Dispensations

by Randolph Thomas

  When Ginger saw me, she pushed herself back from the man. The man turned and looked back at me. He was the man I had seen in the woods, and he rubbed his face and glared at me like he couldn’t believe I was there. Ginger looked at me dully like she barely knew me, like I was some strange memory or hallucination. Her eyes seemed too small for her head. She was barefoot, in the same jeans and blouse she’d been wearing on the bus.

  The man jumped to his feet. He was wearing a white undershirt and khaki pants. His paunch sagged over his belt. He was twice as big in the chest as I was, but no taller, with thick arms and short dark hair. His small eyes were burning me up.

  Footsteps above us, and then Mrs. Crislip, in her robe, was on the stairs. “What the hell is going on?” she said. She glanced at me, seeming to recognize me.

  The man said something about an intruder and struck me twice in the face with his fists. I lost my footing. A door opened, and I saw a crib in a room, children in it, watching us, stone-still with their hands in their mouths. Then they disappeared into the swirling rooms, the swirling wallpaper, and the swirling heat.

  The man grabbed the back of my coat and shirt. He yanked at my collar. He let go and struck the back of my neck so hard I thought my neck would break.

  Ginger never moved, never left the couch. Mrs. Crislip grabbed hold of the man and held him back. I could hear them fighting as I moved in slow motion down the hallway, my hands touching the wall for support.

  In the kitchen, he caught up to me. He slapped me across the top of the head and pushed me down on the kitchen floor, face first. I hit my forehead hard against the linoleum.

  Mrs. Crislip caught hold of him again, and they rolled and fought on the floor. I pulled myself up, using a table leg for leverage. He had her pinned down on the floor, and she was scratching his face. I grabbed the wall, then the doorframe. I pushed myself outside, and the screen door slammed.

  The cold air and the fine snow felt good stinging my face. I held my hand over my right eye and stumbled away from the house, toward the tree line. I stumbled off the path and fell to my knees in the shallow snow and leaves. I lay down behind a stump, held my hand over my bad eye, and looked back at the house. Someone, a blur, came out in the yard, searching for me. I heard Mrs. Crislip calling, saw her leaning in the doorway, and the blur went back inside.

  I stayed put until there seemed to be no more movement in the house. The snow had stopped falling, but I didn’t feel like walking the trail back through the woods. Hunching, I pushed open the shed door, went in, and closed the door behind me.

  Something smelled rank. After a few seconds I was able to make out the shapes of the old tools, a few sacks of fertilizer, and rusted beer cans and bottles scattered on the floor. I poked around with a stick and found a decomposed opossum among the filth in one of the corners, and I kicked it out the door. I eased down on my knees, which ached like everything else, and I laid my head down on a burlap sack.

  When I woke up, Mrs. Crislip was leaning over me. The shed door was open, and the sun was up. Mrs. Crislip wore her housecoat. Her lip was cut, and there was a bruise on the side of her face. Somehow I was still wearing my beret, and some of the blood on my head had dried, pasting the front of my beret to my forehead.

  “Let’s get you inside,” Mrs. Crislip said. “You think you can walk?”

  I sat up. My face and neck throbbed, but now I could open my bad eye a slim, bloody crack, although doing so made the pain worse. I could see a big brown bump in the right side of my vision. I stood with Mrs. Crislip’s help. She must have figured my being there had something to do with Ginger, that I was one of her secrets.

  “You’re lucky you ain’t dead,” she said.

  The more I moved, the more I ached, but it felt good to move.

  The snow was gone, but the grass was still damp. When we got close to the house, almost to the door, I stopped, and Mrs. Crislip said it was okay, they’d gone. She led me to a bedroom, bare and neat. The bed had a white chenille spread. Mrs. Crislip ran water in the bathtub and helped me undress.

  “You want me to call your mother?” she said.

  “We don’t see each other in the morning,” I said. “She’ll think I’ve gone to school.”

