by Lee Martin
When she finally spoke, her voice had a bit of a quaver in it. “You’re a good boy,” she said. “Mercy.”
“Yes, ma’am,” the boy said, and then he was gone, on his way back to the store.
ANCIL AND LUCY
On the drive home, Ancil said to Lucy, “Who was that boy? Who are his people?”
She looked out the window at the snow that had started to fall. “That boy?” she said. She thought Ancil knew, and for a moment, she wondered if he did and only wanted to make her say the name. “That boy is Hattie’s grandson.”
The truck bumped over the railroad tracks. Then Ancil said, “Hattie Mack?”
“Yes,” said Lucy, and then they rode along in silence, leaving Burton’s name unspoken.
Ancil had been about to tell her what he’d done in the barber shop, but then she told him who the boy was, and he couldn’t bring himself to go on. Sometimes, like now, the past was too much with them, and all Ancil knew to do was to be quiet, to hunker down, and wait.
The snow was slanting down hard from the west, already sticking to the street. He had to turn on the wipers to keep the windshield clear.
“Are your lights on?” Lucy asked.
Ancil reached forward and turned on his running lights. He said, “Lucy?”
He wanted to tell her about his anger, about the way it was always with him, and how it had boiled over in the barber shop. He wanted to tell her that he felt diminished by it all—what a scene he’d made—and that he saw the end of their life together getting closer and how he was glad that they’d managed to hold on. He wanted to say that he’d never stopped loving her, that the thing that had happened with Burton Mack and her had sliced him open, but little by little, day by day, he’d found a way to heal—until he saw those footprints in the snow and he started to wonder what someone looking in would make of the two of them.
Once upon a time, there was a man and a wife and a child that the wife decided she didn’t want. He wanted to tell Lucy that if he mourned at all, it was for the fact that he’d led her to believe that this was what he wanted, too. If only he’d said the right things all those years ago, but really, at the time, who knew what those things were. Ancil wondered if she ever knew that he sometimes imagined who that child would have been and how he or she might have changed them in ways both wise and wonderful—taken them outside themselves, perhaps, made them look toward the future rather than so much into the past.
But then Lucy said, “It’s slick out. Be careful.”
And all Ancil could think to say was, “I will.”
Lucy remembered how Burtie’s grandson had let her touch his face. How much love had she never had the chance to give, all because a long time ago, Burtie had seemed like the world to her. She wondered if Ancil knew that she sometimes thought back to those days and especially that moment when the doctor in St. Louis asked her one more time if she was sure, and she said yes, yes she was. Did Ancil know how often she wished she could go back and change her mind, to leave that doctor’s office and go to Burtie and tell him about the baby she was carrying and to ask him—please, Burtie, oh please—wasn’t there a way that they could manage a life together? What did anyone know about what they wanted and what they didn’t? What did anyone know about how to live a life?
At the last intersection before the straight shot out of town, a pickup truck with rusted fenders ran a stop sign.
“Watch out,” Lucy said.
But Ancil had already seen the truck and he was slowing down, tapping his brakes, trying to keep the Explorer from sliding in the snow. The pickup shot through the intersection just a fraction of a second before the Explorer would have been in its path.
“It’s all right,” Ancil said.
“My word,” said Lucy. “My heart is pounding.”
“It’s all right, old girl.” Ancil reached over and patted her arm. “Don’t worry. We’re fine.”
They drove on, the houses becoming fewer and farther apart as they went, the darkness coming on now—a quiet, cold night, the snow settling in over the houses and the fields. Ahead of him, Ancil could see the porch light that Lucy had thought to leave on, a faint glow in the distance. He drove toward that light, toward the house of last chances, where some bright thing between them—neither Ancil nor Lucy dared anymore to call it love—had almost gone out, but not now, not yet, not quite.
BELLY TALK
ONE MORNING, JACKIE RODE ALONG WITH HIS FATHER ON HIS COLLECTION route. The day was clear, and all along the blacktop the sun glinted off silo domes. A jet left a white trail across the blue sky. Wheat fields, golden and ripe, stretched off to the horizon, but the newly planted beans and corn were already wanting for rain. The clay soil had cracked and turned as white as plaster.
