The woman examined him politely, trying to place him. She had a pleasant face that was a bit round, and bright, alert eyes. “Do I know you?” she asked, her voice just like the one on the radio.
“I’m Wesley McBride. I met you in the meat department at McBride Mart.” He picked up his left foot and shined the top of a loafer on the back of his slacks. “I’m one of your … well, fans.” He briefly wondered if announcers on five-hundred-watt radio stations had fans. “I’ve always wanted to meet you again.”
Her mouth hung open a bit, and he could see she felt complimented. “You’re the guy who does the fancy-cut rib racks. Well, I’m glad to meet you, Wesley, but I guess you ought to come by the radio station if you want to discuss advertising.”
“I don’t work for the store anymore. I’ve got a new job, and I’d like to talk to you a little about it now, if that’s all right with you. Maybe we could meet at the coffee shop down the street and sit a while.”
She looked at him harder now, studying his features. “Talk about what?” He liked the way she ticked off her words like a northerner.
“I want to know about how you’re so patient with people.” He had never once in his life thought that he would say such a thing, and he turned red.
She looked at him carefully for a moment, shrugged, and told him she would meet him for a cup of coffee in a half hour. Before she closed the door, he saw that her apartment was nearly bare, had blond paneling, cottage cheese ceiling, rent-to-own furniture, a nubby couch.
At Slim’s Coffee Hut Wesley began to tell her about himself, how he was always impatient, even as a kid, but how over the past year he’d been losing control. He showed her his shortened finger, told her about his driving and about the school bus. His hands began to sweat when he mentioned the children, and he put his palms on his knees. She reminded him of a nurse the way she listened, like someone trying to comprehend symptoms. It occurred to him that she might not be able to tell him anything.
“Let me see if I understand,” she said. “You want to know how I can be patient with the folks that call me on the air?” He nodded. “Well, I’ve got bad news for you. I was born patient. I just don’t see the point in getting angry with anyone.” Wesley frowned. Was she suggesting he had some sort of birth defect? He looked down and saw grains of masonry sand in the penny slots of his loafers. His boss, old man Morris, had given the sheriff two loads of driveway gravel to tear up Wesley’s tickets, and he wanted him back on the road in a few days. Wesley wondered how long it would be before he killed someone.
“I’m sorry to bother you so late,” he said, looking into her eyes and giving her the easiest smile he could manage. “It’s just that I’ve been sort of waiting for things to turn around in my life. Right now, I got the feeling I can’t wait any longer.”
“Oh God,” she said, her face crinkling like crepe paper, burgundy flushes coming under her eyes. “Don’t say that.”
“Say what?”
“That you’re tired of waiting for things to turn around.” She put a hand palm up on the table. “My favorite uncle used to say something close to that, over and over. Nobody knew what he really meant until we found him on his patio with a bullet in his temple.”
Wesley straightened up. “Hey, I ain’t the kind for that.”
She stood awkwardly, almost upsetting her water glass. “I found him. You don’t know how that made me feel. The missed connection.” She stared out at the street, and he saw a flash of panic in her eyes. Her expression made him think of something his father used to say: that good times never taught him one crumb of what bad times had. “Come on,” she said, “I want to show you something.” He followed her out, and in the middle of the block she made Wesley get into the driver’s seat of her car, a boxy blue Checker, a civilian version of a taxi.
“Where’d you get this big old thing?”
“My uncle,” she explained, settling in on the passenger side. “He said it was slow, relaxing to drive, and one of the only things that brought comfort to his life.” She rolled down the window. “He left it to me in his will.”
“Where we going?” Wesley asked.
“Just drive around Pine Oil. I want to watch you.” So he drove down the main street a mile to the end of town as she directed. Then he drove back on a parallel street, then west again, until he had done every east-west street in the checkerboard village. She told him to pull over at the edge of town at the Yum-Yum drive-in, a cube of glass blocks left over from the fifties.
“How’d I do?”
“Awful,” she said.
