A Ford in the River

by Charles Rose

  Hot air was rushing out of the vents. Shirley wanted to turn the thermostat down, but she couldn’t pry Wiley’s hand loose from hers anymore than she could keep him from running his mouth. “You remember that night in Biloxi. I mean the first night, before I started that gig at The Shores. We checked in at this old hotel on the beach. Remember it said on the marquee, newlyweds could have the bridal suite. And you said we can’t check in as newlyweds because neither one of us is wearing a wedding ring.”

  That hadn’t stopped Wiley from wanting to stay there. For Wiley, old beach hotels had class. They could sign a tab for their meals and drinks. Later they had found something cheaper, a rent-by-the-week, beach-view efficiency. It was over, the rumba, the cha-cha, what they did when he came off his gig at the Shores. It was over and done with so why make a face, why are you dragging your mouth down like that, what is it? “What is the matter with you?”

  “Nothing.”

  “You have to tell me.”

  She saw words floating out of Wiley’s big head, what he said, that didn’t matter as long as he felt he could say it, say anything, what he had to say to justify what he had done.

  “I had a dream while you were gone. In the dream you were thinking I’d offed myself, and then I saw you standing beside me. It felt like I was between two plate-glass sheets. I couldn’t move, I couldn’t speak, but I was conscious, I knew you were there. I was god damned dead and you weren’t. So when I woke up I had to ask myself, how would I feel if you’d come in here and I’d really done it?”

  Wiley spread his fingers out flat on the sheet, he raised his head off the pillow, his. She held his head up, pulled the bottle out from under the pillow. It looked like most of the caplets were there but she couldn’t be sure how many were gone. She laid dry fingertips on his forehead. Go to sleep, Wiley, let it all go. But he wouldn’t let go, not Wiley.

  Even now he couldn’t keep his hands off her. He put his hands on her hips, shake it Shirl, swing your hips like so. They used to do ballroom dancing after Wiley got through at The Shores. We did the cha-cha, we did the fox trot, we did the mambo, we did the cha-cha, she’d have to do it herself, on her feet now, swinging her hips like so, one two, one two three, one two, one two three. She would dance for him, she would stay by his side, but that was all she would do for him.

  On her way back from Jo Ann Hathaway’s Shirley stopped at the Lazy Bee for cigarettes. She had delivered Jo Ann’s policy, picked up three referral letters, signed by Jo Ann, recommending Liberty Mutual. For what? For paying your spouse off after you died.

  She’d left a light on in the living room. Parked in front of their house, hers exclusively now, she lit a cigarette. The ash tray was loaded with cigarette butts. She had scattered Wiley’s ashes over the creek, all but a tablespoonful, which she’d kept in a sugar bowl—that’s how Wiley wanted it so that’s what she’d done. She’d given his keyboard to Goodwill. She’d flushed a handful of Halcyon capsules down the toilet.

  She got out of the car, tugged her coat tight about her neck to keep the cold out. She’d left a light on in the living room. The light in her living room window, like the others along her street, kept the same intensity and hue. Wiley had said about lights in windows, they reminded him of fried eggs sunny-side-up. But that wasn’t how she saw her windows. Anyone passing by would think of life going on inside her windows. Normal life, not Wiley’s kind.

  She started walking, hunching her shoulders to keep out the cold. It hadn’t quite turned dark yet. When it did, it would get colder. She passed discarded flower pots. She passed a light-tinctured, sodded lawn. She passed windows impacted with TV glows, others curtained, light slivered, walked beneath clicking twigs, bare branches, under streetlights. The lights in Shayne and Betty Jean’s front windows were off. Had they gone to the movies, all three of them, or were they eating out at Denny’s like she and Shayne and Shailah used to do? Or was Shailah with another skaggy boy, doing what you didn’t want to know about?

  Shailah had come to the house after the funeral, Shayne too. Sitting across from her—in the love seat in the front parlor—Shayne had clumsily tried to comfort her. Shailah had washed and combed her hair. She had a pretty dress on and high-heeled shoes. Mama I’m so sorry, she’d said—but on the way out she’d slapped on her blue-tinted glasses. Just to show you what she thought of Wiley. And Shailah hadn’t been back since. Shayne had. He’d offered her a job at Prudential.

