Lost Highways (A Valentine Novel)

by Matlock, Curtiss Ann

  “I was just leavin’,” she said, lifting her chin and breezing away from Harry and past the man, resisting the urge to shut his mouth for him.

  Harry was right behind her.

  “I brought Buck’s truck,” she said, thrusting his shirt at him and continuing on toward the exit at a pace just shy of running.

  She heard his boots tap rapidly behind her on the tile flooring.

  “Hey, what’d I say?” He grabbed her arm.

  She gazed into his eyes and felt all manner of forceful emotional turmoil, which was both perplexing and embarrassing.

  “Why do men always say that?” she asked, taking the offensive.

  “What?”

  “’What’d I say?’ Just by askin’, you know that you said an insulting and hurtful thing.”

  He stared at her with surprise. And then a nurse called to him. “Pammy would like to see you.”

  Confusion swept his face. Rainey told him that she would wait in the truck and hurried away, pushing out the glass doorway, tears threatening. She walked quickly, thinking. He certainly had not said anything to bring this on. And the child was okay—Rainey herself had had her leg badly broken and knew the child would recover and now have a story to tell.

  Her brother’s voice echoed in memory: You’re just too sensitive, Rain. He had told her that since she was a child and always said it with his condemning frown, as if being sensitive was a fault needing to be scrubbed away.

  Sometimes she thought that she had worked so hard at not being too sensitive that she had lost the ability to know what she felt at all.

  Looking up, she suddenly saw a purple truck in the place where she had thought she’d left Buck’s red one. Then she realized that it was Buck’s truck and that the light from the pole lamp made it look purple. She went over and got behind the wheel, stuck the key in and sat there thinking for several long minutes, all thoughts that, one way or another, ended up being, Well, I’ll be danged, he’s a doctor.

  She turned the key, and the truck rumbled loudly. She drove over to the doors, and a minute later Harry emerged, walking with his long-legged saunter out from the shadowed entrance into the dimly lit portico.

  “She’s going to be okay, isn’t she?” Rainey said, as he got into the seat, folding in his long frame.

  He nodded. “Her leg has two bad breaks but there’s no evidence of internal injuries. She’s young and will most likely heal fast.” He rubbed a hand over the back of his head.

  She searched his face surreptitiously, then looked away quickly before he could notice. She thought he looked a little pale, but not terribly sick.

  She shifted and headed down the drive to the street, telling him that Buck and Neva had taken care of the pup, her horse and her rig, and would get them to Uncle Doyle’s, while in her mind she had a running argument with herself, wondering all about him and telling herself that none of it was her business and that she didn’t care, either.

  Seeing a Sonic Drive-In, she was turning in even as she asked him if he wanted anything to eat. She pulled into a stall, carefully, so as not to knock the extended mirrors on Buck’s truck.

  “I think I’ll get a foot-long hot dog with chili, and some fries.”

  He studied the menu for a minute and said, “I’ll take a cheeseburger with everything, and milk.”

  “Milk? Do you think that’s a good idea, especially with a burger?” she asked.

  She had begun to suspect that he had a grave illness. It all fit. He might have some sort of brain tumor or other horrible illness, which had caused him to throw up, not his head injury. Maybe that was why he had come away from his family—to spare them his suffering, which he knew only too well, because he was a physician.

  “I’m fine. And I like milk—does a body good, you know.”

  She frowned, but turned to call their order into the speaker phone, and then they sat there in awkward silence. Rainey drummed her fingers on her open window.

  “I sometimes throw up when I see a person in pain,” he said.

  She looked at him.

  “I guess I throw up when I have pain, too…but mostly it’s when I see another person’s pain. It’s no big deal. It’s like some people get nosebleeds. They just do.”

  “That must be a difficult reaction for a doctor,” she said.

  “It is,” he said and turned a bleak gaze out the windshield.

  Watching him, she recalled him bending over the little girl, recalled the intensity of his eyes that had been all for the girl and how his voice had been calm and reassuring and his hands capable in the manner of a man who knew what had to be done and had taken hold to do it.