Wesley thought he had never had a milder drive. The heavy Checker had floated over the city streets as though running on Valium. “What’d I do?”
“You rode the bumper on two elderly drivers,” she told him. “Then you signaled for dimmers from two cars who had their low beams on. And Wesley,” she said in her flutelike voice, “six jackrabbit starts, and at the traffic light you blew your horn.”
“The old lady with the bun didn’t move when the light changed.”
Her face rounded off into a tolerant smile. “Wesley, this is Pine Oil. Nobody blows his horn at anyone else unless he spots a driver asleep on the railroad track. That woman was looking in her purse and would have noticed the light in a second. And where were you going? To a summit meeting?” She put her hand on his shoulder like a sister. “You’ve got to pay attention to how you’re doing things.” Her voice held more touch than her hand.
The fat woman wedged in the little service window of the Yum-Yum stared at them. “Okay,” he said. “I’ll try most anything.” Janie then bought him a deluxe banana split, and even though he told her he hated bananas, she made him eat it with a flimsy plastic spoon.
Later, she made him drive the whole town, north to south, from poor brick-paper neighborhoods next to the tracks to the old, rich avenues of big drowsy houses. Janie lay back against the door, twisting a strand of hair around a finger. Finally, she asked him to take her home. When he pulled up to her apartment and turned off the motor, the quiet flowed through him like medicine.
“How do you feel, Wesley?” she asked with that voice.
“Okay, I guess. Just tired.” He felt he had dragged her huge car around town on a rope slung over his shoulder.
“You did better.” She straightened up and looked out over the long hood. “I have no idea what’s wrong with you. I just want you to know that, and I really don’t think you need to see me again.” She smiled at him politely. “Just be patient like you were when you were driving tonight. You have to wait for things to turn around.”
That’s that, Wesley thought, as he helped her into the late-night air and walked her to the apartment.
* * *
The next morning he was sitting in the door of his trailer, drinking a cup of instant coffee and eating a Mars bar, wondering if he could get a job on the railroad, or even go back to work for his father. He heard the rattle and snap of gravel and saw Janie’s navy-blue Checker lumber toward him through the mounds of gravel and sand. Swinging the door open quickly, she dropped from the front seat, fluffing out a full leaf-green skirt. “Wesley, you have got to be kidding.”
“Ma’am?”
“Why’re you living in a place like this? You can do better.”
He nodded slowly, taking the last bite of his candy bar and staring at her. “My boss rented it to me the day I was hired. I guess I thought it came with the job.” In daylight, she was prettier, though he could see better the cautious cast of her eyes.
“It wasn’t easy locating you, let me tell you.” She looked around at the junk as if to get her bearings, then settled her worried gaze on him. She was direct and moved precisely, unlike any woman he’d been around. “Can you take a ride right now?” He saw the white arm move out from her side.
He put down his coffee cup. “I reckon so. Where we going?”
She smiled. “I like the way you say ‘reckon.’”
* * *
Where they
went was out on 51, the sluggish two-lane that bisected the parish. She had him pull up to a stop sign and wait. A pickup truck rattled by, and he started to pull out. “Not yet,” she said.
They waited five minutes, watching lumber trucks and motorcycles pass. Janie craned her neck and studied the southbound lane carefully. Finally she saw something that seemed to draw her interest. “That cattle truck,” she said. “It’s perfect. Get in behind it.”
Wesley stared at the tinged sides of the slowly approaching trailer. “Aw, no,” he pleaded.
“Follow it to Pine Oil,” she commanded as the truck packed with heaving cows rocked by. He pulled into the wall of stench and began to follow at forty miles an hour. After five miles, he begged her to let him pass.
“No,” she said. “You’ll remember this trip for the rest of your life and realize that if you can wait out this, you can wait out anything.” She turned her face to the side of the road, and the sunlight bounding off the hood brightened her high cheeks and made her beautiful. “A road is not by itself, Wesley, even if it’s empty. It’s part of the people who live on it, just like a vein is part of a body. Your trouble is you think only about the road and not what might come onto it.”
