A Ford in the River

by Charles Rose

  She asked Josh for a carton of cigarettes. She handed Josh her Mastercard and he ran it through, and she signed the receipt. Jack Lazenby’s boy, his bright blue eyes would melt snow. She’d been to his baptizing, on the same day Braxton, howling, was baptized in the creek behind the church. Brad tried to shush Braxton up. And Reverend Willoughby lifting Braxton up, managed to get out—“in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost I baptize thee” . . . then broke into a fit of coughing. A doubleheader, Brad’s not-so-funny joke concerning Josh and Braxton’s immersion.

  Driving back she crossed the millrace, its lacy pool sapphire-sheathed. Passed trailers, cabins set back in the woods, stands of pine inching upward, close to topping the power lines.

  Ranch houses strung out on either side of Beauregard High greeted her, as they usually did, with what she suspected was disapproval, their lawn systems twitching out spray. Her front yard would soon need mowing. The gutters were choked with last winter’s leaves. Braxton’s dirt bike lying on its side in her marigold bed, she thought of having it taken away to Goodwill.

  She heated the chicken in the microwave, a breast and wing for her. The leg and thigh she saved for Braxton. And some potato salad and slaw. She had her dinner off a TV tray, sat up watching television, smoking, drinking decaffeinated iced tea with sweetener.

  Braxton didn’t come home that night. Or the next night. He came home on Sunday morning. She heard church bells ringing. She heard Braxton honking his horn. She wouldn’t open the door, go to him, he could come to her. She pulled her bathrobe over her nightgown, went to a front window. Her neighbors, on her right, on her left were backing out of their carports, church bells ringing hurry up hurry up you might not get here in time.

  Braxton opened the door on the passenger side and out stepped a girl wearing a dress Lorna wouldn’t be seen dead in, more a gunny sack than a dress.

  All she could say was come in.

  Inside, insulated from Mr. Kayline, who had come out of his house with a Polaroid camera, crossed Shelton Mill Road and asked them to pose—all three of you—she felt calm settle over her like mist over a field.

  “I want you to meet Eenonee. Eenonee this is Lorna.”

  Eenonee hiked her granny glasses up from her nose. “I feel like I know you already, Lorna. Like I’ve known you all my life.”

  Lovey-dovey—you’d think their hands were glued together.

  “I’ve got news for you, Mom. Last night we were out in Eenonee’s backyard. These lights in the sky seemed to be dancing just for us.”

  “Just for us,” Eenonee echoed, squeezing Braxton’s big hand in her little hand.

  “What else could they be but UFO’s? Right over our heads.”

  Braxton had been down this road before, the extraterrestrial express he called it.

  “So where did they come from? Mars? Venus?”

  “Does that matter? Would I ask you where the sun came from? The important thing is it’s where it is. The same goes for the stars.” Braxton seemed to be pondering an algebra problem Lorna knew he’d never solve. “Last night there weren’t many stars in the sky. Like they got the word somehow. Via Morse code or telepathy, them thar stars got the message and moved out for the night. Move out!”—reminding Lorna of every John Wayne movie Brad ever watched.

  “And the message?”

  “Them thar lights”—please stop—“hoppin’ and skippin’ you shoulda seen ’em Mom”—I’ve had enough—“know what they was a telling’ us you an’ Eenonee go out and get hitched. So we did. ” Braxton put his arm around Eenonee and hugged her tight.

  She had to talk to Eenonee’s mama. Eenonee—that’s how she’d taken to spelling her made up name so everyone she knew could pronounce it. The name Braxton had given her, a mythical name, Braxton explained—how he knew that he didn’t disclose. Oenone was a Greek nymph abandoned by Paris for Helen of Troy. Nymph and Greek, that didn’t sit well with Lorna.

  So much you keep from me. Lorna took her eyes off a giant red rocket up ahead, primed for liftoff.

  From Brad—hugging Eenonee in the back seat. “We should stop for firecrackers, Mom.”

  “This isn’t the Fourth of July.”

  “I know. It’s the third. But on an occasion like this I think a celebration is called for.”

  “I think not.”

  Eenonee said, “Lorna’s right. Firecrackers, who needs them?”

