"Yeah I know."
"And that's what I want to go by."
"Fine."
"And you're Matt."
"I sure am."
"So it's settled?"
"On this end it is."
"All right then." He shakes the hammer once for emphasis.
Matt says, "Eddie's a fine name, I've always liked it."
"You're damn right it is."
"Damn right."
"Goddamn right."
Mateo, confused and excited by the banter, suddenly lets out a weak bark and thumps his tail, gazing up, hoping for reassurance. Matt strokes his head and says, "It's okay, we ain't arguing." Eddie and Matt look at each other for a long moment and some kind of understanding passes between them.
Eddie says, "Hand me some nails, would you."
"Yessir."
They make one last trip to Builders Square just at closing time and it's a small load they bring home. They have a beer on the patio to celebrate and to cool off and then Matt goes into the house to call Sandra Boone. After a few minutes he returns. His face is troubled but he seems to find the trouble amusing.
"Sandra wants to bring along a friend."
"What kind of friend?"
"Her name's Joan."
Eddie snorts a laugh. "I'm a married man."
"It ain't no date or anything."
He sits still a moment, trying to think of something else to say. He knows there is only one thing to say and he knows they both need to hear it. Onward; march onward. Matt would only laugh at such a phrase so he nods his head yes without speaking.
Alone then Edward Mansfield steps into the yard and takes a good look at his new fence. There is the pile of old lumber to deal with but he decides then and there to cut it up in the fall for firewood. Mateo is sniffing around the hot tub; as he approaches, shooing away the dog, he too smells the faint stench of that drowned squirrel. He reaches into the scum and lifts the carcass out by its tail, marches to the trash can on the side of the house and drops it in. Such a simple thing.
The Solitary Heart
1
The widower Beamus Hardcastle hung up the phone one day in his hot, dry, dusty living room, parted the billowing lace curtains that his wife had made by hand, looked out at the springtime desert and said with a certain inflection, "Well, shit."
He had to go see those people, the Krafts. It had been the woman's brother on the phone and with bad news again. He hated to do it, there was something about the people that he just didn't care for, but it appeared he had no choice. Somebody had to tell them. After grumbling about it for half an hour over two bowls of lunchtime Corn Flakes, he went outside and hefted his thin tired angular old body into his pickup truck.
Long in retirement Hardcastle still ranched in a small way and tended his laundromat near the college down in Alpine, and he was the Kraft's landlord and closest neighbor at two miles distant. For over a year he had been renting to them the place where he was born, the house in which his parents had lived for almost fifty years. He loved the old house but it had become a burden to Hardcastle and his sister the past few years and he wanted to unload it. The people had promised to buy the house and the five acres he had set aside with it, though no formal offer had been made, and lately they shied from the topic on his brief visits to the porch for the rent check and once to repair the water pump.
In a few words, the people were "pretty goddamn strange." She seemed to think she was an Indian squaw, wearing leather moccasins and headbands and feathers even down in town. And the man more often than not simply stared at him from under his long yellow hair whenever Hardcastle asked him a question; it was as if their isolation up there in the hills had taken the man's voice right out of his body. More than once Hardcastle had heard weird chanting-like music coming from the house when he approached. And smelled unusual odors, like incense, he assumed. Hardcastle's tenants had turned out to be not at all what he had expected: she was a librarian at the college, or had been.
On top of it all there was that contentious half-coyote the people had raised from a pup and kept like any other dog. To Hardcastle, who had considered himself a cattleman even before he was old enough to drive, there was something immoral about anyone who didn't eradicate a coyote at the slightest opportunity. They called him Wolf and the name fit: a good watchdog, except it never barked, which made it all the more sinister and suspect.
The animal rose from the porch when Hardcastle pulled up to the yard, and he saw the Krafts' old rusty pickup. The truck around back meant someone must be home. It usually did at least.
Hardcastle called toward the house: "Hello inside." He noticed his mother's yellow rose bushes going wild up the south wall of yellow stone and a window screen lying on the parched yellow ground. There was other junk in the yard. If he hadn't known better he would have thought the place abandoned. It had been months since he'd seen the inside of the house, and he fully expected to find it an abject mess. He considered asking them to vacate before the locals started to talk even more than they already were or he found out these people were dope smugglers.
He called toward the house again; no one answered so he got out and walked around to the back. The coydog followed him along the yard's picket fence, growling at him, sniffing at him through the pickets. "Beat it!" he said. As he passed through the back-gate opening he kicked at the dog once which sent him scurrying out into the weeds and prickly pear; soon he was back, growling.
Hardcastle knocked on the screen but again no one answered. He stood there on the deep back porch, his hand on their old green washing machine, hoping the Krafts were gone somewhere, hoping he could postpone his errand. At least for a few hours. The wind coming off the knoll from the southwest carried with it the scents of spring, of cactus and wildflowers and West Texas dust, nice smells, familiar smells. Nothing human though. Maybe they were hiding from him, watching him from some hidden spot among the yellow rocks or the green mesquites, afraid for some reason to come and face him, or laughing into their fists.
