were moving toward his plate. She watched Clifford pick up a chicken wing, holding it out in front of his mouth. They were talking about Clifford’s woman, talking as if she were not around, as if it didn’t matter to them what she heard. She emptied grease out of the skillets and set them in the kitchen sink. The burners were clotted with grease. She thought of herself in the kitchen, without Michael, doing these things by rote until she got too old to care anymore. And even then, she would do these things, go on cooking and cleaning alone.
Clifford picked up the bottle. His hand was gripping the bottle. “I’m ready to go when you are.”
She said nothing, staring at Michael. The words were locked in her throat. She was backing up, into the gas stove. Michael was on his feet now. Michael’s hands were on her shoulders. Michael would move his hands this way when he started to make love to her. He was soothing her, caressing her, because his brother was his brother. “I’m going,” he said. “I have to go.”
“All right,” she said, “you go.”
Then Michael was turning away from her because she couldn’t look at him anymore. He was looking at Clifford now. He put his hand on Clifford’s shoulder. Clifford set his glass on the oilcloth. Would Eileen make Clifford some coffee? She looked at the smears on the oilcloth. Michael gave her a quick look, and she knew he would not change his mind.
She was out of the kitchen now. She was moving across her own front yard. Their voices were not reaching her. She thought of how they would talk about it, later, in the pickup truck, on the highway to Atlanta. What got into Eileen tonight? There were lights on in the trailer. Mr. Green’s car wasn’t parked out there, but she could always get in touch with him. When she got to the trailer door, she didn’t turn to look at her house. Without Michael there, she couldn’t live in it.
She thought of her daughter taking long strides, hurrying to the door to let her in. She would clear away Clifford’s mess later, his shaving kit, all the empty beer cans. She found an address book next to the telephone. She sat down next to the telephone, Melissa lounging on the sofa, her knees up, doing her fingernails. Whatever you do, you do. When she took the receiver off the cradle, Melissa got up and went to the bathroom. Eileen heard water splash in the sink.
Through the window, from her place by the telephone, she saw the lights were still on in her house. They were still there, in the kitchen.
“This is Eileen Reece,” she was saying, to the walls of the trailer, the walls of her house. “I have to talk to you, Mr. Green.”
The fog came back in the morning. Michael had not come back yet. He could be anywhere in the county, or he could be out there in the woods. All she knew was he would come back, that somehow they would start over.
Mr. Green showed up around noon. She watched the blue Escort pull into the yard, Mr. Green getting out of his car. Through the heat dazzle he ambled to the front door.
Mr. Green put his right hand on his tie, up near the collar of his shirt. “I told you I’d fix it with the sheriff. Michael won’t be implicated,” he said.
She watched Mr. Green loosen his tie. If she let him in, he wouldn’t stay long. He’d sit down where he usually sat, in his place at the kitchen table. He would pull back his chair for some leg room. The door was closed in the trailer. She heard someone off in the woods somewhere, making dove calls, crazy sounds. Or was it a dove, in the woods? Baby Marcus was sleeping behind her, in the crib, in front of the television set. The door of the trailer was open. Her daughter, who knew where Melissa was?
Mr. Green put a hand on his tie clasp. “I thought Michael would be back by this time.”
“I don’t know when he’ll be back.”
“I can wait. I need to talk to him.” Mr. Green’s eyes were set in a squint. Sun flecks jittered in his long face.
His skinny arms in the short sleeved shirt, sun flecked, like his face, his fingers spread, their imprint faint on her shoulders. “You did the right thing, Eileen.”
She heard a dove call, far off in the woods.
The Skater
One wing and the fuselage, the clotted tubes of airplane glue, the hobby knife with replaceable blades, all these were still on his desk. Frank Martin ran his fingers along a lateral strut in the fuselage. He tried to visualize rooms downstairs, his mother and father’s bedroom where they would let him sleep sometimes, the living room with its fireplace and brass candlesticks on the mantel, its whatnots and foot stools and armchairs, Martha’s room at the end of the hall, next to the downstairs bathroom, the dining room with its sideboard, the kitchen with its oven and range. The hired girl’s room was upstairs, across the hall from his own.
He no longer saw his wife clearly, not as she’d looked when he’d lost her. He remembered her better when she was young.
After moving the trash bag off his bed, he went to the windows, two of them, looked out at the elm tree in the side yard. He thought about going back downstairs. He would leave the upstairs the way it was. His sister was in the kitchen, packing his mother’s china, crumpling newspapers to stuff in coffee cups. Martha wanted him to move in with her. She had already laid claim to the furniture, the china, the silver, almost everything. She might as well have him too. It was what his mother would have wanted.
The door was still open across the hall. so he went in, without much hesitation, stretched out on Dorothy’s bed. The springs still creaked from his weight on the bed, but the stains had bleached out on the mattress. The closet door was open. Metal hangers were bunched up on the rod. Above the rod on a narrow ledge was where Dorothy had kept her dress shoes, her one pair of heels for her Saturdays off. Her nightgown had hung on the closet door.
He got up off the bed and moved to the bathroom, at one end of the narrow bedroom, with its window overlooking the roof. He opened the medicine cabinet and took out a can of talcum powder. He shook a little powder out into his hand and put the can back where he’d found it, beside the safety razor, yes left behind, that she’d used to shave her legs. Dorothy had to wash up in the sink. Once a week she could use the bathroom downstairs, take a tub bath, shave her legs. But sometimes she shaved her legs
here, then put powder on before she went to bed. He had shaken the powder into her hand. He had sprinkled her shoulders and back with it, in her nightgown with the straps down. Sometimes he gave her a back rub. If she asked him to, he would do that.
There wasn’t much powder left in the can. What was left was clotted, unusable. He set the can down and went to the toilet. He would always be sure to shut the door. He went to the toilet and raised the seat. Dorothy would be at her vanity, combing out thick red hair. He would hear her radio going, Guy Lombardo, Ray Anthony. The radio on the bed table, Dorothy had taken it with her. She would let him turn the station band dial. He would sit on the bed and turn the dial.
He would ask Dorothy why she was all dolled up and she’d tell him—I’m going dancing. Dolled up, that was his father’s phrase. Sometimes it wasn’t dancing but a movie palace downtown. For a month or so the name didn’t change; then a new man’s name would replace the old. Her men never took her back to her room. She met them outside on the front porch—that’s where they must have dropped her off. Sometimes she came back early; other nights she didn’t come back until dawn. On those nights she’d take her shoes off before she climbed the stairs to go to her room. He’d hear the water run, the toilet flush.
He was washing his hands in the sink. There wasn’t a towel, so he dried his hands on his sweater. He closed the medicine cabinet and looked at his face in the mirror. His mustache needed trimming. He remembered that Martha had told him to make sure that the upstairs windows were locked. He went to the bathroom window, pushed the stiff lock into place, looked out at a patchwork of roofs and trees. He looked at his watch. It was four o’clock. He remembered climbing out on the roof. He would climb out of Dorothy’s bathroom, crawl down the shingled roof to the heaven tree by the back porch. Next step, shinny down the trunk of the tree. He might do what he had done as a boy. Suppose he showed up in the kitchen while Dorothy was cooking dinner. He would come in through the back door. He would pull at the strings of her apron, her apron sliding away from her hips. He would embrace her, pull her to him. But first he must see to the windows. Her bedroom window wasn’t locked. He quickly pushed the lock into place.