  “You didn’t appear about to throw up when you took care of Pammy,” she said. “You took care of her and got her to the hospital before you threw up. My first husband, Robert, fainted at the sight of blood. Out like a light, no matter what. Once I was chopping carrots and about cut my finger off. I called for him to come help me, and I ended up having to wrap my finger in a paper towel, step over him and drive myself to the hospital. I got blood all over his BMW.”

  As she had hoped, he gave that lazy, sad smile she had begun to associate with him when he was amused.

  “Why do I think you bloodied his BMW on purpose?” he said.

  “I didn’t…but I was glad.”

  The girl appeared with their food. Rainey didn’t want to put the tray on the window of Buck’s truck; some people didn’t like doing that to their vehicles. She brought the food into the truck.

  Harry produced several bills and told the girl to keep the change.

  That the tip was a substantial one was evident from the girl’s broad grin and eager nod.

  Rainey looked over at Harry, who was carefully unwrapping his hamburger with his long-fingered, broad-palmed hands. Her gaze lingered on his hands, remembering how competently and tenderly they had ministered to the hurt girl.

  She had to tear her eyes away from those hands, but their image remained to echo in the back of her mind.

  They were both curiously silent as they returned to Uncle Doyle’s. Rainey was wanting a bath and wondering if she would have to drive back into town with Buck’s truck, as she had left too hurriedly to coordinate plans, had simply caught the keys Buck tossed her.

  When she mentioned this, Harry said he would take the truck to town for her if need be.

  “You wouldn’t know where you were goin’,” she said, somewhat surprised, yet impressed by his willingness.

  “How big is the town?” he answered reasonably.

  Then the truck’s headlights lit upon Neva’s pickup and small, two-horse trailer, the horse’s tail hanging out, parked beside Rainey’s own bigger rig in Uncle Doyle’s graveled drive. Her heart leaped with the hope that her cousin and uncle had reconciled.

  This proved to be something of the case, if not perfectly correct.

  Neva was in the house with her father, with the door open and light shining through, and Buck was sitting out in Neva’s pickup truck, listening to the radio, twanging country music that he could, and did, drink beer by.

  “That dog don’t much like men,” he said, leaning out the truck window into the silvery glow of the pole lamp when Rainey went over to give him the keys to his pickup and thank him for the use of it. “Ever’ time I go to get out of this truck, he growls.”

  Harry was bending over petting the pup, who had come running and wiggled his entire body back and forth between Rainey and Harry.

  Watching, Buck qualified, “Well, I guess he likes Harry. I must smell bad to him.” He gestured with his beer. “Neva’s on in the house. I didn’t think I should go in. I think I rile that old man just by sight of me. I think he has somethin’ against facial hair.”

  Rainey tried to reconcile the man she stared at with the man her cousin had described. Then Buck was calling to Harry, asking him to have a look at his elbow that was paining him when he bent it a certain way.

  Rainey stepped back and watched Harry speak to Bu
ck through the window. He went so far as to have Buck display said elbow. She had the uncharitable thought that Buck’s problem was likely from too much lying around and lifting beer.

  Turning from the men, she went to the house. Neva met her at the door. Rainey figured she was probably keeping close to the screen door in order to breathe the fresh air. Uncle Doyle sat at the table in a swirling cloud of gray cigarette smoke.

  Neva reported that she had given Rainey’s mare alfalfa but had not grained her, not knowing how much Rainey usually gave the horse. Then she said that she had just gotten off the phone with Juanita, Pammy’s mother.

  “She told me Pammy’s doin’ real good. Her leg hurts some, but they’ve given her something for it, and she’s watchin’ the Disney Channel. I think they need to give Juanita something. She sounded on the very verge, I’ll tell you.”

  “Juanita was born on the verge and just went over from there,” Uncle Doyle said. “She’s a pothead,” he explained, then puffed good on his cigarette.

  Then Harry was coming in and Uncle Doyle was offering coffee all around. By the small talk that was made, Rainey was certain that her cousin had not told her father about her marriage. In fact, Uncle Doyle seemed to behave as if Buck was not sitting out there a couple hundred feet from his back door, and Neva, wearing the desperate look of a woman balancing the affections of two men, seemed intent on not calling attention to it, either.