He made a face but followed in silence, down through Amite, Independence, and a half a dozen redbrick and clapboard communities with countless red lights and school zones. Arriving among the low tin-and-asbestos buildings of Pine Oil, he was white-faced and nauseated.
“You look awful,” she said, leaning over, her green eyes wide. “Does being patient upset you this much?”
“No, ma’am,” he lied.
“Well, let’s see.” She had him drive to Wal-Mart and stand in the longest line to buy a can of paste wax. They went over to her apartment, where she told him to get busy waxing the car. For three hours she sat in a folding chair under a volunteer swamp maple growing by the street, watching and occasionally calling for him to go over spots he’d missed. “Polish slower,” she called. “Rub harder.” Wesley thought he’d like to sail the green can of wax a block down the street and tell her to go to hell, but he didn’t. His face began to develop slowly in the deep blue paint of her car.
Later, she set him in a straight-back chair in her plain living room and made him read a short story in The Atlantic and then talk to her about it. To Wesley, this was worse than following the cattle truck. He stared down at the glossy page. What did he care about a Chinese girl who couldn’t make herself look like Shirley Temple to please her mother? Then Janie drove him home and they sat in the Checker outside his trailer. He leaned over and kissed her, long and slow, once.
“Wesley,” she began, “what did the story in the magazine mean to you?”
“Mean?” he repeated, suspicious of the word. “I don’t know.” He knew what she was doing. She was trying to make him patient enough to think.
She asked him again, this time in her nicest radio voice. He told her about the Chinese girl’s guilt and about her will be independent. They talked for an hour about the story. Wesley thought he was going crazy.
The next day he did not see her, but he did listen to the radio. The topic was how to get rid of weeds in the yard. One caller, a wheezy old man, recommended pouring used motor oil along fences and sidewalks.
“But Mr. McFadgin,” Janie began, using her most patient voice, “used motor oil is full of toxic metals such as lead.”
“That’s right, missy,” the old man said. “Kills them weeds dead.”
Wesley listened to her program for three hours and did not become enraged once.
The following night she called him to meet her at the Satin Lounge, a sleepy nightclub for middle-aged locals next to the motel. In a blue dress with a full skirt, she looked like a schoolteacher, which was all right with Wesley. They talked, Wesley about his father trying to control his life and Janie about her uncle, how he had raised her, how he had left her alone. They ordered a second round of drinks, and Janie did not test him for patience for an hour. Then, someone played a slow number on the jukebox, and she stood up and asked him to dance. “Now slow down,” she said, after they had been on the floor about ten seconds. “This is not a Cajun two-step. Barely move your feet. Dance with your hips and shoulders.” He felt the controlling movement of her arms, of her soft voice, and realized that she was leading. After a while—he didn’t know how it happened—he was leading again, but slowly. He felt like a fly struggling in sap, but he willed himself to dance like this all the way through the lengthy song.
Later on, two men sat at a table next to them. One was round and bearded, wearing a baseball cap with Kiss My Ass embroidered across the crown. The other, a short man with varnished blond hair, stared at Janie and once or twice leaned over to his companion, saying something behind a hand. Wesley watched him walk over to their table. The little man smiled, showing a missing tooth. He asked Janie to dance, and when she replied in a voice that made being turned down an honor, he scowled. “Aw, come on, sweetie. I need to hug me some woman tonight.”
“I’m sorry, but I don’t want to dance right now. Maybe someone at one of the other tables would enjoy your company.” She smiled, but it was a thin smile, a fence.
He grinned stupidly and leaned over the table, placing his hands down on the damp Formica. “That sounds like a line a crap to me, sweetie.”
Wesley caught her glance but couldn’t read her face. He figured that she would want him to stay calm, to avoid an argument, to sit expressionless and benign, like a divinity student. Maybe this would be another test, like polishing her mountain of a car.
“We really would like to be alone,” she said, her confident voice weakening. The man smelled of stale cigarette smoke and beer. He looked at Wesley, who did not move, who was thinking that her voice was betraying her.
