by Chris Offutt
He passed a truck and two cars, swerving around them as if they were mirages standing immobile in the road. He slowed twice—for the single-lane covered bridge over the Little Sandy River, and again when he came barreling around a curve to confront two mules pulling a wagon that listed to one side. He didn’t want to rile the team and pitch the old driver off the seat. After the wagon went by, he pushed the speed over a hundred on the few straight stretches, double-clutching to downshift through the turns. He knew every pothole in the road, every tree branch that swept low, every blind curve and entrance lane. Tucker drove without thought, operating on instinct, holding the steering wheel lightly, trusting the machine to obey the slightest twitch of his hands.
He slowed at the edge of Salt Lick. Suspended on two chains from a tree was a car door advertising a used car lot, the paint faded and blotched with rust. He ran high and heavy in second, the engine struggling under restraint. The main road was the only street in town. Salt Lick had one cop who went off duty at sundown, still an hour away. Tucker headed for the gas station on the going-toward-Lexington side of town. Next to the pumps was a diner known for possessing the biggest window around, although it was actually five panes of glass connected by metal strips. A red neon sign said “EAT” in large letters. Amid the dimming dusk, light from the diner spilled onto the cement lot, cracked and heaved from frost. Three unoccupied vehicles were visible. One was newer than the rest, with plates from Franklin County, the state capital.
Tucker parked behind the gas station on a dirt lot covered with car parts and drums of old motor oil. He left the car and circled the building, staying in the shade until he could see the front. Inside the diner a workingman wearing a cap, flannel shirt, and dungarees drank coffee at the counter. Past him was a man in a dress shirt sitting with a woman. Tucker studied the sight lines and took a position beneath a cluster of cedar. The strong smell made his eyes water but he was hidden from view, able to see the diner and car, the ground soft from dead brown needles. He had his pistol and knife.
As the sun slid into the tree line, light leaked out of the land. The neon sign glowed orange against the purple sky. He recalled coming here as a teenager with a group of boys to admire the big window. They’d stood around the parking lot, talking rough, arguing about how the glass was delivered during construction. None of them had eaten in a restaurant and they stayed outside. Each boy took a leak in the weeds before leaving. Tucker wondered if he was hunkered down in the same spot where he’d pissed several years before. The glass wall lacked its previous wonder. Now it had cracks covered in tape, the grand panes greasy from exhaust fumes and grit, stained at the top from rain. He watched the couple eating.
During her twenties, Hattie had developed a kind of intuition, which alerted her when the attention of men needed fending off. She considered Marvin a broken sad sack who relied on his job to feel good. He disgusted her with the accidental brushes of her arm, the clandestine glances at her bosom. Hattie’s deflections were a case of casual ignoring, as if she hadn’t noticed. Instead of getting the message, he’d increased his efforts.
In her thirty-four years of walking the earth Hattie had kissed one boy and didn’t like it, one girl and did—and wound up so distraught by the conflict that she joined church with an aggression that lasted six months until she quit. Like most women she preferred the social company of women. She didn’t participate in their gossip, but studied their arms, their necks, their ankles, and their lips. Hattie knew she had a left-handed turn. It was in the family—her mannish aunt had moved off and never visited. Though often surrounded by people, Hattie felt dreadfully alone. At night she drank sherry, purchased at three different stores to conceal her habit. She read paperback novels that cost thirty-five cents. She imagined herself not as the scantily clad women on the covers, but as the men who rescued them. Her legs and stomach tingled. She knew the problem, if it indeed counted as a problem, and had no idea what to do about it, stuck in a conservative town with a public job.
Marvin drank coffee and ate pie with the family’s folder open in front of him like a menu.
“Hydrocephaly,” he said.
He repeated the word three times. Hattie gave a quick shake of her head at the first two, then quit responding.
“Hydrocephaly,” he said again. “No record of a shunt to drain the fluid. By all rights that baby should’ve died. Why didn’t it? That’s what I’d like to know. And these others, there’s no diagnosis. They didn’t look like Downs to me.”
“I don’t believe they are Downs,” she said. “Ida is alert, just sleeps a lot. Good focus. She can copy complicated designs from scraps of cloth.”