  Five trash bags lined up behind the curb. Shayne used to rake the leaves. She’d help out, holding open the mouths of the trash bags. Shailah too. They would take turns, all three of them.

  Returning, she passed the same window lights. She shivered, walked faster.

  When she got home she would turn the heat up. She would drink a beer, smoke one cigarette. What then? What then? She would make a salad, heat up a frozen dinner in the microwave. Shake lentils into a stock pot, bring eight cups of water to a boil. Sautee diced carrots, a diced onion, sliced mushrooms. She would keep watch over her lentil soup until it was just right, stirring it with a wooden spoon. She would keep it in the fridge. Tomorrow night she would call Shayne, ask to speak to Shailah. What would she say? Not come over and sample my lentil soup. She would say something better than that.

  She looked up at the darkening sky. Her house lay ahead of her, waiting.

  A New Roof

  What Samantha Hall did for Teejay Banks on the morning before her father drove up to visit her in his brown and beige Cadillac Deville, she did biscuits and gravy, cheese grits, three eggs over easy, whole wheat toast. Normally she saw to it he had granola for breakfast. She was worried about his cholesterol even though he was only twenty-five years old. She had to watch hers, for she was thirty-six.

  She didn’t bring up her father right away. She waited. She spooned up granola and fat-free milk, set her spoon down and asked Teejay to spend the next two days in a Best Western motel.

  “Daddy won’t understand how we feel about each other. He’ll think I’m using you for sex. Since that’s just what we don’t want him to think it might be better if you were somewhere else.”

  “So I should care what your old man thinks.” Teejay swabbed egg yolk with a piece of toast. “We both know we’re not using each other for sex.”

  “I know we do, but Daddy doesn’t. Will you do this for me, just this once, Teejay?”

  He said he’d do it one time only. He’d move into a Best Western motel for two days. He saw relief in her pretty blue eyes. She ran her hands through her thick blond hair, her big breasts flattening out a little. “I won’t ask you to move out again, Teejay.” Then her soft white hands were warming his. “I’m going to tell Daddy I have a wonderful man in my life. You, Teejay, only you.”

  He held the palm of her soft hand up to his lips. “What you tell your daddy is up to you. You do what you feel like doing.”

  They made love right away in Samantha’s brass bed. Teejay honey! Oh Samantha. She made the bed with Teejay in it, pulling the sheet up past his chest, poking and pinching his arms and legs.

  Samantha knew how to make him feel good in bed, but it wasn’t just sex they had going for them. There were things that made them feel close, hearing birds sing waking up at dawn, taking long walks, working crossword puzzles together. He would help her set up her still lifes, gladiolas and pussy willows in a long-necked vase, lemons and limes, a Florida orange, oodles, she’d say, of bougainvillea. Sitting quietly in her studio, he would watch her sketch and paint.

  On his second day in a motel, a Best Western close to East Pensacola Heights, he got a telephone call from Samantha. He could come back any time, she said, her father had left a day early. Instead of going back to her house he asked her to come to him, get in the minivan her father had purchased for her while he was there and drive to the Best Western. That she did for him, came to his place. She brought an electric razor for him with her, a pair of Levi’s, a t
ank top, mousse for his hair. He waited to ask her what she’d said about him to her father, until just before check-out time.

  “When I told him about you, Teejay, he said he hoped it would work out for us.” Samantha unsnapped her bulging purse, searched through her many credit cards.

  Two days later Teejay got word that his father had died of a heart attack. He’d called his father in Cantonment—the telephone ringing on and on, why didn’t his father buy an answering machine—because the next time Samantha’s father drove up in his Cadillac, Teejay thought he’d just head back home, spend the time in the house he’d grown up in. He got his old maid aunt on the phone instead; that’s how he’d gotten the news. Something quivered, leaped, ran amuck in his brain. The house is mine now. I own it. He put the cordless back in its cradle. Last time I saw you you were dead drunk, in mama’s bedroom in your boxer shorts. You do that one more time I’ll whip your sorry ass.