  “I bought some cinnamon rolls,” Rainey said, unable to think of anything else to do but present some food. She brought the rolls and plates to the table, and the sight of them appeared to jar Neva into motion.

  “I can’t stay to eat. I gotta go. Are you leavin’ tomorrow, Rainey?” Her eyes pleaded with her to stay.

  “Not until evenin’. I’ll make chicken pot pie for supper. You all come over. Six o’clock.”

  Neva blinked and then looked at her father. Rainey glanced at Uncle Doyle, who frowned down at his coffee cup but did not make a comment. Neva looked back at Rainey and nodded, hesitated, and then went over and kissed her father’s dry cheek before leaving.

  Rainey went out the door with her cousin and, standing there, rubbing her arms against the fall chill, she watched Neva hurry across the yard beneath the light of a rising moon to Buck’s truck, where he now sat. It seemed like she had to wake him. Then she stuck her head in the window and kissed him in the darkness, where Rainey couldn’t see, although she witnessed her cousin’s leg come clear off the ground.

  She watched until the red taillights of Neva’s and Buck’s vehicles were getting small down the drive. Then she looked down to see the puppy sitting right beside her feet. She touched his head quickly and gave in to scratching him behind the ears. Satisfied, he settled himself against the wall by the door, as if taking his place. She regarded him for a moment, and then went back inside the smoky glow of the kitchen, where Uncle Doyle was explaining about his weak knee and telling Harry the story of how as a boy he had been run over by a tractor. Harry’s being a doctor apparently brought out people’s need to speak of their infirmities.

  Taking up her coffee, she leaned against the counter, listening to the familiar story of Uncle Doyle almost losing his leg. She watched the enjoyment of the telling on her uncle’s lean, weathered face and the way Harry sat forward at the table, as if listening intently, with the quirk of that sad smile on his lips. She wondered what type of doctor he was—perhaps by perfect fate a bone doctor.

  When her uncle had finished his tale, she said, “Neva and Buck are married, Uncle Doyle. She is not living in sin with him.”

  She felt perfectly justified in interfering by both the need for expediency and her experience with what happened when people hid things that needed to be said. She intended to see Uncle Doyle and Neva put to rights before she left the following evening for Amarillo. She had a feeling her mother was right on her shoulder, giving her the words.

  Uncle Doyle’s head came around, his deep-set eyes widening, a mixture of emotions flying across his face: surprise, dismay, anger.

  “There’s no use in gettin’ all mad over it,” Rainey said before he could find any words.

  Then she proceeded to tell her uncle how he would surely be needed soon in the capacity of grandfather, which she thought might be just the idea to warm his heart, as he had always wanted a number of boys. One thing that had been a great disappointment to Uncle Doyle, she knew, was having only one child and that being a daughter.

  “Well, just think of it, Uncle Doyle…” she said and presented in great detail the picture of boys racing around him, while he taught them to drive the tractor and grow alfalfa and dry and bale it to the perfection for which he himself was known. She saw the anger on his face slip into thoughtfulness.

  “It seems to me that Buck will also be just the man to help you with cuttin’ and haulin’ hay, and he’s bound to give Neva a lot of little boys to do the same thing. I think he looks like a man who’ll give off boys, don’t you, Harry?”

  Harry jumped in with the spirit of things and agreed. “Bound to,” he said. Rainey was very proud that he didn’t let the facts of life get in the way.

  About all Uncle Doyle said to everything was, “Well, it’s done…and I don’t guess I can shoot him.” He said those gruff words in a decidedly accepting manner, she thought.

  Satisfied that she had things going in the right direction, she left the men at the table talking over old joint injuries and went upstairs to take a nice long hot soak, which for her was the equivalent of tossing back several fortifying jiggers of Jack Daniel’s.

