Shiloh and Other Stories

by Bobbie Ann Mason

  “I can’t. I have to get up at six.”

  Sabrina whispers to him, “Sue has the hots for Jeff. And Jeff’s wife is going to have a duck with a rubber tail if she finds out.” Sabrina giggles. “He kept dropping hints about how his wife was going to Louisville next week. And he and Sue were eating off the same slice of pizza.”

  “Is that supposed to mean something?”

  “You figure it out.”

  “Would you do me that way?”

  “Don’t be silly.” Sabrina turns up the radio, then unties her shoes and tosses them over Edwin’s head into a corner.

  Edwin is forty-three and Sabrina is only twenty, but he does not want to believe age is a barrier between them. Sometimes he cannot believe his good luck, that he has a beautiful girl who finds him still attractive. Edwin has a deep dimple in his chin, which reminded his first wife, Lois Ann, of Kirk Douglas. She had read in a movie magazine that Kirk Douglas has a special attachment for shaving his dimple. But Sabrina thinks Edwin looks like John Travolta, who also has a dimple. Now and then Edwin realizes how much older he is than Sabrina, but time has passed quickly, and he still feels like the same person, unchanged, that he was twenty years ago. His two ex-wives had seemed to drift away from him, and he never tried to hold them back. But with Sabrina, he knows he must make an effort, for it is beginning to dawn on him that sooner or later women get disillusioned with him. Maybe he’s too laid back. But Sabrina likes this quality. Sabrina has large round gray eyes and limp, brownish-blond hair—the color of birch paneling—which she highlights with Miss Clairol. They share a love of Fudgsicles, speedboats, and WKRP in Cincinnati. At the beginning, he thought that was enough to build a relationship on, because he knew so many couples who never shared such simple pleasures, but gradually he has begun to see that it is more complicated than that. Sabrina’s liveliness makes him afraid that she will be fickle. He can’t bear the thought of losing her, and he doesn’t like the idea that his new possessiveness may be the same uneasy feeling a man would have for a daughter.

  Sabrina’s parents sent her to college for a year, but her father, a farmer, lost money on his hogs and couldn’t afford to continue. When Edwin met her, she was working as a waitress in a steak house. She wants to go back to college, but Edwin does not have the money to send her either. In college, she learned things that make him feel ignorant around her. She said that in an anthropology course, for instance, she learned for a fact that people evolved from animals. But when he tried to argue with her, she said his doubts were too silly to discuss. Edwin doesn’t want to sound like a father, so he usually avoids such topics. Sabrina believes in the ERA, although she likes to keep house. She cooks odd things for him, like eggplant, and a weird lasagna with vegetables. She says she knows how to make a Big Mac from scratch, but she never does. Her specialty is pizza. She puts sliced dill pickles on it, which Edwin doesn’t dare question. She likes to do things in what she calls an arty way. Now Sabrina is going out for pizza with people in the Theatre. Sabrina talks of “the Theatre.”

  Until he began driving the bus, Edwin had never worked closely with people. He worked on an offshore oil rig for a time, but kept his distance from the other men. He drove a bulldozer in a logging camp out West. In Kentucky, during his marriages, he worked in an aluminum products company, an automotive machine shop, and numerous gas stations, going from job to job as casually as he did with women. He used to think of himself as an adventurer, but now he believes he has gone through life rather blindly, without much pain or sense of loss.

