Joanna felt a flush of anger that anyone would stand back to allow the elderly black man to carry such a burden. Mr. Jackson kept walking forward, seeming to her eyes almost compressed beneath the weight, his overalls sagging loose at his sides and down over his legs to his cracked and graying work shoes. His eyes within the wrinkled face met Joanna’s as he drew nearer to her, and Joanna saw that he understood she had been about to offer to carry the sack herself.
“No, miss, I got it,” he said, his voice showing a touch of strain.
Joanna started to protest, but then he was going past her and she moved out of the way lest she somehow knock him from his feet—then she was almost sent to the floor herself as the man trailing him ran directly into her instead. His hand closed around her upper arm, hurting her as his fingers dug into her flesh, but he kept her on her feet. Joanna looked up, finding gray eyes only barely touch on her before he released her and continued to follow the elderly man toward the front of the Feed and Seed.
Joanna rubbed at her upper arm, feeling the grip of the man’s fingers still on her skin, and knowing there would be a bruise there by the morning. She watched the man as he followed Thomas Jackson and his burden through the store, thinking that he had not said: “Excuse me,” or “I’m sorry,” or “I didn’t see you standing there”—then she told herself it was unreasonable to expect decent behavior from someone who would let an old man pick up and carry a burden so heavy.
And she knew that this had to be the driver of the red convertible blocking the steps outside, the red convertible with its open men’s magazine and its several boxes of condoms in plain view on the front seat.
Joanna stared at the man as he watched old Mr. Jackson set the dog ration down on the wooden floor before the counter, noting muscular legs below khaki shorts, a tan that she knew did not come from work in the sun, and a neat Polo shirt tucked in at a leather belt that had probably cost more than Joanna Sanders Lee had ever spent for an item of clothing in all her life.
“Joanna—” she heard, but did not turn for a moment. “Joanna—” her grandfather said for the second time, and Joanna at last turned to find her grandfather’s fading green eyes staring at her from only a few feet away.
“Yes, Grandpa?” she asked, bringing her mind back to the moment and to the reason she had come here to the Feed and Seed.
“Mr. Abernathy said you can move th’ truck on around back t’ load th’ chicken feed.”
Joanna nodded and started through the store, walking past the men at the front counter as the tall man shoved a thick wallet back into one rear pocket of his khaki shorts, then bent and easily hefted the fifty-pound sack of dog ration onto one shoulder.
She was just getting into the old Ford truck when she heard the blast of a car horn from up the street, followed by a derisive shout in a teenaged male voice.
Joanna looked back to see the driver’s side door of the red convertible open out in the way of an old pickup that had already swerved to avoid it. A boy was hanging out the open passenger side window, the middle finger of his right hand raised at the tall man standing by the convertible. Joanna could see the look of anger on the man’s face as he threw the sack of dog feed over onto the back seat and started to get into the vehicle—then he shot back up and half-out of the convertible with a curse as his bare legs came into contact with the leather seats that had been baking in the Alabama sun. Joanna laughed aloud, unable to stop herself.
The man heard her and was staring at her now, but Joanna did not care. She had little sympathy for someone who so obviously had more money than he had common decency, especially when that person had just gotten a little something of what the world usually gave so freely to everyone else.
The man was still staring a moment later when she glanced into the truck’s side mirror before pulling out into traffic.
19
Saturday night was the worst night for being alone. Joanna sat that following Saturday night in the living room, pushing the buttons on the remote control, watching channels flip by on the television, not pausing at any of them long enough to really have an idea as to what was playing.
Her parents had driven to Anniston for the evening, and Katie was asleep. The little girl had been curled on her side with her teddy bear dangling from one small hand off the edge of the bed when Joanna checked on her earlier. Joanna had rescued Teddy from the imminent fall, had snuggled him against Katie and placed the little girl’s arms around him again where he would hopefully remain safe—Katie had not even moved in her sleep, causing her mother to stand and watch her for quite some time, wondering what it felt like to sleep so soundly, so peacefully, so without worry.
Joanna had done nothing herself but worry since she had moved back home.
She finally shut the television off and moved to the shelf of books across the room. She could hear the steady faint screaking of the porch swing through the open front windows, along with her grandparents’ soft voices there on the porch, though she could not understand what they were saying. Neither had turned on the porch light when they went outside earlier, though it had been growing dark even then. They wanted to be alone, and being alone could sometimes be difficult here in this house where so many other people lived.
On the other hand, being alone was something Joanna herself could not seem to avoid, especially on Saturday nights.
She ran her hand over the spines of books on the shelf there at eye level—Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre, The Great Gatsby, Great Expectations, so many others—she had read them all, quite a few several times, and could not bring herself tonight to choose one to begin again. People were in love in almost every book that her eyes touched on. Oh, they might destroy themselves and each other and a few other people in the bargain, but they were in love.