  There was a mirror on the back of the door, and as Mrs. Crislip helped me out of my clothes, I stared at my undernourished body, my shaggy hair, and my bruised face, which was almost unrecognizable. I looked like a corpse that had washed up on a beach somewhere, except for my erection from Mrs. Crislip’s handling me. She acted like she didn’t notice it. She gave me a towel, led me into the bathroom, and steadied me while I lowered myself into the warm water.

  After my bath, Mrs. Crislip made me a fried egg sandwich, which I ate ravenously, even though my head ached when I chewed. It was afternoon when I started walking home. I was sore all over, and the soreness made me very aware of every step and movement, and of ordinary things: the tall bushy evergreens lining the road, the bend just before our house, our driveway, and our house perched on the low ridge above the lake.

  A car I’d never seen before, a two-tone Buick, was backed into our driveway, and there was a man I’d never seen before standing at the garage door looking in the window at the boat. The man, who was stocky and dressed in a suit, didn’t even notice me as I walked up the driveway past him and the house, across our backyard to the lake and the pier. The late afternoon sun was behind the clouds. Nobody was on the lake, not even any ducks, and the water looked still and gray like smoky glass.

  I was standing by the pier when my mother’s carpool driver dropped her off. I heard her speaking with the man in the driveway and heard the door to the garage opening. In a few minutes the man’s car started. He drove away, and my mother opened the door to the house and went in, probably thinking over what she was going to say to me, how she would break her decision, for she had made up her mind that we needed to sell the house, to move as far away as possible, as soon as possible. She would have been happy, or so she believed, to pack and leave before nightfall.

  As she did every evening, my mother walked through the house to the kitchen, where she took the bottle of gin from under the sink, the tonic bottle and ice from the refrigerator, and made a drink at the counter. Going to the back door, to the deck, she glanced down at the pier, saw me, and dropped her glass.

  The way my mother looked, frozen and transfixed, standing over the broken glass, sent a warm wave through me. I have gone over my memory of that moment again and again, searching her expression. At times, it has seemed to me that she did not know me at first or that she was refusing to know me. Other times, I have believed she thought I was someone else, someone she was surprised and pained to see again after so many years. Either way, from what my mother saw, she must have concluded I was now lost to her. I stood by the pier, as still as the lake itself. She turned, without acknowledging me further, and went back inside the house.

  HOMING

  It’s eight o’clock, just dark. Across the highway, in the parking lot beside the bus terminal, an eighteen-wheeler spews clouds of exhaust. A passenger, a woman in a long denim dress, a poncho, and long gray hair streaming down her shoulders, climbs down. I acknowledge her arrival without much thought. Sitting in a window booth of the Dog House Diner, dabbing the last crumbs of my burger and dropping them on my tongue, I taste again after so long the coal trains moving through the town built against the side of the mountain. I’ve spent my life away from here, but have returned often in my dreams, and know by heart the geography of the town from the maps I used to spread on Aunt Augusta’s living room floor. I gathered what I know of my earliest life from the clippings I’d sneak from her desk and study in bed by flashlight.

  I slide from the booth and walk to the bathroom where I lean over the urinal, so close to sleep my head taps the wall in front of me. On the way back, I stop at the bar, and the bartender, a plump redhead with a freckled, flat face, reaches into the cooler for my beer and pops the cap off. When I return, the
woman from the truck is in my booth, sitting across from my seat like she’s come into this place with the sole purpose of finding me.

  She could be a little older than I am or she could be eighty, she’s so weathered, so wrinkled, and a wave of old clothes, damp leaves, and trash brings some of the burger and the onions into my throat. Just as suddenly the bad smell is gone, and she’s looking at me like she knows I’ve had to smell worse, that I’ve smelled worse myself.

  As soon as I sit, she’s going through a thick, ragged billfold that appears from under the poncho. She hands me a wrinkled black and white photograph of a barefoot teenager sitting on a plank fence. The picture is so old the lighter parts are faded almost white. The kid has a close crew cut, jeans, and no shirt, and he’s laughing with his head leaning back. The kid is turning invisible, most of his face and chest are already gone.