“An idiot quilt maker. What about the other two?”
“Too soon to know with the baby. The other one, Velmey, she’s got limited motor skills. But they’re all physically healthy as a mule.”
“There’s no pattern,” he said.
“None that we can see.”
Hattie accepted a refill of pop to wash down the last of her sandwich. She wished she’d ordered french fries, but knew they’d upset her stomach. Her head hurt like a hog bite. She tore open a packet of BC aspirin powder, dumped it into a glass of water, and watched the swirling crystals dissolve. It was bitter as a peach pit but she drank it in one long swallow.
“Hydrocephaly,” he said.
“Please stop staying that,” she said.
“Why didn’t they shunt it?” Marvin said.
“What I heard,” Hattie said, “they thought the baby would die so they didn’t drain the liquid. Then he lived.”
“What kind of doctor does that?”
“A granny-woman.”
“What?”
“Mountain midwife. Beulah Tolliver. She delivered a few generations on that hill.”
“Thought they were done with that.”
“Mostly they are,” she said. “There’s two doctors in the county, both in Morehead. One charges high, the other won’t leave the town limits. Women in the hills use a granny-woman. If there’s complications, she gets hold of a doctor. In this case, she waited a day, and the doctor showed up two days later.”
“Are you blaming medical personnel?”
“People don’t have phones. The roads are bad, and not enough doctors. Most of the time, it works out fine.”
“But not this time.”
“I don’t judge,” she said. “That’s a habit you might think about taking up.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“What it sounds like, Marvin. I can’t fix what already happened. My job is to try and make things easier on the family.”
“A mother with severe melancholia,” he said. “An absent father. A house full of freaks. I was afraid I’d find another room with a bearded lady and an alligator boy.”
Hattie felt like a cat with a hair ball the size of a pinecone. She wanted to slap him in the face and go back to Frankfort alone. She clenched her teeth and spoke in a quiet tone.
“Those kids are all that mother and little girl have. There isn’t a problem, Marvin.”
“It’s coming, Hattie. They come of age, they’ll start rubbing on the furniture, then on each other.”
“You don’t know the future.”
“Yes, I darn well do. Those kids are coming out of that house or I’ll know the reason why. You’re either with me on this, or you’re not.”
“There’s no abuse,” she said. “No neglect. No grounds for removal from the home.”
Marvin grinned inwardly, hearing the urgency in her voice. He had married a woman he didn’t love because her father could get him a state job in Frankfort. The old man died and Marvin’s career stalled. Now he was stuck with a wife who went to bed mad, woke up mad, and stayed irritable all day. Pretending to glance at the table in contemplation, he appraised Hattie’s body. Though she wore loose clothes he’d studied her often enough to know she had a set of heavy lungs beneath her blouse and fine wide flanks. Between Mount Sterling and Winchester
there was the Blue Top Motel that would suit his purposes.
He arranged on his face an expression of deep compassion, one he’d copied from a preacher, and shifted his body forward. He placed his hand on hers, the touch of skin sizzling through his body straight to his groin.
“We’ll let them kids be,” he said. “If that’s what you want, we can do that, you and me. First we need to go somewhere private and talk out all the options. I know a place up the road a piece.” He bared his teeth in his most alluring smile. “You like gin?”
Hattie’s mouth was dry as old leaves. For thirty seconds that felt like weeks, she remained stoic and unmoving as the meaning of his words filtered through her mind. Her job was at stake. The child. The mother. Everything she believed in and worked toward.
“Have to go to the ladies’,” she whispered.
She tugged her hand away and stood, hoping the unsteadiness in her legs wasn’t evident. She walked the length of the diner, past the freshly scrubbed breakfast bar, the full cups of sugar with their tiny spoons. In the cramped bathroom she held on to the sink as her body shivered. She used several wads of toilet paper to remove every speck of makeup, hoping to make herself less attractive. She felt torn in half. The urge to protect the children conflicted with her own sense of futility and outrage. Reporting Marvin would get her fired. Enduring his desire was no guarantee that he’d leave the family alone. She could put off the inevitable but at a terrible cost.