Even make-believe people did not have to be alone, she told herself, or at least they were not alone unless there were some defect in their character, some wrong choice taken that would destroy them in the end.
Like Heathcliff. Or Jay Gatsby. Or even Mr. Rochester before Jane had taken pity on him. At least it was usually men who were alone in books—but then she thought of Miss Haversham haunting her halls in her rotting wedding gown, and that brought to mind the bad choices that Joanna herself had made.
But without those bad choices, Katie would not be here now.
And being alone was far better than being with Dwight Lee.
She cleared her throat loudly and moved toward the front door, stopping to rattle the interior handle of the storm door deliberately before she unlatched it and pushed it open. Her grandparents were swinging slowly in the darkness when she stepped out on the porch, and Joanna wondered what it was that she had thought she would find them doing. They were both in their seventies now, she reminded herself, and had to be beyond all that.
“I thought I would drive into town. Would you mind listening for Katie? She’s sound asleep,” Joanna asked, sliding her hands back into the rear pockets of her jeans with her elbows canted outward as she stared across the porch to where they sat side-by-side. They were holding hands, their fingers intertwined and their hands resting against the light-colored fabric of her grandma’s dress. It was cute, and it said so much, for them to have been married for well over half a century and to still hold hands in the darkness.
People didn’t stay together like that anymore, Joanna told herself. The world was too hard a place for things to last nowadays.
“It’s late t’—” her grandpa began, but Joanna could see Grandma press her elbow into his ribs, silencing his words and bringing his eyes to her as Grandma finished for him instead.
“You go on. We’ll listen for Katie.”
They were just getting up from the porch swing when she came back out of the house with the strap of her purse over her right shoulder and the keys to the old Ford truck in one hand. Her own car was almost out of gas, and the old truck had at least ha
lf a tank. Besides, the truck was blocking her car, and it made more sense to drive it than move it simply to get her own car out.
She watched as her grandpa took a step, and then another, clearly favoring his bad hip as he always did after having been still for a time, his right hand holding securely to the crook of his walking stick.
“I didn’t mean to make you go in,” she said.
“We was about t’ come in anyway,” Grandpa said.
Grandma opened the door for him and held it while Joanna went down off the porch and started across the yard toward the old truck.
“You be careful,” Janson Sanders said.
Joanna smiled to herself. It was the same thing he said each time she left the house since the day she had first begun to drive alone at the age of sixteen.
It was good to be away from the house, driving alone in the darkness with the windows down and the wind blowing her hair. Joanna knew it would be a mess to comb out when she got home later, but that did not matter to her for the moment. Just having the freedom and the familiar noise and rattle within the cab of the truck was all she wanted.
For once she was not worrying about the land. For once she was not thinking about what would happen if God did not bring them rain—and a miracle as well if He could spare one. Lights were on in houses she passed, and once she heard loud rap music from a car sitting in a drive—but mostly there was just the noise of the truck, the force of the wind against the palm of her hand when she held it up outside the window, and being alone for a time.
That feeling of solitude lessened as she reached the highway that skirted town. Both the Kmart and Winn-Dixie were open, as well as Harco Drugs, and cars and trucks were pulling in or out of each parking lot that she passed. She waited at the red light where the highway crossed Main Street, then made the turn to drive down through the heart of downtown.
The volume of traffic thinned considerably as she left the highway. There were a few vehicles moving down Main Street, teenagers cruising on a Saturday night, but Joanna paid little attention to any of them as she drove down through town and out to the small shopping center just past the cluster of stores that were the dying heart of the town. She pulled into the parking lot of Allstate and circled around slowly, then drew back up to sit for a minute at the edge of the parking area to watch the cars go by before pulling back out to start up Main Street again.
After the loop through downtown, she came back to the bypass and pulled into the parking lot of McDonald’s. She shut off the lights and killed the engine, then sat for a moment while she listened to the motor cough and sputter before it at last understood that it was time to die.
Lights washed over her from a car as it pulled into the lot and then into a space near hers. She took up her purse and got out of the truck—she was accomplishing nothing by just sitting there, she told herself as she slammed the door. She felt as if she ought to be doing something, although going into McDonald’s seemed a little enough accomplishment.
She started across the parking lot, not having bothered to roll up either of the truck windows or to lock the doors, though she had at least thought to take the key from the ignition. She was fishing in her purse as she neared the sidewalk and the lighted windows of the restaurant, wanting to make certain that she had at least some change, for she did not want to order a Coke only to find that she had no money with her—but the purse was suddenly gone from her shoulder, her hands missing it an instant before it hit the pavement of the parking lot and her checkbook and the truck keys spilling from it. She bent to pick it up, but felt a touch just below her sleeve, then fingers closing around her upper arm as she was drawn up short.