“Looks like you are alone,” he said, grabbing her wrist and giving it a playful tug.
Wesley was sitting on his emotions the way he used to sit on his little brother in a backyard fight. When he saw Janie’s wrist circled by a set of nubby fingers, he said in a nonthreatening voice, “Why don’t you let her go? She doesn’t want to dance.”
The blond man cocked his head back like a rooster. “Why don’t you just sit there and cross your legs, little girl.”
Wesley looked down at the table as Janie was towed over to the tile dance floor. He relaxed in his fury and watched them. The little man couldn’t jitterbug, his steps had nothing to do with the music, and he cramped Janie’s arms on the turns. At the end of the song, he pulled her close and said something into her ear. She pushed him away, and the little man laughed.
When she stormed over to Wesley, her face was flushed, her voice a strained monotone. “I am so embarrassed,” she said, staring straight ahead. “Why didn’t you do something instead of just sitting there like a worm?”
Wesley felt a rush of blood fill his neck. He imagined that the back of his head was ready to blow out. “Do you know how hard it was for me to sit here and not pop him one in the face?”
She rubbed her right arm as though it hurt. “I felt so awkward and helpless while he was limping around out there.”
“I was being patient. The only thing that would’ve made the little bastard happy is if I’d whipped his ass and gotten us all pitched out on the street or arrested.”
She seemed not to hear. “I needed help and you just sat there.” She stirred her drink with a swizzle stick but did not lift it. “I felt abandoned.” She looked down into her lap.
Wesley’s face was red, even in the dim light of the Satin Lounge, and the muscles in his neck rolled and twitched. He told himself to hold back. She wanted him patient and slow. “Hey, no harm done. It’s over.”
Janie stood up, sending her chair tumbling, and slammed her purse on the table. “Right,” she yelled. “It’s over.”
By the time he paid the tab and ran into the parking lot, all he saw were the crimson ovals of the big Checker’s taillights swerving around a distant curve. In the hot ni
ght air hung the sound of her uncle’s car grinding through its gears, gaining momentum as though it might never stop.
* * *
The next morning he called Janie four times at the station, and each time she hung up on him. He sat on the sun-warmed iron steps to the trailer and tried to figure out why she was so upset. He had done what he thought she’d wanted him to do. He looked over at the abandoned locomotive buried axle-deep in the sand and shook his head.
Around eight o’clock the telephone rattled. Big Morris, his boss, was on the line. “Hey, boy. Mount that T-Bird and fly over here. We got called on a full load of masonry sand for the south shore by nine-thirty.”
Wesley stared through a cracked window at his ten-year-old car. “It’ll be a pinch.”
“C’mon. You can do it.”
“Call Ridley.”
“He went through the windshield yesterday over in Satsuma. Be out for three weeks. Listen,” Big Morris said with the cracked and weathered voice of an old politician, “you’re my man, ain’t you? You’re the fastest I got.”
Wesley looked at the warped and mildewed trailer, then out at the junk stacked around it. “I think I’m going to lay off driving for a while.”
“What? You’re good at speeding gravel, son.”
“I know. That’s why I’d better quit.”
* * *
Two weeks later he was cutting meat in his father’s grocery store, doing a fine job trimming the T-bones and round steaks, though now and then he jammed the slicer when he hurried the boiled ham. It was a new store, and the cutting room was pleasant, with lots of fluorescent lights, red sawdust on the floor to soak up the fat, and an auto-parts calendar on the wall showing Miss Rod Bearing. He always worked the one to nine P.M. shift, but today he had to cover the morning stretch. While he was in the back pulling meat out of the cooler, he noticed a familiar voice on the janitor’s boom box, and he stopped, a rib cage cocked under his arm, to listen to Janie. She was dealing with Raynelle Bullfinch, a motorcycle club president from up near the Mississippi line.
“Who cares if we don’t put no mufflers on our hogs, man,” Raynelle growled. “Last time I looked, it was a free country.”
Same Place, Same Things Page 11