It was three P.M. now. Sarah had told him that she would come by at ten P.M., as soon as her shift at the hospital ended. Seven hours. Plenty of time.
He began to assemble the things he would need. There was a strange pleasure in these preparations, in this discovery of his instinct to survive. He had always thought himself weak, but here he was, scheming to protect himself, proceeding despite the risks. There was something manly about it, and he thought that he was perhaps no longer the person who had submitted to so many indignities at the hands of Sam Austen and his gang. That if Sam were to call him Tubs now, he might be in for a surprise.
3.
That night at Nancy’s, the woman who paid his tab had said, “Well, train’s leaving the station. Come on if you’re coming.”
He followed her outside, knees quivering, trying to avoid the bodies swaying around him. He scanned the crowd for Sam and Gene, still not quite believing that they would have deserted him. OK, Sam would have, but all of the rest of the guys? Both trucks? And it was early yet; even Wyatt could make that out. Not even midnight. They’d all been dancing, talking to pretty women, ordering shots—having a good time. Why would they all have left? Without him?
A prank, he realized.
“I’m this way,” the woman said. They were outside, and the cool air was clarifying. He felt now the suggestion of a headache, just a little twinge behind his eyes, and he focused on the wink of the woman’s light-colored shoes in the darkness. His senses were heightened unpleasantly; he could feel in the cup of his ear the rasp of her sneakers against the gravel, could make out the trail of her perfume, which was muskier than that of the woman he’d danced with. Where Sarah’s vanilla had suggested a kitchen table and oven-warm cookies, this woman’s cologne was wilder, spicier. There was something in it that reminded him of the way Boss smelled when he came in from exercising—not sweaty, but like he’d carried in some of the outdoors, the smell of damp earth and tree sap, the spirit of his own exertion.
Wyatt bent over double, hand pressed against a nearby truck for support, and vomited the hamburger he’d eaten earlier. Sweat popped against his neck and forehead, and his bowels felt loose.
The grind of gravel halted. “Better?”
He paused, assessing. His skin stopped prickling, and he took in a gulp of clean air. “Yeah.” He nodded, too, for emphasis, then stood, wiping his mouth with the cuff of his shirt. It was his good shirt, bought at Dillard’s for $25, marked down from $40. It was a deep blue, subtly pin-striped, with a nice, fine weave. He wore it tucked into a pair of khakis, with his old brown belt and his wingtip shoes, a pair he’d bought over thirty years ago for the high school graduation he would never attend and had carefully preserved with polish and a single resoling. He’d thought, assessing himself in the mirror earlier that night, that he looked good. He’d combed his thinning hair over, rubbed some pomade between his hands, patted the flyaways into place. He’d used a fresh Bic razor to carefully shave his cheeks and chin and neck, managing not to nick himself, and then he’d trimmed his mustache neatly with a little pair of scissors. He could still pluck the gray hairs from his mustache; the hair on his head he touched up every few weeks with a Just For Men kit.
“I ought to be ashamed,” he said. He didn’t want to make eye contact with the woman. But she came up to him, took his hand in hers, squeezed it, and he couldn’t help looking up at her. He tried to smile, bashful, and he noted with surprise how young she was, despite the raspy voice and the bravado. Her hair, which seemed to be brownish or dark blond in the dim lights outside the bar, was clipped short, boyish, but ruffled up in the front and hairsprayed, lending her a touch of femininity. She had wide, startled-looking eyes, the effect heightened by heavily applied mascara, and her full, painted lips anchored an otherwise absent chin, giving her an aspect of almost homely cuteness. She was pretty, but in a way that defied the individual parts that comprised her.
“Now stop that,” she said. “We’re all entitled to a little embarrassment. I’ve had my share tonight and then some.”
“You have?”
“Yeah.” She dropped his hand. “Do you want this ride or not?”
“Please,” Wyatt said.
“All right.” She pointed to a dark-colored Camaro. “If you think you’re going to puke again, though, you let me know in time to pull over. You puke in my car and I’ll kick you out right there and then.”
“OK.”