  Silence. Lorna drove on. Abandoned cabins she passed, a rusty harrow, sheep grazing, a sign to the right saying felicity acres, a road she knew was circular because she had already been down it with Brad. The last time she had heard from Brad he had sold one lot in Felicity. Not enough to pay her back alimony. But if she took Brad to court it would cost her.

  How many more miles would she have to drive to do something about this situation? She had a few words for Eenonee’s mama. How could you bring up a girl to do such a thing? Run off with my boy? How could you?

  She hadn’t been down this road for awhile. She took Lee County 29 to town, where she spent her day behind a counter in the Probate Office, taking in checks, handing out Georgia license plates. On her computer screen love bugs with smiling faces.

  From the back seat, “Pull over, Mom.”

  A barbed wire fence, the sign on the gate, no trespassing. Braxton got out of the car, swung the gate open, Eenonee scooting after him. They skipped down a rutted clay road. If they can’t read I can. Daylight was on its way out in here, first thing she realized following them. Not them, the trail they left, what Eenonee must have stored in that gunny sack she was wearing, candy corn, one every ten yards. She should go back and unlock the car and drive off. Let them go their way. But what if at the end of the road there was a cottage, there was an oven?

  She followed their trail to a clearing, a picnic bench, a cabin, a huge cedar tree, a barbecue pit silted in ashes. Out in front of the cabin, a no smoking sign. Lorna lit one last cigarette. Took her time, inhaling luxuriantly, allowing nicotine to caress her lungs, exhaling streams of smoke. From inside she heard Eenonee giggling.

  Inside—no one should have to live here—it was musty and hot. Cobwebs everywhere. Climb a ladder to get to the loft, that she definitely wasn’t going to do.

  Don’t you realize what you’re doing? You don’t belong here.

  Coming down the ladder a pair of legs in panty hose, a waist you could put your arm around and have some arm left over. Bangled wrists, pointy breasts—lipstick, rouge, eye shadow. Descending behind her Braxton’s big can, his torso, his straw-thatched head. Braxton took Eenone’s hand. “Mom,” his voice resonating the way it did when he came home from school with C’s, not D’s, on his report card. “Meet Rona Beth.”

  Rona Beth smoothed out her miniskirt.

  Lorna called 911 on her cell phone. Asked for the sheriff’s office. Two deputies, one she used to date, Buddy Bolton, before Brad came along, spotted her car and after closing the gate took the road to the cabin. Buddy Bolton had put on a beer belly and his gun belt creaked from too much fat and the arm he felt he had to put around her and the hand he gripped Braxton’s arm with wasn’t exactly welcome.

  They would take Rona Beth to her place, Buddy Bolton reassured her, before pulling the gate open. Behind him the patrol car came to a stop. Scratchy voices on the radio. “If this happens again, we’ll have to take both of them in.”

  “I know. Trespassing is trespassing.”

  “Lucky you didn’t get shot.”

  “I know. I know.”

  “Next time you call me first.”

  “There won’t be a next time, Buddy.”

  It took Buddy to get Braxton in the car.

  She had hidden Braxton’s car keys. Asked him not to see Rona Beth again. “Don’t you get it? She isn’t in her right mind.”

  “That’s what you say.”

  “That’s what I k
now.”

  Braxton still had Rona Beth’s granny glasses. He would put them on when they watched television, his TV tray junked with food he hadn’t eaten. One night she asked him, “Who do you like better? Eenonee or Rona Beth?”

  “I like them both the same. Having two personalities, maybe more, isn’t that what we all have? You too, Mom. You’re one person at the Probate Office and another when you come home. With me, I mean.”

  “I’m your mother. I’m trying to do what’s best for you.”

  Braxton’s blue eyes filmed over with hurt. “Only I know what’s best for me.”

  The day shift was just letting out at the mill—automobiles, pickup trucks, none of them new like her Saturn, were backed up at the traffic light. That was bad enough, but where Rona Beth lived must be worse. But Rona Beth didn’t live near the mill. Just Braxton’s way of letting you know what you didn’t have to contend with. An auto graveyard. Trailer parks. Mill houses with 110-volt air conditioners humming in the windows.

  “Taking the long way can be the best way. So you won’t say it’s Eenonee’s background that’s made her the way she is. She doesn’t have to escape from anything. She’s exploring what might be possible for her.”