He was about to leave when way up at the top of the knoll he saw a human form moving around, bending, moving around some more. It looked like the woman. He stepped off the porch into the sunshine, pushed up his eyeglasses, tilted back his Stetson and intensified his gaze: looked like she was picking wildflowers.
She turned. He saw a huge bunch of flowers in her hand. And it was then that he noticed she was naked to the waist.
"Lordy," he said. He held his breath as she stepped from behind a low boulder, showing her slender legs now too.
Hardcastle glanced around to see if anyone was watching him and passing judgment; there was her husband to consider. He saw no one, just as before; all the evidence indicated he and the woman were alone together. So he indulged himself, squinting and blinking to get her into focus. It had been many years since he had seen a young woman's breasts on anything but the pages of a magazine, and these two were awfully far away for his weak old eyes. He wished he had his hunting binoculars. No matter; blurry though it was, the scene did more to charge up his atrophied urges than anything he'd come across in years. She was wearing only underwear purple underwear, it appeared and twice when she bent to pick a flower he got a view similar to the one a bull gets when he's headed off to mount a cow across a pasture. At these moments Hardcastle's lust throbbed painfully in his crotch and his boots stirred in the dust. But then she would stand and walk a ways, moving along a barren trail, holding the bouquet of flowers against her belly, looking down, her dark hair falling across her white shoulders and the image would change to something sweet and endearing as if she were a well-endowed child playing in a field . . . and he felt ashamed of himself.
He didn't know quite what to do but figured this had gone on long enough. He decided to call out to get her attention and then he'd make a big show of not looking as she came down the hill. Turned out neither was necessary. She must have seen him at last for she stopped what she was doing, shaded her eyes with one hand and
waved to Hardcastle with the other. And she did it without even trying to cover herself. Just then, off to his right, Hardcastle heard the screen door slam out at the old foreman's house which hadn't been used in years. Standing on the stoop was the husband. He seemed preoccupied with something. Hardcastle almost jumped out of his skin trying to get through the gate and up the long path before the man could see what he'd been up to.
Kraft was holding some kind of pot in his hands and blinking in the deluge of afternoon sunlight. His voice was very soft with little inflection when he said, "Hello, Mr. H." He too was naked to the waist and with no shoes on his feet but at least he had on jeans, torn at the knees and sort of rusty-looking. Streamers of sweat glistened on his brown blond-bearded face and his arms were crusted to the elbows with a flaky gray mud. He looked at Hardcastle as if he hadn't seen another human being in a long time and expected this one to do something entertaining.
"Y'all gonna have to get yourselves a telephone," Hardcastle said more loudly and with more jocularity than was necessary. But then bluster was his way with people. With bluster and a little business sense he had gotten along pretty well in life. It didn't seem to be working this time it rarely did with these people and he laughed uneasily under the husband's innocent gaze.
"Don't y'all believe in progress?" he tried again in the same blustery tone, but the man just stared at him with the same expectant face. It was like trying to talk to a child. Even his eyes had a childlike innocence and penetration about them.
Hardcastle gave up and attempted a new tack; he spoke to him as he would to a child: "You see, son, I've got a message for your wife. An important one. Is she here by any chance?"
Kraft stared at him for so long that Hardcastle thought perhaps he wasn't going to answer. He began to wonder if there was something wrong with himself, spittle hanging from his mouth or a new wart growing on his nose. He was ready to ask again when the man sort of came to himself and said, "Uh yeah, right, Mr. H. Sorry, I had something on my mind. You wanted Alice?"
"That's right, son."
Kraft said that she had left a while ago, gone to the house, but he had seen her pass by shortly thereafter and he thought she was out picking flowers or maybe she was robbing from the honey bees. "We've got a hive up in the hills now," he said. And then he smiled to himself and went back inside the house.
Hardcastle stepped back, glanced up the knoll and saw the woman was coming toward him, her naked breasts jouncing grandly as she made her way down the trail. He didn't want to be caught alone with her so he quickly invited himself in and followed the husband through the door, removing his Stetson and catching the screen before it hit the jamb. What he saw amazed him.
The inside, nothing more than a large room, was neat and tidy as a hospital though a little dusty and very warm. All the woodwork and cabinets and fixtures were in good repair and the room was freshly painted. It smelled nicely of the paint and of something else, an earthy smell. One of the walls was covered over with pictures, each one framed and carefully arranged from ceiling to floor. The other long wall was rack upon rack of unfinished pottery, some pieces covered in plastic, and each one was accompanied by a tag stuck to the front of the shelf below it. Lined up neatly on the floor were a dozen or more white buckets of glaze. In the center sat a muddy potter's wheel with a smooth lump of clay on top and just beside it squatted the large octagonal kiln, its top propped open, the source of the room's uncomfortable heat. In one far corner was the kitchen, in perfect empty order save a plastic bucket in the sink and a few dishes in the drainer. In the other corner was a narrow bed made up like an army cot and a small dresser. It looked like the man not only worked here but lived here, lived here quite comfortably.
"My word!" said Hardcastle. "Y'all've really fixed this place up. What are you, an artist or something?"