  The incline behind the fence looks like the land behind the house I lived in, here, so long ago, but it can’t be the same. I know I’ve had the place on my mind a lot, maybe too much. I turn over the picture and study the faint pencil writing on the back: Fred Stover, 1950–1968.

  “You’re looking for him?” I say. “I’m sure I ain’t seen him.”

  It comes to me this woman is more lost than the person she’s looking for, asking questions nobody can answer. She licks her lips, probably waiting for the offer of a drink. I figure she’s about as lucky as I am, picking me for a handout, but I’m no damn mark.

  “I’m doing some hitching myself,” I tell her. “Hitchhiked up here to visit my home place.”

  She blinks, and the jukebox plays another sleepy country song, but I feel easier having somebody to tell.

  “It’s not far now,” I say, “four or five miles north on Route 11. After the small engine shop, there’s a trailer court. It’s across the road. Straight up the driveway, and you’re in the yard.”

  She rolls her eyes like I’ve made this up, but my story is as true as anyone’s.

  “I just rode in that way,” she mutters, “and I didn’t see nothin’.”

  Now I’m sorry I wasted the breath. I can’t decide what game she’s playing, but I’ve heard enough. I drain what’s left of my beer, set the bottle and its foamy remnants on the table.

  “I got places to go.”

  I stand, and after a second’s consideration, pluck a couple of dollars from my wallet and drop them on the table in front of her. She stares at them like she’s never seen money before.

  I push open the glass door and walk out. The breeze blowing off the street is chilly and faintly sweet. I’m beat all to hell, but I’ve made no arrangements for sleep. To keep awake and keep my blood circulating, I duck into the arcade, pick out a machine, and throw in a couple of quarters. I haven’t finished one game before some girl in tight shiny pants and a colorful T-shirt is watching me like she knows I don’t belong here. When I make a funny face, she whispers something to her friend. A security guard, a burly, squat woman, steps out of the bathroom, so I push away from the table, grab my quarters, and walk to the glass door. I shove it open and walk out. On the sidewalk, I walk right into the old woman, or did she bump into me?

  Stepping back from her, I slap my pocket to make sure my wallet is back there, and she waves her hand in front of my face like someone trying to keep a child from falling asleep. She motions for me to follow her, and when she turns away I feel her tug my sleeve. After looking around the empty streets and into the arcade at the jailbait and the security guard, I know I don’t want to stay around town. Maybe this woman is harmless and as lost as she seems. Or maybe she knows of a hobo camp nearby, or at least some dry place where I can keep the wind off. If she is trouble, if she is playing some game, I will know soon enough.

  I follow her. Railroad tracks replace the buildings on the lower side of Route 11, and beyond the tracks lies New River, wide and dark with willow trees hanging over it, just the way it looks in my dreams.

  When I visited Aunt Augusta on a sunny morning three days ago, I’d expected to wake everybody up. I’d expected Mrs. Mason to answer the door, to look me over with her worried eyes, knowing she would have to let me in even though I frightened her.

  But this time it was Aunt Augusta herself standing behind the glass door in her heavy black-framed glasses that looked too big for her head. Leaning on her cane, she watched me cross the lot behind the house like she’d sensed my impending return.

  “Here comes my lost boy.”

  I towered over her. How long was it this time? Five, no, ten years. I touched her arm, but there was no embrace coming. Mrs. Mason was cooking breakfast when Aunt Augusta called to her, “Look what the cat dragged in.” I heard the refrigerator door open as Mrs. Mason took out more eggs, and then the voice came back, emotionless, “Good morning, Wayne.”

  I walked my aunt into the dining room. Around the ceiling were the pictures of English fox hunts. When I was a boy, putting off my homework, I’d follow the story, the hunters and the hounds chasing the weary fox that’s never caught but is never safe either. I’d hear the barking and the hunters’ guns, hide under the table and watch the legs of the adults coming in and out of the room.