Hattie felt gripped by one of those Japanese finger cuffs in a Cracker Jack box—paper that tightened as you struggled to free yourself. From the restroom window came the sound of the cook throwing trash in a garbage can and pounding the metal lid tight. She could leave through the kitchen, get in her car, and drive away. She could quit her job, vacate her bleak apartment, and move to Chicago.
Marvin sat with no patience, his desire increasing each time he looked at his watch. He hoped to high heaven she wasn’t undergoing a bout of female trouble. Maybe Hattie was adjusting herself, applying a skim of crimson lipstick like the women on magazine covers. He finished his coffee and paid the bill. The waitress left with the workingman, and Marvin felt a pang of envy undercut with anger. He was the one with an education befitting a jacket and tie, creased pants and wing tips, now slightly soiled. He polished them on the back of each calf. He straightened his clothes and strode through the diner and into the dark parking lot. When she emerged from the ladies’ room, she’d no doubt hurry his way like a fly to sugar.
Tucker waited in the black shadowed stand of cedar thinking about his brothers. Two were dead, and one may as well be. As boys they’d roamed the hills with burlap pokes and hoes, gathering mayapple and low-billy, and selling them by the ounce. Tucker spent the most time with his older brother Casey. At sixteen Casey had begun digging ginseng, a more valuable plant, and shot a man in the woods over a four-year root as thick as a wrist. He’d gone to prison for murder and emerged addled as a paddle, his left temple dented from a blow by a pipe, one eye missing. Afterward Casey couldn’t stay focused enough to clear rock from a road.
Tucker gave their mother money when he could, but Casey took it and got drunk and set fire to a man’s chicken house. The man found him eating half-cooked bird, his mouth filled with feathers. The state put him in a lockdown hospital north of Lexington. Tucker visited once with his mother, appalled at living conditions worse than the chickens his brother had killed. Their mother never recovered from the visit, had begun a gradual dwindle to death.
The diner sign flickered and hummed. The man in the suit came outside and leaned on the car. He propped one foot on the bumper, then arranged himself in a casual position as if nothing mattered in the world.
Tucker moved slowly along the tree line, placing the sole of each boot on its edge and easing his foot down, prepared at the slightest sound to stop. He lowered his chin to protect his throat. He didn’t blink. Tucker stepped from the trees to the edge of darkness, deliberately scraping his boots.
Marvin turned to the sound, a fragment of his mind thinking Hattie stood behind him, dress unbuttoned and off the shoulder, having slipped outside to surprise him. Seeing the short man in work clothes disappointed Marvin.
“I have important business here,” Marvin said. “It doesn’t concern you. I’ll thank you to travel on.”
“Was it you up to Tunnel Cut Holler at a woman’s house had five kids today?”
It took Marvin a few seconds to unravel the mountain syntax and make sense of the question. He assumed the man was concerned about ethics, a home visit to a woman alone. Marvin held his tie with one hand and adjusted the half-Windsor knot, a gesture of authority he’d practiced. He squared his shoulders, and cleared his throat. He knew how to talk to people, especially these people.
“Yes,” Marvin said. “It was a professional appointment. A female colleague accompanied me.”
Tucker stepped into the light, his dual-colored eyes startling Marvin momentarily. Tucker glanced past Marvin at the side of the car. Marvin followed his gaze and in that millisecond Tucker pressed his toes to the earth and sprang forward, the Ka-Bar knife flashing in the moonlight as he stabbed Marvin below the sternum, twisting the knife to puncture a lung and pushing the point into the bottom of his heart. Marvin was unsure what had happened. He felt suddenly weak and not quite able to breathe.
“Help me,” he tried to say, but no words issued from his mouth, only blood.
A searing agony swept through his body. He reached for the side mirror and his knees gave out. He slid down the car as if an invisible force pushed him toward the earth. The wall of pain perplexed him because he couldn’t feel his body. He closed his eyes, smelling his own urine, his last feelings those of embarrassment.
Tucker watched the man’s legs tremble involuntarily, knowing from Korea that it wouldn’t last long, that he was bleeding internally. He died without a sound. Tucker turned to leave and saw the woman from the diner standing immobile at the front of the car. He sensed her fear, her stunned disbelief, and something else he could not name.