  When he drives the bus, he feels stirred up, perhaps the way Sabrina feels about Oklahoma! The bus is a new luxury model with a tape deck, AM-FM, CB, and built-in first-aid kit. He took a first-aid course, so he feels prepared to handle emergencies. Edwin has to stay alert, for anything could happen. The guys who came back from Vietnam said it was like this every moment. Edwin was in the army, but he was never sent to Vietnam, and now he feels that he has bypassed some critical stage in his life: a knowledge of terror. Edwin has never had this kind of responsibility, and he has never been around mentally retarded people before. His passengers are like bizarre, overgrown children, badly behaved and unpredictable. Some of them stare off into space, others are hyperactive. A woman named Freddie Johnson kicks aimlessly at the seat in front of her, spouting her ten-word vocabulary. She can say, “Hot! Shorts,” “Popeye on?” “Dukes on!” “Cook supper,” and “Go bed.” She talks continuously. A gangly man with a clubfoot has learned to get Hershey bars from a vending machine, and every day he brings home Hershey bars, clutching them in his hand until he squeezes them out of shape. A pretty blond woman shows Edwin the braces on her teeth every day when she gets on the bus. She gets confused if Edwin brings up another topic. The noises on the bus are chaotic and eerie—spurts, gurgles, yelps, squeals. Gradually, Edwin has learned how to keep his distance and keep order at the same time. He plays tape-recorded music to calm and entertain the passengers. In effect, he has become a disc jockey, taking requests and using the microphone, but he avoids fast talk. The supervisors at the center have told him that the developmentally disabled—they always use this term—need a world that is slowed down; they can’t keep up with today’s fast pace. So he plays mellow old sixties tunes by the Lovin’ Spoonful, Joni Mitchell, Donovan. It seems to work. The passengers have learned to clap or hum along with the music. One man, Merle Cope, has been learning to clap his hands in a body-awareness class. Merle is forty-seven years old, and he walks two miles—in an hour—to the bus stop, down a country road. He climbs onto the bus with agonizing slowness. When he gets on, he makes an exaggerated clapping motion, as if to congratulate himself for having made it, but he never lets his hands quite touch. Merle Cope always has an eager grin on his face, and when he tries to clap his hands he looks ecstatic. He looks happier than Sabrina singing “Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’.”

  On Thursday, November 14, Edwin stops at the junction of a state road and a gravel road called Ezra Combs Lane to pick up a new passenger. The country roads have shiny new green signs, with the names of the farmers who originally settled there three or four generations ago. The new passenger is Laura Combs, who he has been told is thirty-seven and has never been to school. She will take classes in Home Management and Living Skills. When she gets on the bus, the people who were with her drive off in a blue Pacer. Laura Combs, a large, angular woman with buckteeth, stomps deliberately down the aisle, then plops down beside a young black man named Ray Watson, who has been riding the bus for about three weeks. Ray has hardly spoken, except to say “Have a nice day” to Edwin when he leaves the bus. Ray, who is mildly retarded from a blow on the head in his childhood, is subject to seizures, but so far he has not had one on the bus. Edwin watches him carefully. He learned about convulsions in his first-aid course.

  When Laura Combs sits down by Ray Watson, she shoves him and says, “Scoot over. And cheer up.”

  Her tone is not cheerful. Edwin watches in the rear-view mirror, ready to act. He glides around a curve and slows down for the next passenger. A tape has ended and Edwin hesitates before inserting another. He hears Ray Watson say, “I never seen anybody as ugly as you.”

  “Shut up or I’ll send you to the back of the bus.” Laura Combs speaks with a snappy authority that makes Edwin wonder if she is really retarded. Her hair is streaked gray and yellow, and her face is filled with acne pits.

  Ray Watson says, “That’s fine with me, long as I don’t have to set by you.”

  “Want me to throw you back in the woodpile where you come from?”

  “I bet you could throw me plumb out the door, you so big.”

  It is several minutes before it is clear to Edwin that they are teasing. He is pleased that Ray is talking, but he can’t understand why it took a person like Laura Combs to motivate him. She is an imposing woman with a menacing stare. She churns gum, her mouth open.

  For a few weeks, Edwin watches them joke with each other, and whenever he decides he shoul
d separate them, they break out into big grins and pull at each other’s arms. The easy intimacy they develop seems strange to Edwin, but then it suddenly occurs to him what a fool he is being about a twenty-year-old girl, and that seems even stranger. He hears Ray ask Laura, “Did you get that hair at the Piggly Wiggly?” Laura’s hair is in pigtails, which seem to be freshly plaited on Mondays and untouched the rest of the week. Laura says, “I don’t want no birds nesting in my hair.”

  Edwin takes their requests. Laura has to hear “Mister Bojangles” every day, and Ray demands that Edwin play something from Elvis’s Christmas album. They argue over tastes. Each says the other’s favorite songs are terrible.

  Laura tells Ray she never heard of a black person liking Elvis, and Ray says, “There’s a lot about black people you don’t know.”