  Granny glasses, miniskirts? Braxton drove past the courthouse, closed for the day. Crossing the tracks, Braxton pulled into a motel. A bricked-up pool. Weekly and monthly rates. “Right now Eenonee’s living here.” Next to Wendy’s and an Exxon station. “She grew up in the last antebellum home in Calhoun County. Her grandmama’s still living there. Lucky for her she hasn’t cut off her allowance. I wanted her to check into the Holiday Inn but Eenonee wasn’t having any of that.”

  “How did you know she was here?”

  “We kept in touch. By cell phone.”

  Which Lorna could confiscate but what was the use?

  Eenonee had checked out. Left a note in a sealed envelope at the front desk. Braxton tore open the envelope. Read from lined yellow note paper.

  Braxton—

  A sad occasion has called me home. Please don’t try to see me.

  Rona Beth

  Lorna followed Braxton to room fourteen. Braxton pounded on the door, pulled on the knob. She waited for him to calm down—how many times had she waited for Braxton to clean up his room, do his homework, participate in at least one team sport? Steaming off what was once a swimming pool, heat from the low-hanging sun in the murky sky. She couldn’t walk home. She had to let Braxton take her arm and escort her to the car.

  “Take me home.”

  “I’m afraid I can’t do that.”

  “You can’t go on acting crazy.”

  “Why not? The whole world’s crazy.”

  What was the point in sitting here listening to Braxton go on, parked in front of a motel no one in his right mind would stay in for more than one night?

  “We deny it, we build more prisons, we put people in funny farms, go to church, read our magazines and newspapers thinking they must know what’s going on.”

  And—“You want to renovate our house. Put tile floors in the kitchen, in the bathroom, repaint the living room. A bird is satisfied with a nest. But not you, Mom, not Dad either. He thinks he’s buying lots to make money. He thinks Lu Ann will get her dream house if he socks enough money in the bank.”

  The motor on and the windows rolled up—if Braxton didn’t drive off they would both die of carbon monoxide poisoning.

  Eenonee’s grandmother’s house sat on a low hill. It had a portico, columns, a porte cochere, ivy crawling up dingy brick. Behind the house the overseer’s cottage, on the front door a sign, wet paint. And from Braxton—“You ask me this place should be torn down.” Braxton took her arm, guiding her to the front door. “Best thing that could happen, wipe it all out of our minds. I’ve been after Eenonee to sell the property.” Knocking, getting no answer, pushing open the door. “Eenonee should talk to her grandmama. Sell the land off to developers. Cut up the land into lots. Give Dad a chance to buy a few.”

  Lorna followed him inside through the parlor, chairs covered with sheets, a grandfather clock, its hands stopped at 11:55. At the foot of the stairs Braxton hollered—“Eenonee?”

  Lorna gripped the bannister, needles of tendonitis pain tattooing her ankles and calves. You did this to us, Brad. You and Lu Ann. The clock on the landing was ticking. She followed Braxton into the bedroom.

  The grandmother lay on a double bed, a sheet pulled up to her neck. Her fingers kneaded the sheet. Hooked into an oxygen tank, a nasal canula looped over her ears, pronged into her nostrils, her mouth, she seemed to be waiting for something that wasn’t going to happen. Her eyes moved from Braxton to Lorna, and when she opened her mouth she showed gum. In a glass jar on the bed table false teeth submerged in cloudy water.

  Rona Beth stared at Braxton as if she’d never seen him before. On a chest in the bay window, a potted white orchid. Somebody ought to move it. Orchids couldn’t stand direct sunlight.

  Braxton would be home any minute now, with Eenonee, Rona Beth. They had the back bedroom all to themselves. Eenonee’s string of Christmas lights lit up the headboard—up to you to replace the bad bulbs. Up to you to take care of both of them.

  She had gone to the grandmother’s funeral. Braxton wanted her with him. The burial was in Pine Hills. She’d been there before, with Brad, years ago early in the fall, for Lanterns in the Cemetery Eve. Townspeople dressed up like dead and buried former citizens paraded around the tombstones. The mayor dressed up as a dead mayor and Colonel Obediah Lewis rode again on his white horse, right here in the cemetery, a horse turd steaming on a marble slab, Brad had to point out, for he hadn’t wanted to go, she had nagged at him until he took her. Lanterns swaying on the cedar trees, she’d felt Brad’s hand slip down to her bottom, how could he do that, ruin all this, just to show her she was his for the taking?