Hattie had fled the diner through the kitchen, onto its crude loading dock, past the garbage cans, and hurried to her car. In the darkness she hadn’t seen Marvin until the short man stepped from the shadows and stabbed him.
“He your husband?” Tucker said.
She shook her head rapidly, dislodging strands of hair that floated like glowing tendrils in the diner’s light.
“Fiancée or whatnot?” he said.
She shook her head again.
“But you damn sure knowed him,” he said.
She nodded.
“Sorry for the language,” he said.
“I didn’t like him,” she said.
“Then why set down to eat with him?”
“I was hungry,” she said.
After combat he’d killed wounded enemy, using his bayonet to save ammunition. But she wasn’t wounded and he didn’t think she was an enemy. He had never killed a woman and didn’t want to start. Lacking protocol or experience, he was unsure how to proceed.
“Say you didn’t like him,” he said. “How come you to not to?”
“He wanted me to go to a motel with him.”
“Was you aiming to do it?”
“No.”
“He making you go?”
“Yes. I was trying to get loose of him.”
“Well you are now.”
They both looked at Marvin.
“Do you know me?” Tucker said.
She shook her head.
“Make sure you don’t when the law comes. I got to go.”
“What do I do?”
“Say you found him laying this way.”
“All right,” she said.
“Ain’t nobody else was here. Just him. What’s your name?”
“Hattie,” she said. “Hattie Johnson.”
“This your car?”
“Yes.”
“I’ll remember that.”
Tucker stepped into the wo
ods and watched her go back in the diner. He drove slowly, using a network of dirt roads, making a wide arc through two counties to avoid detection. He wondered what kind of doctor the man was. He remembered the Lexington hospital where he’d given blood and urine, answered gobs of questions about his family, and had his eyes examined. He’d thought something was wrong with Rhonda’s undercarriage or his nutball sack, but the doctors said the test results were normal. They likened the problem to blending food that tasted good separately but made a terrible mess together, like soup beans and bananas in a single stew.
“It’s not your fault,” the doctor said.
“Ain’t they nothing to do?” Tucker said.
“No, there’s no medicine to fix the problem.”
“Way I see it,” Tucker said, “we’re due for a good baby.”
“It doesn’t work that way.”
“How does it work?
“I don’t know.”
“All those years of schooling,” Tucker said, “and none of it took.”
He gently helped Rhonda to her feet and they left. She cried for a month of Sundays and the next baby laid her out. Rhonda looked like she’d been sent for and couldn’t come, got there and wasn’t wanted. But Tucker still yet wanted her, wanted his family, and wanted a regular son.
At the foot of his home hill he parked beneath a willow struggling beside the creek. He climbed the shoulder of the land to his ridge, stopping to listen every thirty yards, but the night was still, his own passage alerting the nocturnal animals to quiet themselves. He studied his house from each direction. He found no sign of man, no car tracks, smelled no cigarettes, saw no flash of moonlight on a gun barrel. Satisfied, he went inside. He carefully lifted Big Billy’s head and turned it, then leaned into the crib and brushed his lips along his son’s sweaty face.
In his bedroom he removed his boots and clothes, kissed baby Bess, and listened to his wife’s steady breathing. He rubbed the silken skin of her hip until she drowsily rolled his way. He held her tight, then began caressing her shoulders and arms, running his fingertips the length of her body from collarbone to calf. Rhonda awakened little by little, as if in sections. She smelled his sweat and smoke. She rolled onto her back and opened her thighs. When he was inside, she clasped her arms across his shoulders and dug her nails into the meat of his back. They moved with a steady rhythm, neither talking, aware of each other’s breath, the bed creaking. Her tiny grunting gasps increased. She wrapped her legs around the back of his knees as he arched his back, propped on his forearms, his head tipped like a drowning man seeking the surface of water. They finished and he collapsed. She stroked the back of his head, feeling his muscles relax. He fell asleep, a quick hard nap, and jerked awake fully alert. His movement pulled her from the edge of her own slumber. She glanced at the baby, who hadn’t stirred in her basket.