  We sat at the dining room table, and Mrs. Mason served me without speaking. Aunt Augusta sat stiffly while I ate.

  “Why don’t you go back and see your home place?” Aunt Augusta said. “Follow your bloodline back to its source. Seeing it all might set your mind at ease.”

  I took a drink of the hot, black coffee to wash down the egg lodged in my throat. Already her suggestion was sinking in, feeling like it had been there already, waiting for her to say it, the reason I had come back to her. I remembered almost nothing of my parents before that day I found them, and suddenly I burned with the same curiosity that had nagged me as a boy, driving me to take her letters, articles, and pictures.

  When I was finished eating, Aunt Augusta reached into the drawer of her desk, took a fifty and a twenty from the envelope she always kept there. She placed the money in my hand.

  We cross the half-mile bridge over New River single file. She’s walking in front, her eyes watching closely the slow spin of the earth like it will eventually bring Fred Stover back to her. A truck passes, and the wind whips me around, almost lifting me off my feet. I worry the wind has sent her over the side, plummeting into the cold water below, but she finds me in the dizzying dark, her bony hand gripping my arm the way Aunt Augusta did when I walked her to the dining room.

  “You’re my boy, ain’t you?” she says.

  I wrangle out of her grip. She casts her eyes down like she’s lucid enough to accept the truth, and then she turns and walks on ahead.

  Across the bridge, we come to the Executive Motel. I follow her behind it, where she pulls a screwdriver from under her poncho. While she works at the bottom of one of the windows, I find a cinderblock and lift it with both hands. I carry it back to her and stand over her, holding it, while she works. Sensing me, she turns, her eyes still as she watches me, her body relaxed like she knows I’ve done such things.

  She isn’t afraid. In fact, she looks like she might welcome death, and I doubt anyone would be sorry. But I’ve got nothing against this soul, only an uneasy feeling sometimes, and I can’t decide if it’s important or just a whim. I ease the block down beneath the window. She steps onto it and raises the window. I hold her arm as she climbs through. Once inside, she helps me climb in.

  I turn on the television but leave the sound low. She sits beside me on the bed, not watching, and then she lies back on one of the pillows. The eleven o’clock news comes on, a high school roof that needs replacing. She mumbles in her half sleep, “There ain’t no such place,” and her voice vibrates through me. On the day I found my mother and father, I crossed Route 11 like my mother had warned me never to do. I ran to one of the trailers, knocked on the door. The big man looking down at me didn’t believe my story until he followed me across the highway to the house. After he pushed open the door, after he saw them, there
were other people from the trailers running back and forth, a swirl of voices and sirens, and women from the trailers who touched and held me because I was so small and alone. It would do something to me, one of them said, and the words echoed in my ears.

  My flesh crawls with questions. Maybe I will know some of the answers tomorrow. Maybe they will just come to me when I find the small engine shop and the trailer court. Smelling familiar scents, recognizing shapes of buildings, I will walk up the driveway across the road, under the overhanging branches, right into the yard. Pictures will form from the incomplete shapes that haunt my dreams, and maybe their shadows will cease to chase me, maybe I will find peace and some rest.

  The television light flickers across her eyelids. Her smell is strong again now that we are in the small room together. I know one among the many smells that gags me, a decomposing animal. A dog will roll in something dead to pick up the scent for protection. Maybe she does the same thing.

  Her lips puff with her breath.

  I think of lying down next to her on the bed, of trying to catch a few hours there. I go to the air conditioner, cut on the vent and the fan, so the smell won’t be as bad. I cut off the television, but as soon as I step to the bed, her eyes pop open. She lies stiff, watching me, and I can’t make the next step, can’t let my knees and body bend to the bed. Instead, I grab a pillow, carry it into the bathroom. I lie down between the toilet and the shower stall, my neck and back stiffening, and the cold from the floor moving through me. It will be impossible to sleep here, even for a minute.