“Riding high in the crow’s nest,” Jackie’s father said.
“Yo ho ho,” said Jackie, because this is what he always said when his father made his remark about the cab of the tank truck being high above the other vehicles on the blacktop. Jackie thought it was fine to be able to see into the cars they met, to be so far above them that he could see the tops of people’s heads, even their feet on the floorboards. He made note of their shoes: sneakers, penny loafers, sandals, thongs. He thought each pair more magnificent than the one before it. His own shoes were made by a man in Vincennes, an old German with a leather apron and a red nose. One shoe, the right one, had a higher heel than the left, a thicker sole, because Jackie had been born with his right leg shorter. His shoes, the same kind year after year, were bulky oxfords, black with three pairs of eyelets for the cord laces. “Built to last,” the shoemaker always said. “Not some silly shoe for you.”
Jackie’s father turned off the blacktop, onto the Bethlehem Church Road, and the tank truck bounced over the ruts. Jackie thought of the red letters on the side of the silver tank—MARATHON—the letters painted over the drawing of a runner, a flaming torch held in his hand. Jackie knew, because his father had told him, the story of how the Greeks had defeated the Persians at Marathon and how a runner had carried the news nearly twenty-five miles to Athens. Jackie couldn’t imagine what it would be like to run that far. “You know when we drive to Vincennes to buy your shoes?” his father had said once. Jackie had pictured the highway running along muskmelon and watermelon patches in the bottomland, the bridge arcing over the Wabash River, and then the spires of the Old Cathedral rising up as they drove into the city. “That’s how far,” his father had said, and Jackie marveled at the enormity that could make a man run that distance, his lungs bursting with all he had to tell.
“Yo ho ho,” Jackie said again, only this time he said it with his mouth closed and in a muffled voice that made it seem that the words came from a concealed place, the glove compartment, perhaps, or the toolbox on the seat, or the tank itself, full of gasoline, riding behind the cab.
“You crack me up,” his father said. “You and that voice.”
It was Jackie’s talent, ventriloquism. He had learned how to form letters with his tongue, how to say words without moving his lips, only the tongue waggling in the cavity he made inside his mouth. He could imitate a muffled sound and then “throw” it. He made pies talk, drawers, closets, flowerpots. “Listen closely to everything around you,” his ventriloquism manual said, “and when you speak, think what you want to hear.”
He had learned his fifth-grade classmates’ voices and could imitate them perfectly. On occasion, he would make it seem that one of them had said something outrageous right in the middle of class, and the teacher would stop her lesson to scold him. She had long ago learned his trick. Even if someone really did speak out of turn, she would put the blame on Jackie. If he tried to tell her the truth, she wouldn’t believe him.
“No one likes a joker, mister,” his mother told him. “You better cool your coppers.”
He listened closely to what she said, learned that phrase. “Cool your coppers.” He said it while drinking water one night at the supper table, a new trick he had perfected
. “Cool your coppers,” he said in his mother’s voice, and his father laid down his fork, narrowed his eyes, and said to her, “What did you say?”
“I didn’t say anything,” she told him. “It’s that son of yours. He’s tormenting me. He thinks he’s a funny man. Ha ha, Jackie. Ha ha.”
He didn’t think he was a funny man, not in his heart of hearts. There he thought he was, to borrow something his father often said after coming in from his route, the saddest goddamn thing he had ever seen. “It’s the saddest goddamn thing,” his father said, and then he launched into a story of a customer down on his luck. It was 1976, and the high oil prices, in light of the drought, made it hard for the farmers to keep up with their fuel bills.
Jackie knew all the words for what he was: a cripple, a handicap, a gimp. Often, when he was alone in his room, he stared at himself in the mirror. He pressed his lips together and let his tongue form words in his own voice, speaking everything that was inside him that he couldn’t bear for anyone to hear. He talked about how sad he was—“goddamn gimp”—how it wasn’t his fault—“I didn’t do anything”—about how angry it made him. “I’ll mow ’em down,” he said, using the old Charlie McCarthy line he had heard on a tape of the ventriloquist, Edgar Bergen. The line sounded paltry when Jackie said it. “I swear, I’ll mow ’em down.”