  She moved the sprinkler to the front yard. She heard a limb fall off the pecan tree. Crepe myrtles, once pink and lavender snow cones, most of them shriveled by the drought. Mimosa pods too. Brad used to say mimosa pods poisoned horses. If pecan trees couldn’t get enough water, they’d sacrifice one of their limbs.

  She went inside to fix dinner. She turned the oven on. She took two chicken breasts out of the refrigerator, chopped up potatoes, carrots, onions. Rubbed them with garlic, olive oil, sprinkled on pepper and paprika, set them in a casserole lined with aluminum foil. Eenonee was a vegetarian—she liked broccoli, eggplant, Brussels sprouts—but the potatoes, the onions, the carrots she’d eat and the salad you’d make just for her.

  She opened a bottle of Chardonnay—chilled not iced, Brad would tell her—poured out half a glass, the oven on, chicken breasts beginning to brown. The orchid shouldn’t be in the kitchen window. How many times had she told Braxton that? But that’s where Eenonee wants it, Mom. She would move it and Braxton would put it back. Well that wasn’t going to happen again.

  She found a place for it on the island. So she could look at it while she was boiling eggs, slicing onions, green peppers. What didn’t belong on the island, draped over one of the burners, were Eenonee’s granny glasses.

  She poured out more wine. Picked up the granny grasses by one temple, put them on.

  She might just keep them on. Show Eenonee how silly they looked. The temples pinched her behind the ears. She pulled them down over her nose. Pulled up her skirt and did a dance. With Brad she’d danced. And he’d gotten ideas. Still wearing Eenonee’s granny glasses, she let her skirt fall, felt its hem slip over her knees.

  Pagoda

  Today I received a reply to my first application for a job. My resume has been put on file.

  Loraine’s back from town, in the station wagon. She gets out from behind the driver’s seat, swings the door shut, announces herself. Charlie gets out on the other side. He waits for Loraine to unlock the tailgate, thumbs hooked in the pockets of his jeans. The
back seat of our station wagon has been lowered to make room for fiberglass. There is also a bag of birdseed, which is not large, and not heavy. It is sitting in front of the fiberglass, easy for me to get to. Charlie will haul in the fiberglass. The birdseed is easy to carry. I can support it on one shoulder, without any strain or dizziness. I don’t have to worry about my heart, which can go out at any moment.

  I set the bag of seed down on the screen porch. Charlie shoulders the fiberglass. Charlie is wearing a red muscle shirt. His sinewy arms and chest are tanned. His sweat-streaked hair is pulled back tight, in what Charlie called a rat tail. Loraine tells Charlie where the fiberglass goes, beside the sheetrock inside the garage. Charlie will put up the feeder, under Loraine’s supervision, of course. She knows just how the feeder should hang.

  I go back inside to do some work. I have some changes to make on my resume. When I come out, the feeder is up, between the screen porch and the tulip tree.

  Loraine and Charlie go off again, this time for peat moss and potting soil, for the garden, beyond the tulip tree. While they’re gone I look at the feeder. Two walls of the upper section have windows in front and back. I can look right through these windows at the foliage behind the feeder, through the upper sections of the panes. Through the lower sections of the panes I can look at a column of birdseed. Circumscribing the upper section’s base is a deck, or porch, or balcony. In actuality, it is a feeding trough. Its dimensions match those of the trough below, circumscribing the base of the feeder.

  From a projecting beam of the screen porch to a lower branch of the tulip tree runs a clothesline, from which the feeder hangs. A copper wire falls from the clothesline, through the roof and on through the feeder. The copper wire is wrapped around a nail, a two-inch, monstrous nail inset in the flat-bottomed base. The lower section could be a ship, with windows and a flat-bottomed hull. The ship resembles a Chinese junk, without the high poop and battened sails. From the center point of the flat-bottomed hull, this copper wire makes a curlicue, resembling some kind of pigtail, resembling, perhaps, a Chinese queue.