  Running the water hot enough to fill the room with steam, she squirted shampoo into the stream, filling the tub with bubbles. Shedding her clothes, she swept up her hair and stepped into the sudsy wet warmth. Deeper and deeper she sank her body, until her shoulders were under, only her knees and head sticking out, and inhaled the moist air, relishing being alone. When she was thoroughly warmed, she spread her wet washcloth on the cool enamel back of the tub and reclined with her head resting on a folded hand towel, lazily watching water drip from the tarnished chrome faucet.

  Plop…plop…plop. The drips formed, slowly growing silver and plump, like life, until, one by one, they overgrew and fell into the sudsy water.

  Lifting her foot, she toed the drop, wiping it away. She watched another form, and when it was about to drop, she touched her toe to it, too, wiping the water from the sharp edge of the faucet. She toed the opening of the faucet, into which her toe wriggled neat and smooth.

  She had a moment of panic, when her toe seemed to be stuck, but it came free, and with thankfulness, she sank her foot beneath the warm water, lay back and listened to the water drip. Plop…plop…plop…

  Pictures plopped into her mind with each drip, coming slowly, one after the other.

  Plop, and it was Harry, gazing at her with haunted eyes when he asked to be taken to a hotel.

  Plop, and it was Harry at breakfast, digging into her biscuits and gravy.

  Plop, and it was Uncle Doyle, all hurt when he spoke of his daughter’s betrayal of him with the man of her dreams.

  Plop, and it was Harry, running across the dirt to the injured girl, so intent he had almost been run down by a horse.

  Plop, plop, plop, and it was Buck in the truck, and Neva running to kiss him, and the pup at Rainey’s heels, and her mother’s whispered voice, Oh, honey, I have to tell you…

  We can sure live a lifetime in a moment, can’t we, Mama? she whispered, Whether we want to or not.

  She did not realize that she had dozed off until a knock at the door startled her.

  “Rainey, did you fall asleep?”

  “Oh. I guess I did.”

  She sat up, feeling warm and fuzzy and a little like asking him to come in. “I’m okay, though.”

  “Well…just checking,” he said in something of a shy voice. “I’ll be down in the kitchen.”

  “Okay.”

  She was sure he was saying, “I’m here, and I’m ready t
o tell my story.”

  CHAPTER 10

  Out Where It Gets Lonesome

  When Rainey came downstairs she was wearing her blue robe over her nightgown, and she knew she smelled lovely, as a woman fresh from a bath always does. She had in fact spritzed herself with the expensive perfume Helen had given her. She had done this before realizing, stopped, and been very annoyed with herself and stuffed the bottle way to the bottom of her purse.

  She stopped in the doorway to see Harry at the table, his head bent over a small brown box, and his dark hair catching the shine of the overhead light.

  He looked up at her. A thick strand of hair fell over his forehead. His gaze quickly swept her from head to toe, and then came back up to her eyes. She jerked the belt of her robe tighter and wished she’d remembered to put on socks.

  “Gosh, it’s freezing in here,” she said, hurrying past him to slam down the window over the sink. “I guess we could light the furnace.”

  Rubbing her arms, she turned to face him, but he had again bent his head over the brown box on the table.

  With some surprise, she saw that the box was the old fifties radio that had sat gathering dust on the second shelf of the microwave cart. Her eyes widened as she saw he was poking inside the back of it, while it crackled with static.

  “Shouldn’t you unplug it while you do that? You might get shocked. Freddy was fiddlin’ in the back of a radio once and got shocked so bad he lost his hearing for three days. Scared us all to death.”

  Slowly he turned his head to look over his shoulder. “Just how many husbands have you had?”

  “Well…two. Why?”

  He frowned. “By my count, Freddy is number three.”

  “You are counting?” This was interesting.

  He blinked, and he actually blushed, she was sure of it.

  Returning his gaze to the bowels of the radio, he said that he had not been exactly counting, but that he seemed to recall a Robert and a Monte, and now here was a Freddy.

  “Freddy’s my brother. Robert and Monte are my ex-husbands,” she said in a clarifying manner. “Robert was number one and Monte number two and gone now for two years. Well, not my husband for two years, but he does show up every three or four weeks to borrow money.”