  “What?”

  “That’s for me to know and you to find out. You belong on the moon. All white peoples belong on the moon.”

  “You belong in Atlanta,” Laura says, doubling over with laughter.

  When Edwin reports their antics one day to Sabrina, she says, “That’s too depressing for words.”

  “They’re a lot smarter than you’d think.”

  “I don’t see how you can stand it.” Sabrina shudders. She says, “Out in the woods, animals that are defective wouldn’t survive. Even back in history, deformed babies were abandoned.”

  “Today’s different,” says Edwin, feeling alarmed. “Now they have rights.”

  “Well, I’ll say one thing. If I was going to have a retarded baby, I’d get an abortion.”

  “That’s killing.”

  “It’s all in how you look at it,” says Sabrina, changing the radio station.

  They are having lunch. Sabrina has made a loaf of zucchini bread, because Sue made one for Jeff. Edwin doesn’t understand her reasoning, but he takes it as a compliment. She gives him another slice, spreading it with whipped margarine. All of his women were good cooks. Maybe he didn’t praise them enough. He suddenly blurts out so much praise for the zucchini bread that Sabrina looks at him oddly. Then he realizes that her attention is on the radio. The Humans are singing a song about paranoia, which begins, “Attention, all you K Mart shoppers, fill your carts, ‘cause your time is almost up.” It is Sabrina’s favorite song.

  “Most of my passengers are real poor country people,” Edwin says. “Use to, they’d be kept in the attic or out in the barn. Now they’re riding a bus, going to school and having a fine time.”

  “In the attic? I never knew that. I’m a poor country girl and I never knew that.”

  “Everybody knows that,” says Edwin, feeling a little pleased. “But don’t call yourself a poor country girl.”

  “It’s true. My daddy said he’d give me a calf to raise if I came back home. Big deal. My greatest dread is that I’ll end up on a farm, raising a bunch of dirty-faced younguns. Just like some of those characters on your bus.”

  Edwin does not know what to say. The song ends. The last line is, “They’re looking in your picture window.”

  While Sabrina clears away the dishes, Edwin practices rolling bandages. He has been reviewing his first-aid book. “I want you to help me practice a simple splint,” he says to Sabrina.

  “If I broke a leg, I couldn’t be in Oklahoma!”

  “You won’t break a leg.” He holds out the splint. It is a fraternity paddle, a souvenir of her college days. She sits down for him and stretches out her leg.

  “I can’t stand this,” she says.

  “I’m just practicing. I have to be prepared. I might have an emergency.”

  Sabrina, wincing, closes her eyes while Edwin ties the fraternity paddle to her ankle.

  “It’s perfect,” he says, tightening the knot.

  Sabrina opens her eyes and wiggles her foot. “Jim says he’s sure I can have a part in Life with Father,” she says. Jim is the director of Oklahoma! She adds, “Jeff is probably going to be the lead.”

  “I guess you’re trying to make me jealous.”

  “No, I’m not. It’s not even a love story.”

  “I’m glad then. Is that what you want to do?”

  “I don’t know. Don’t you think I ought to go back to school and take a drama class? It’d be a real great experience, and I’m not going to get a job anytime soon, looks like. Nobody’s hiring.” She shakes her leg impatiently, and Edwin begins untying the bandage. “What do you think I ought to do?”

  “I don’t know. I never know how to give you advice, Sabrina. What do I know? I haven’t been to college like you.”

  “I wish I were rich, so I could go back to school,” Sabrina says sadly. The fraternity paddle falls to the floor, and she says, with her hands rushing to her face, “Oh, God, I can’t stand the thought of breaking a leg.”

  —

  The play opens in two weeks, during the Christmas season, and Sabrina has been making her costumes—two gingham outfits, virtually identical. She models them for Edwin and practices her dances for him. Edwin applauds, and she gives him a stage bow, as the director has taught her to do. Everything Sabrina does now seems like a performance. When she slices the zucchini bread, sawing at it because it has hardened, it is a performance. When she sat in the kitchen chair with the splint, it was as though she imagined her audience. Edwin has been involved in his own performances, on the bus. He emulates Dr. Johnny Fever, on WKRP, because he likes to be low-key, cool. But he hesitates to tell Sabrina about his disc jockey role because she doesn’t watch WKRP in Cincinnati with him anymore. She goes to rehearsals early.