  He didn’t ask Samantha to go to the funeral; he wanted to spare her that ordeal. The night before the movers came, Teejay slept in his mother’s room. His mother had died two years ago, worn out, riddled with bone cancer. It was raining when he woke up. He had a bucket set at the foot of the bed. The roof had a leak in two places, at the foot of the bed, above his mother’s vanity. Something would have to be done about that. He moved the bucket on top of the vanity, seeing his face in the mirror, a surface that once had held his mother’s face. His great-grandfather’s Bible was still on the dresser, births and marriages written inside. An Olan Mills photograph taken in Biloxi was also there—his father in a rented tuxedo, his mother in her wedding dress and lifted veil. His father was wearing sideburns then. His mother wore her hair in butternut curls. They were holding hands in front of a latticed arch.

  He got up and went to the living room, already puddled in several places. He walked out on the front porch and watched the traffic on U.S. 29 nosing through the rain, Gulf beach-bound vehicles with Tennessee license plates or with Ohio or Illinois plates whose occupants stared straight ahead.

  The rain stopped before the movers came. Teejay led the moving van back to Pensacola in the pickup truck Samantha had purchased for him. Samantha’s house looked good to him, Samantha coming out on the front porch with a paint brush behind her left ear. Teejay got out and went to her right away, while the ramp was coming down from the truck.

  What belonged to his father was sold. His mother’s dresser and vanity, the television set his mother had watched—game shows, talk shows, sit-coms, day in and day out—Samantha made a place for these things in an upstairs room in the back of the house, with a nice view of the bay. It was somewhere for Teejay to be by himself. He kept the photographs on the dresser. His great-grandfather’s Bible he also kept. Sometimes he opened it and read the births and marriages, a sheet of tiny printed inscriptions from before the Civil War on up to his great-grandfather’s marriage and his grandfather’s name and date of birth. In a broad hand was his father’s name and date of birth, William Banks, 1955. No one had ever called his father William. He had always been called Willie.

  He stayed in his mother’s room while Samantha worked in her studio. Instead of watching her work, he stayed up in this room, watching talk shows on the television set, looking out at the sailboats on the bay. Looking up from the open Bible once, he felt a spear of probing sunlight between his eyes. The letters B . . . A. . . N . . . K . . . S were shimmering, floating away from him. He raised one hand to shut out the voice, Willie talking to him, I’m talking to you. You can have it all with this woman. He closed the Bible, let the sailboats go on cutting swaths in the bay. He got out of the room in a hurry. He took a walk down the sandy road. When he got back to her house he went to her studio and put his hand on the doorknob. You can have it all. He wanted to tell her it didn’t matter what Willie said, but the doorknob, one of his fingers cramped when he grasped it.

  In bed with Samantha, it wasn’t the same. He would roll over afterwards and go to sleep. He’d be out of bed before Samantha was, making coffee for them in the kitchen just so he could be away from her. Still, he tried not to show what he was feeling. Not much seemed to change in their life together. They went fishing off the bay bridge. He made stretcher bars for her canvases. He drove her paintings to a Gulf Coast art show in the new minivan, and when Samantha didn’t win best of show, not even an honorable mention, he did his best to make her feel okay about it. He said the best of show painting made him want to vomit. Samantha shouldn’t give up her painting because someday she would be recognized.

  He decided he had to put his house up for sale. He listed the house with Deen Real Estate Agency in Cantonment because he felt Hugh Deen should have the listing, not Buddy Purvis, he was telling Samantha, the only other real estate agent in his home town, because everyone knew Buddy drank like a fish.

  “He was my daddy’s big buddy but he sure isn’t mine.” He waited for Samantha to set up three long-stemmed calla lilies in the long-necked vase. She ran her pink tongue along her lower lip, looking out at the sailboats speckling the bay.

  “Neither one of them sounds very reliable to me. Why don’t you let Daddy handle it? He has some good friends in real estate, right here in Pensacola.”

  I’m talking to you. You can have it all. He had to pull his eyes away from the calla lilies.

  Hugh Deen told him over the telephone he was only interested in selling land anymore. Lori Torbert was handling house sales now. Teejay met Lori Torbert at the house. She parked her Nissan Sentra in the driveway. She came up to him on the front porch and sat next to him on the porch swing. Her skirt was a little too tight for her, and there were streaks of orange in her short blond hair, but she was still a nice-looking young woman. He saw she wasn’t wearing a wedding ring.