She drove with her window rolled down, the air biting but fresh, and Wyatt noticed the way she flew her left hand along outside, letting it roll in waves. She was propped on an extra cushion for lift, but even so she had to perch at the end of her seat to reach the wheel and the pedals and the stick shift, and she seemed to be constantly in motion, switching off hands on the steering wheel every time she had to put the car into a different gear, hips flexing as she pumped the brake and the clutch, eyes on the road, then her rearview mirror, then on Wyatt. She made the process of driving seem difficult, her own efforts heroic. They might have been riding in a time machine to Roma instead of a Camaro.
“Have you had this car long?” Wyatt asked after several minutes of silence.
“Little over two years.” She was pushing the car to seventy-five now, taking the little rises in the road too quickly for Wyatt’s nervous stomach. Headlights appeared in the distance and she dimmed her own. “Finally decided, fuck it. I’m never going to be a millionaire. If I want something nice, I’m just going to have to get it and enjoy it while I can.” She restored the brights. “It was used,” she added, as though she had to justify herself.
“I wish I’d spent more time thinking that way,” Wyatt said. He felt sweat popping on his forehead despite the cold. The security light on a distant farmhouse wavered in his vision like a shooting star. “You don’t want to be pushing sixty and realize that you always played it safe, you always planned ahead. Thing is, you’re just planning for some time that never comes. Or you’re planning for a day when you’ll be too old to enjoy it.”
“Hell yeah. Live in the now, that’s what I say.”
Wyatt closed his eyes, nodded into the cold air whipping through the car. He didn’t believe it for himself, but he believed it for this pretty young woman.
“I think about this stuff,” she said. “I think about, OK, I spend forty hours a week at this shitty factory job—”
“Which factory?”
“The sewing plant.”
“Huh,” Wyatt said. “I’m at Price.”
“You know what I mean, then.” She was now motioning with her free right hand, adding a step to the already complex dance. “I sew pockets into blue jeans. That’s all I do. This.” She lifted both hands off the wheel now, miming: she lowered them, as though she were putting a tray on a table, and then she flattened her hands and moved them around like a planchette on a Ouija board. She finished with a sweeping yank—the thread getting cut, Wyatt recognized. “Ta-da. Multiply times fifty.”
Wyatt was nodding.
“What’s funny is, I can’t really sew. My sister brought me a dress pattern for my niece one time, thinking I might be able to make it, and I just laughed. I can sew pockets into jeans. I can use that one sewing machine. I don’t know the first thing about making a little girl a dress.” She drove for a moment silently. “I heard one time that they used to have women making bombs in factories, and they gave each one a specific role so she wouldn’t know how to put the whole bomb together. ’Cause then what would she do? God knows I’d like to bomb the hell out of Sew-Rite some days.”
“I don’t even make anything,” Wyatt said. “I used to be in the winding room, and then I did die cast, but now I’m out in packaging. It’s better, in a way. It’s not as hot out there in the summer. But I can’t seem to move fast enough anymore.” He felt a little burn of anger at the thought. “I can’t do what these Bosnian kids do. They’re desperate. They come here and think it’s the greatest thing ever since we don’t have bombs going off outside. This
Jusef guy—” He shook his head. He didn’t have the heart—or maybe the clarity—to complete the thought.
“I don’t know your name,” the woman said.
“Wyatt,” he told her. He held out his hand and she shook it briskly.
“Ronnie.”
He mouthed it silently. A man’s name.
“Wyatt,” she said. “I don’t think I’m in the mood to be alone yet. How’re you feeling?”
“Better,” he said truthfully. “The coffee helped.”
“So did yakking, I bet. Could you eat something? I always get hungry like this when I drink. I have this strange hankering for chicken livers. Nasty, right?”
Wyatt’s stomach, parted from its hamburger, actually rumbled. “Sounds good to me.”
“My treat,” Ronnie said. “Along with your drinks and half your buddies’, the fuckers.”
He flushed. He’d almost forgotten his humiliation. “I’ll pay you back. I promise.”
“It’s the principle, Wyatt. You can’t let people treat you like that. Get the money out of them or don’t bother.”
“I’ll try to,” he said.