Their first stop was a farm off the Bethlehem Church Road, a family named Marks. The boy, Eugene, was in Jackie’s class at school. He had silky blond hair, bleached white by the sun in summer. He had prominent cheekbones and brilliant blue eyes. Jackie would have thought him quite lovely if not for the fact that Eugene scared him. Eugene was too big for his age, much bigger than Jackie, and he was clumsy and also stupid with his lessons. But what terrified Jackie most was how sometimes he would glance over at Eugene and find him staring at him with his blue eyes, not with anger, but with hunger, taking in every bit of him, and it made Jackie nervous because he had no idea what Eugene wanted.
“Teach me how you do that thing,” he said to Jackie one day on the playground. It was the last day of school that spring. “That thing with your voice,” Eugene said. His own voice was raspy as if he were always hoarse from shouting, and he had a lisp that further distinguished him.
“It’s hard,” Jackie said.
Eugene’s blue eyes narrowed. “And I’m just a dummy, right?”
“I didn’t mean that.”
“I know what you meant.” He gave Jackie a half-hearted push.
“No, really. I just meant it takes a lot of practice.”
Eugene grabbed Jackie by the front of his shirt and pulled him close. His lips, when he spoke, brushed against Jackie’s chin. “You better never tell no one I asked you. You hear me? Not no one.”
“I won’t tell,” Jackie said.
Eugene kissed him—a shy, soft kiss on his cheek—before shoving him away and running into the school.
Jackie didn’t know what to do with that kiss. Later, as the teacher passed out their report cards, he said, in Eugene’s raspy, lisping voice, “Sweet Jesus. All F’s.”
Their teacher took him out in the hall. She put her hand on top of his head and nudged it forward until his nose was touching the cold metal of a locker. “You just stand there,” she said. “You think about what a tragedy it is when the only way someone can build himself up is by belittling someone else. You don’t know the life Eugene has. You ought to leave him alone.”
Later, as they were getting on the school bus, Eugene tripped Jackie and sent him sprawling across the asphalt. For weeks there were scabs on his knees. Now the new skin was bright and pink. He rubbed his finger over his right knee as his father turned the tank truck into the Markses’ lane.
Mr. Marks was cutting wheat in the field along the lane. He was emptying the hopper of his combine. The wheat streamed out of the spout angled over the high sideboards of the grain truck. Jackie followed his father over the freshly cut field, the wheat stubble tickling his ankles.
Mr. Marks was cursing at Eugene, who stood in the bed of the truck with a scoop shovel. “Goddamn it. Shovel it to the back. Goddamn it. Keep up.”
The grain rushed out onto the hump of wheat that had built up as other hoppers were unloaded, and it was Eugene’s job to level the pile by shoveling it to the back. It was clear to Jackie that he couldn’t keep up. The shovel was too heavy; the wheat was coming too fast. Eugene floundered around in the wheat, which was nearly up to his thighs, and Jackie could feel the stumbling motion in his own legs. Finally, Mr. Marks climbed over the sideboards and jerked the shovel from Eugene’s hands. “Get out of here.” He gave him a rough shove. “Go on. I’ll do it myself.”
Eugene crawled over the sideboards and jumped to the ground. Jackie’s father was standing on the truck’s running board now, shouting to make himself heard over the noise of the combine and the wheat showering out of the spout. “I need something on account.”
“On account of what?” Mr. Marks bent and hefted a shovel full of wheat. He slung it toward the back of the truck’s bed. His hands were big, the fingers short and thick. One thumbnail was split; the creases of his knuckles were black with grime.
“A few dollars.” Jackie’s father had his ticket book out. He licked the point of his pencil. “Just so I can feel good about carrying you a while.”
“I’m cutting wheat. I don’t have time for you now. You’ll get your money.”
“I’d like to be sure.”