  The house needed a lot done to it. A fixer-upper, Lori told him. She thought he could get eighty-five thousand for it if Teejay put in a new roof. Yes, the roof leaked; something had to be done, he thought, but where would he get the money? Not from Samantha, or Samantha’s daddy. So he asked Lori to sell the house as-is.

  “All right, but that’s going to take awhile. At least get someone to clean it up.”

  “I can do that. I think I can take care of that.”

  Lori asked him how she could get in touch with him, and he left her Samantha’s telephone number. The next day he called Magic Maids in Pensacola and arranged to have the house cleaned. He sat out on the porch swing while the girls did the job. He dropped by the real estate office to leave word that the house was ready to show. Lori Torbert turned in her swivel chair, and gave him the news. “I’m not really sure I can sell your house unless you put in a new roof.”

  “Try selling it without one. Come down on the price if you have to,” he said.

  Three weeks later, Lori Torbert called him right before lunch. Samantha picked up the telephone, handed it over without a word, and padded off to the kitchen. Lori Torbert sounded put out with him. She had shown the house on a beautiful day, no likelihood it would rain, she thought, but after she’d shown the house to these people it had rained on the way to the car. “You can imagine how I’d look to my clients if it had rained while they were in your house. That would be one sale I could kiss goodbye.”

  Samantha was waiting for him in the kitchen. She had a pot of split pea soup simmering, whole wheat toast in the toaster, an endive lettuce green salad already made. She was stirring the soup with a wooden spoon.

  “That was my real estate agent on the phone. She wants me to put on a new roof. If I don’t it might not sell so quick.”

  He told Samantha it had started to rain while Lori Torbert was showing the house. “She told me that old roof of mine leaks like a sieve,” he said. “She said that was one sale she had to kiss goodbye.”

  It was the first time he had lied to Samantha. Nothing showed in his voice, nothing showed in her but irritation over the way he was handling the sale. Two slices of toast po
pped up in the toaster.

  “You ask me this woman doesn’t know which end is up. I mean she isn’t professional. She should have told these people the roof leaked before she had them inside to look at the house.”

  “So next time she tells them,” Teejay said, “and the time after that too.”

  Samantha set down her wooden spoon. “All right, Teejay. You can have your new roof. My checkbook is in my pocketbook. Would you please go get it for me? You fill out the check. I’ll sign it.”

  “You get it.”

  “All right, I’ll get it,” she said, and laid the spoon down on the cook top.

  Samantha came back with this bulging leather pocketbook. He couldn’t stand to watch her poke through the clutter—change purse, pink tabbed keys to the van, tubes of lipstick, the pink flowered checkbook cover. You can have it all, but not at this price, no goddamned way he would write out the check. Something snapped in him, made him be mean to her.

  “You sure your Daddy would want this? If he found out you were paying for my new roof, he’d say you were using me for sex.”

  Samantha bit down on her lower lip. “He won’t find out about your new roof because I don’t intend to tell him about it.”

  “Well, you ask me, you should tell him. Ask him to pay for my roof. That way he’ll have to write out the check.”

  Split pea soup gushed out of the pot, the pot clapped down on the linoleum. “Get out of my house! I mean it! I want you out of here!” Samantha yelled at him.

  He got his razor and toothbrush, a change of clothes, his parents’ wedding photograph. The Bible he left where it was. He climbed in the pickup truck and drove away to Best Western.

  He pawned the pickup truck to pay for the roof. He went down the next day to a pawn shop—we keep the title but you keep the keys—and came out with seventeen hundred dollars in cash. Next he went to a roofer and got a date for getting the job done. He would have to wait a week; he would have to live in a motel until the new roof was on the house. After that he could live in his own house, be there when Lori Torbert showed the house, and when she sold it he could get a decent job and find an affordable place and get his truck out of hock and start living. Samantha called him that evening. She said she had to see him. He watched her pull the minivan into the parking lot. She brought sandwiches in a picnic basket, paper plates and linen napkins. She spread their picnic out on the bed, and opened a bottle of cold beer for him. Her soft plump arms opening out to him made him want her again, like before.