She smirked, but she was kind enough not to say more on the subject. “The Fill-Up’ll be open. We can get the food there and just take it back to my place, and I’ll drive you home when you’re wore out. Or you can crash on my couch.” She added this last almost sheepishly, and Wyatt’s heart started thumping. He couldn’t read her. He couldn’t make a guess at her intentions. Was she a lesbian? That would explain her name, her hair, her lack of unease around him: a man, a stranger. But he didn’t think she was. Did she see him as a father type? He could be her father. He placed her at late twenties, early thirties. He would have already been working at Price when she was born.
“I feel like you get me,” Ronnie said. She was pulling into the gas station, and the red neon lettering of the sign made her skin look pink and raw in the dark. She shoved the gearshift home to first with finality, shut off the engine, looked at him. “I’ve had a rough night. Hell, I’ve had a rough life.”
“I’m sorry.”
She shrugged. “I’m not some good Samaritan. But I saw what those guys were pulling on you, and I kept thinking that I should say something. No one else was going to do it. I watched them keep putting these shots in front of you, and you swallowing it like poison but like you wanted so bad to please them, and I thought, That’s a nice man over there. Too nice.” She leaned across him to pull a pack of cigarettes out of the glove box, hitting him again with a whiff of that spicy-smelling cologne. She tucked one between her lips, then raised her eyebrows and pointed the mouth of the pack toward him. He shook his head. The cooling engine ticked.
“Anyway,” she continued. “I could use a friend tonight.”
“So could I,” Wyatt said hoarsely.
She grinned. “Let’s pick out some grease, then.” Wyatt, a little drunk still, and dazed, followed. Was this happening to him? Was he about to go into this store with this young woman? With her?
He did. He watched her move: the purposeful stride, the muscular thighs, the fine, girlish hairs tickling the nape of her neck. The outline of her wallet against her swaying bottom. And he felt swell within him a desire so intense that he himself swayed a little, making Ronnie laugh and ask him if he needed to visit the bushes again.
There was an old black woman behind the counter—she tiredly donned plastic gloves as Ronnie placed their order—and Wyatt registered a pang of regret that the cashier wasn’t a man. He wanted a man to see him with Ronnie. At midnight, with their beer breath and their sudden, silly hunger and their exchanged looks of relief and hilarity, how else could a man see them as anything but a couple—as lovers? A man would notice, would be curious. This woman hardly saw him. She was tucking the wedges into a white paper sack, folding over the opening, reaching farther to her right to grasp a handful of livers, which would taste, Wyatt knew, of cooking fat and dirt. Look at me, he willed, moving in as close to Ronnie as he dared to, heart rat-a-tatting with the thrill. Look at me.
The black woman glanced up as if she’d heard him. Frowned. It was only a second, but Wyatt was satisfied, and he wandered to the front of the store to wait while Ronnie finished placing the order and ran quickly to the coolers to grab a twelve-pack for the road. He didn’t know what would happen after tonight. He didn’t know what Ronnie meant by “friend.” But he’d been seen with her, and that made everything real for him in a way it wouldn’t have been otherwise.
“Ready?” Ronnie said, handing Wyatt one of the grocery sacks and the twelve-pack.
“You bet,” he told her.
“Well, let’s go,” she said, and they went.
4.
Wyatt jolted awake with a gasp. His hands flew to his face, came away damp. He had been having a nightmare. It had started, like the bad dreams always did, with his beating a man, defending himself from some abstract harm; and, like usual, the man had turned into Boss, and it was the dog receiving his punches and his curses, and it was Boss howling with pain and confusion. But this time, his realization of the transformation hadn’t stopped Wyatt’s hand, the rain of rage-filled blows.
“Hello? Hello? Anyone home?”
“Here,” Wyatt called hoarsely from his recliner. He struggled to shift up to more of a sitting position, feeling blanched and limp. He had never been so tired.
Sarah was still wearing her pink scrubs, and she smelled faintly and reassuringly not just of her vanilla perfume but of the hospital: the alcoholic whiff of antiseptic, that lemony hand wash that she had to use so many times a day. She dropped her purse on the couch and rubbed Boss briskly on his head, setting his tail to thumping. “My goodness, you’re enormous,” she said, hunching over to pet his side, easy with the dog in a way that pleased Wyatt even in the fog of his discomfort. “We’ll go out in a minute, boy. Yes we will.”