“I’d like to be rich,” Mr. Marks said. “Shit in one hand and wish in the other and see which one fills up first.”
Jackie was embarrassed for his father, embarrassed for himself. Eugene had wandered over behind the combine, where the belts were spinning on their flywheels and the screens were huffing out chaff. “Jackie,” Eugene called to him. Jackie went to where Eugene was waiting, and the two of them stood face to face in the shadow cast by the combine. Eugene bit down on his lip the way Jackie had seen him do in school when he was trying to figure out an arithmetic problem. Jackie heard his father and Mr. Marks shouting, but now their voices, swallowed up by the combine’s noise, were merely drones, vibrations of sound that buzzed the way Jackie sometimes heard voices from other people’s conversations bleeding over when he was talking on the telephone—voices that sounded small and frantic, coming from some far-off place he couldn’t imagine.
Eugene unfastened his blue jeans and let them slide down his hips and knees until they settled in a pile at his feet. His legs were striped with welts—some old and fading, others fresh and pink—and Jackie understood that Mr. Marks had left them there with his belt. Eugene didn’t say a word. He merely took Jackie’s hand and laid his finger on one of the welts. It was hot and moist. Jackie was afraid to look at Eugene, but finally he did, and what he saw was a face of dread and expectation, a look similar to the one Jackie’s teacher had when she was waiting for students to answer questions, to demonstrate how much she had taught them. Eugene bowed his head, and his fine hair lifted up in the wind around the combine’s flywheels. Something fluttered inside Jackie. He thought of the way his hip sometimes ached in the night, and he longed for someone to make it stop. He couldn’t keep himself from tipping his own head down until it touched Eugene’s. Jackie felt Eugene’s silky hair on his forehead, and he thought it the most delightful sensation, the soft tickle of that wispy hair.
“I’m sorry I pushed you down,” Eugene said. “That last day of school.”
“I shouldn’t have done your voice,” said Jackie. “That was mean.”
They stood there in the shadow, their heads nuzzling the way Jackie had often seen newborn calves rubbing along their mothers’ flanks. He worked up the courage to ask Eugene the question that had been puzzling him all summer. “How come you kissed me?”
“There’s all kinds of mean.” Eugene’s voice was a hoarse whisper. “We know it, don’t we? You and me.”
“Yes,” Jackie said. “We know it.”
Then the tractor’s throttle fell back,
and the combine’s flywheels stopped spinning. The quiet startled him. His father called his name. He drew his hand away from Eugene’s wound, and, calling, “Here I am,” he ran out into the light.
That evening, after his mother had finished washing dishes, Jackie tried to tell her about the welts on Eugene’s legs. But before he could speak, something about the way the light came into the house—a muted light just before dusk—and the way his mother moved about the kitchen, slow and dreamy, mesmerized him, and he couldn’t speak.
She untied her apron and hung it on the hook inside the pantry door. She hadn’t yet turned on a light. The white curtains at the kitchen window lifted with the breeze, and Jackie smelled the grapes in the arbor, the one his father had kept alive during the drought by hauling river water from Vincennes. The grapes’ perfume was splendid, as was the cooing of the mourning doves gathered in the lane and the three-note call of the whippoorwill somewhere far back in the woods.
“Well, Mr. Jackie,” his mother said, “another day.”
“Another dollar,” he told her, which was what his father sometimes said.
She polished the faucet until it gleamed. “Oh, dumpling,” she said. “Let’s not think of your father’s nasty business just now.”
A radio sat on the counter. She switched it on and the gentle strains of dance music drifted into the room.
“That’s ‘You Belong to Me.’” She closed her eyes and swayed her head. “‘See the pyramids along the Nile.’” She sang along. “Come on, Jackie. Dance with me.”
It was the most extraordinary thing—to be moving with his mother across the floor. He followed her lead, listened to her humming along with the song. For the first time ever, he felt graceful. “You’re really very light on your feet,” his mother told him. He could smell the lemony scent of the dish detergent still on her hands. “You’re a regular Fred Astaire.” Then the radio went dead. “We must have blown a fuse.” She sighed. “Oh dear.”