The husband nodded and shrugged in a noncommittal way and said "sort of" and then smiled at Hardcastle from where he stood behind his kitchen table. He asked Hardcastle if he cared for something cool to drink and Hardcastle said no thank you, not right now, just as the woman entered by the door along with the panting coyote who settled itself calmly at the husband's feet.
Her hands were full of bluebonnets and yellow coreopsis and red Indian blanket, and she was dressed now in a white tee shirt and a faded denim skirt. Still the shape of her breasts seemed to jump out at the old man, so he avoided looking at her below the neck. The woman appeared prettier than he remembered, healthier somehow with more weight and breadth and texture in her olive-colored face, and she greeted him as a friend. With the gaze from her caramel eyes fixed on him pointedly, she apologized for the warmth of the room and went on to explain that on days when James was firing in the kiln they had to take extreme measures to keep cool. From a kitchen cabinet she removed a jelly jar, filled it with water and arranged the flowers in it.
"Mr. H, the wildflowers are coming up beautiful this year," she said. "Why don't you take these on home with you. We'll just drain the water before you leave and you can fill it up again."
Hardcastle was so taken by the offer that he accepted the glass of flowers with several thank yous and awkward bows and then the woman asked him what they could do for him. She said with a smile that she hoped they hadn't somehow let the first of the month slip by unnoticed.
"No, ma'am, no, it's nothing like that."
James said, "He has a phone message for you."
"Oh, I see," she said.
"It's from your brother, ma'am. Bad news I'm afraid."
Alice's father had died. Like bookends loosely holding up the fifteen months they had been back in Texas this matched news they had received in March of the year before. That time it was her mother who had died.
"Your brother said he was already in Houston and that the funeral was in two days, on Friday," said Hardcastle. "He left a number for you to call. You can use my phone if you'd like."
Hardcastle noticed absolutely no difference in the woman's face or manner after receiving the news of her father's death. She acted as if she had fully expected him to say exactly what he had said and that it didn't matter to her one way or the other. He even felt a little foolish acting so pious and concerned as he went through the things her brother had told him on the phone, the particulars of how and when and where and what. When he had finished she thanked him for coming over to tell them and then she said the most incredible thing, given the circumstances:
"Is your house, this house, still for sale, Mr. Hardcastle?"
Glancing at the husband Hardcastle coughed once and stuttered a moment before saying, "Well, sure, yes ma'am."
"And you're asking?"
"Forty-five thousand, just as before."
"Would you take forty thousand cash?" she said and then glanced herself at the husband who affirmed the offer with a nod.
Hardcastle laughed strangely and looked again at the husband who sat at the table waiting for him to answer. "Well, yes, ma'am, I guess so," he said to relieve the pressure. "But there's no hurry about anything like that. I mean you got other things to worry over just now and I'm not going to sell it out from under you or anything."
"Would you have the papers drawn up?"
"Well . . . well sure, yes ma'am, but there's no rush."
"You're right," she said. "At your convenience."
Hardcastle liked a woman who could take care of business so easily but he was glad when she shifted her attention. She and the husband began to talk lowly between themselves, something about dates and savings accounts, and this too astonished him, how they could seemingly ignore the emotional aspect of death. He stood there staring at the woman, holding his flowers in his hands, listening but not really listening and as he did a new and troubling thought began to prick his mind. He had the feeling he had been taken advantage of somehow. It had to do with numbers. Forty-three thousand had always been his mental minimum price for the house yet he had just agreed to something else. And then he saw what she had done, that she had seized an op
portunity and used his delicate feelings toward her just then to negate the possibility of negotiation a tactic he himself had used a number of times and suddenly his heart lifted itself to the platform of admiration.
The two had quit talking. There was a strained silence before the woman said, "Well thank you again, Mr. Hardcastle," and he took it to mean she wanted him to leave. The husband got up and shook his hand as if to seal a pact and then returned to his seat at the table without saying a word. She walked out with him and as they approached his truck it struck him that he had apparently just sold his family's home place and he might never have a chance to see the inside again. So he asked her if she would mind letting him take a quick peek for old time's sake and she said, smiling, "Certainly not."
They walked through weeds to the dilapidated porch where he had played as a child, and she opened the weathered old door. He stepped inside expecting the worst. But this too amazed him.
It was beautiful inside. All of the woodwork and walls and cabinets had been redone and the old wood floors glistened with varnish.
There wasn't a curtain on any window and the furniture was very plain, very old, very sparse, but pictures covered the walls and on each floor rested a lovely rug of an intricate design, the kind you see in museums. In the front bedroom was a gigantic loom interlaced with gray yarn and a work-table covered with beads and tools. And in the back room he found a bed almost identical to the one in the husband's place, simple and narrow like a cot. Above the bed hung a huge painting. It was abstract but he assumed it was of a wolf or maybe their own coyote.
She saw him staring at it and told him they had commissioned the painting by an emerging artist in New Mexico and that it was called "The Essence." Again he exclaimed the way they had "fixed up the place," saying it made him feel good to think of it "pretty like this." She told him that her husband was something of a carpenter and had done the work all by himself.
Memorial Day Page 5