  Maybe it is out of resistance to the sappy Oklahoma! sound track, or maybe it is an inevitable progression, but Edwin finds himself playing a few Dylan tunes, some Janis Joplin, nothing too hectic. The passengers shake their heads in pleasure or beat things with their fists. It makes Edwin sad to think how history passes them by, but sometimes he feels the same way about his own life. As he drives along, playing these old songs, he thinks about what his life was like back then. During his first marriage, he worked in a gas station, saving for a down payment on a house. Lois Ann fed him on a TV tray while he watched the war. It was like a drama series. After Lois Ann, and then his travels out West, there was Carolyn and another down payment on another house and more of the war. Carolyn had a regular schedule—pork chops on Mondays, chicken on Tuesdays. Thursday’s menu has completely escaped his memory. He feels terrible, remembering his wives by their food, and remembering the war as a TV series. His life has been a delayed reaction. He feels as if he’s about Sabrina’s age. He plays music he did not understand fifteen years ago, music that now seems full of possibility: the Grateful Dead, the Jefferson Airplane, groups with vision. Edwin feels that he is growing and changing for the first time in years. The passengers on his bus fill him with a compassion he has never felt before. When Freddie Johnson learns a new word—“bus”—Edwin is elated. He feels confident. He could drive his passengers all the way to California if he had to.

  One day a stringbean girl with a speech impediment gives Edwin a tape cassette she wants him to play. Her name is Lou Murphy. Edwin has tried to encourage her to talk, but today he hands the tape back to her abruptly.

  “I don’t like the Plasmatics,” he explains, enjoying his authority. “I don’t play new-wave. I have a golden-oldie format. I just play sixties stuff.”

  The girl takes the tape cassette and sits down by Laura Combs. Ray Watson is absent today. She starts pulling at her hair, and the cassette jostles in her lap. Laura is wound up too, jiggling her knees. The pair of them make Edwin think of those vibrating machines that mix paint by shaking the cans.

  Edwin takes the microphone and says, “If you want a new-wave format, you’ll have to ride another bus. Now let’s crawl back in the stacks of wax for this oldie but goodie—Janis Joplin and ‘A Little Bit Harder.’ ”

  Lou Murphy nods along with the song. Laura’s chewing gum pops like BBs. A while later, after picking up another passenger, Edwin glances in the
rear-view mirror and sees Laura playing with the Plasmatics tape, pulling it out in a curly heap. Lou seems to be trying to shriek, but nothing comes out. Before Edwin can stop the bus, Laura has thrown the tape out the window.

  “You didn’t like it, Mr. Creech,” Laura says when Edwin, after halting the bus on a shoulder, stalks down the aisle. “You said you didn’t like it.”

  Edwin has never heard anyone sound so matter-of-fact, or look so reasonable. He has heard that since Laura began her classes, she has learned to set a table, make change, and dial a telephone. She even has a job at the training center, sorting seeds and rags. She is as hearty and domineering, yet as delicate and vulnerable, as Janis Joplin must have been. Edwin manages to move Lou to a front seat. She is sobbing silently, her lower jaw jerking, and Edwin realizes he is trembling too. He feels ashamed. After all, he is not driving the bus in order to make a name for himself. Yet it had felt right to insist on the format for his show. There is no appropriate way to apologize, or explain.

  Edwin doesn’t want to tell Sabrina about the incident. She is preoccupied with the play and often listens to him distractedly. Edwin has decided that he was foolish to suspect that she had a lover. The play is her love. Her nerves are on edge. One chilly afternoon, on the weekend before Oklahoma! opens, he suggests driving over to Kentucky Lake.

  “You need a break,” he tells her. “A little relaxation. I’m worried about you.”

  “This is nothing,” she says. “Two measly lines. I’m not exactly a star.”

  “What if you were? Would you get an abortion?”

  “What are you talking about? I’m not pregnant.”

  “You said once you would. Remember?”

  “Oh. I would if the baby was going to be creepy like those people on your bus.”