This done, she came to the recliner, set her hip on the arm of the chair, and leaned in for a kiss. There was awkwardness—this was their first night together outside of the hospital, unobserved by nosy others—and she smiled in her brash way, not wanting to acknowledge it. Then her lips touched his, and it was as nice as it had always been—nicer—and some veil of formality lifted.
“Miss me?” Her face was still close to his. Unlined, cheeks bright with life.
“More than you could know,” Wyatt said.
Sarah frowned and put her hand on his cheeks, then his forehead. “You’re clammy as hell, Wyatt.” She felt his wrist. “Jeez, your heart’s just racing. What on earth have you been doing?”
“Just a little tidying up,” he said. “I didn’t want you coming over to a mess.”
“You must be looking to have another heart attack,” she said. She retrieved her purse and pulled out a blood pressure cuff. “Roll up your shirtsleeve.”
“I don’t think that’s necessary, now—”
“You roll up that sleeve before I roll it up for you.”
Wyatt did as he was told. Sarah pulled the Velcro closure apart and fastened it around his upper arm, then pressed the cold stethoscope inside his elbow. She tucked the earpieces in and started squeezing the pump.
“Sarah—”
“Shh,” she hissed. And then the monitor hissed and the tension on his arm lessened. Sarah released some more air and looked at the dial. “One seventy-five over one hundred. That’s not good, cowboy. I find that really troubling, actually.”
“I just overexerted myself.”
“I think you might need to go back to the hospital.”
The idea wasn’t entirely unpleasant: the safety of his room and bed, the certainty of Sarah’s tender ministries. But he couldn’t stay there forever, and besides, now that he was out, now that he knew exactly what was at risk, he didn’t know if chaining himself to a bed again was a good idea.
“Let me stay the night here,” Wyatt said. “You can check me in the morning. If it’s no better then, I’ll go.”
She exhaled in an exas
perated way. “Are you sure?”
He nodded and took her hand. “Will you stay with me? I could use the company.”
“All right,” she said with uncharacteristic softness.
So that was how, for the first time in his life, a woman slept the night next to him in his bed. He climbed under the covers in his drawstring pants and white undershirt; she borrowed one of his oversized flannel shirts and stripped otherwise to her underwear. Wyatt was too exhausted to be aroused but not so exhausted that he couldn’t appreciate the flash he saw of her pale thighs as she scooted quickly under the sheet. She was a big woman, the kind of woman whose nakedness Sam Austen and his like would express disgust at the sight of, but Sam was wrong, he and his like. This was beauty: a smooth-fleshed woman, wise and funny, her eyes filled with love. It was beauty, more beauty than he deserved, and he pulled her close with a confidence he had never before possessed, and her warm cheek rested against his collarbone, and her cool legs tangled with his.
“If I had my way,” Wyatt said, mouth against her hair, “this is what life would always be like.”
“Me too,” she said.
In few moments’ time, Sarah was breathing deeply enough that Wyatt knew she was sleeping. Still, his thoughts stirred. He wondered what would happen if Sarah saw one of the posters around town, if she put the image and the date and Nancy’s Dance Hall together and tried to make sense of it. He couldn’t kid himself any longer: someone was going to come to him with questions. It was just a matter of when.
In the meantime, he held Sarah tighter.
Chapter Nineteen
1.
Sarah was humming to herself when she checked into the nurses’ station Monday morning. Most of the other women complained about the hours—it was a habit, a shtick, a way to pass the first dreary phase of the day, when eyes were still itchy with sleep and breath still sour with coffee—but Sarah liked the twelve-hour shifts, always had. She liked rising before the sun and driving to the hospital on silent, mostly empty roads. She liked the fact that the nurses’ station was a lively oasis among dimmed hallways, the hospital still mostly a kingdom run by women before the first doctors started trickling in at eight or nine to make their rounds. She liked the conversation at six A.M., the good-natured grunts and groans, the dry humor, the way she and her colleagues moved around one another in an unconscious but graceful dance, reaching for clipboards and phones and doughnuts, leaning to the side so that someone else could pull a file drawer and tuck away papers.
The Next Time You See Me Page 22