She started, fear changing to rage in an instant as the thought came to her that whoever had knocked her purse from her shoulder had to be a teenage boy who had mistaken her for some high school girl—but the eyes she looked up into were of a man who was vaguely familiar. For a moment she did not know how she knew him—and then she did, instantly jerking her arm free to take a step back and stare up at the man who had allowed old Mr. Jackson to carry a heavy sack in the Feed and Seed two days ago.
“Aren’t you a little old to be knocking someone’s purse from her shoulder to get her attention?” Joanna asked. She could see the red convertible now, parked nose-in one space from her pickup, and this man, in expensive blue jeans and a tee-shirt with a crimson curve of letters spelling out “Alabama” over one breast pocket. Cowboy boots that she could tell even in the darkness did not have one crease of character or one scuff over their surface completed the picture. He was trying to look like he belonged here, she told herself, trying to look like he was just anybody—next he would trade the red convertible in for an expensive pickup truck hoisted up on big mud tires. He probably had no idea even what the crimson “Alabama” on his shirt meant, any more than he would know what “War Eagle” in orange and blue stood for either, for they would be nothing but a fashion statement to someone like him.
This man belonged in Pine, Alabama, about as much as he belonged driving a dirty pickup truck hauling hay down a country road.
“I had no intention of knocking your purse from your shoulder,” he said, seeming almost angry that she had spoken, although he had been the one who had stopped her, ostensibly to speak. She could only infer that—as lowly as she must be in the eyes of someone such as this—he did not think she should have been the first to speak. What else could she imagine of someone who would let an old man carry a sack of feed that had to weigh almost half as much as himself. The stranger stooped to retrieve her purse, checkbook, and keys, but she bent after them herself, moving to avoid having her head collide with his in the process. He had to be close to a foot taller than she, and she could just see herself being knocked to the pavement if their heads bumped, and she could not bear the thought of him trying to help her to her feet if it should happen.
He had retrieved her keys before she could stop him, and, after she stood and shoved her checkbook back into her purse, she found herself having to accept them from him as he held them out. She did not say “thank you”—but then he had not said “sorry” for knocking her purse from her shoulder, or even “excuse me” when he had bumped her in the Feed and Seed, either.
She found herself wiping the keys, ring and all, down along the leg of her Levis once she had them in her hand, until it occurred to her that the pavement would not have gotten them all that dirty.
Then she realized she was wiping them off because he had held them in his hand, and she made herself stop.
“Did you want something?” she asked, dropping the keys into her purse and zipping it with a quick and satisfying sound of finality.
He looked at her with dark eyes that she knew were gray from the brief encounter in the Feed and Seed, thick brown hair that waved uncontrollably from the most current men’s hair style, broad shoulders and a build that made him look as if he worked out. He could have been a model for GQ, she thought. But GQ was not even the sort of magazine this man bought, she reminded herself, taking another step back from him and crossing her arms before her chest, safeguarding her purse strap in the opposite hand just within the crook of her arm.
“Well?” she asked.
“You laughed at me,” he said at last, in a deep voice that sounded oddly petulant from this big man.
Joanna opened her mouth to respond, but was unable to think of anything to say. It was so childish and stupid a remark that there seemed no worded response within her. She laughed instead, then watched a look of absolute rage come to his face.
“I’m sure you’ve been laughed at before,” she said, unable to stop herself.
“Not by someone like you.”
That silenced her as assuredly as a slap. She stared back, rage filling her this time. “Is that why you stopped me, knocked my purse off my shoulder, just so you can insult me?”
“You laughed at me,” he said again,
as if that explained the entire confrontation, and why it was that she was standing here in the McDonald’s parking lot on a Saturday night talking to a man she already knew without a doubt that she did not like.
Then he seemed to reform the statement, as if making it into the question he had intended to ask the entire time.
“Why did you laugh at me?”
“Why not?”
“You shouldn’t laugh at other people.”
“And you shouldn’t allow old men to carry something that weighs almost as much as them, either.”
He surprised her as he seemed almost to relax, as if that explained why she had laughed at him in the first place.
“I didn’t ‘allow’ him to carry it. I said something, and then I couldn’t stop him—” But he did not finish. He stared at her instead.
“You insulted Mr. Jackson, too, then,” Joanna said, certain of it.
“Mr. Jackson?”
“The elderly man who carried your dog feed for you? The elderly man you followed through the store?—someone like him would have a name, you know, just like someone like me would.” This man’s absolute dismissal of the remainder of the world outside himself made her madder than anything else about him so far.
“So what is your name?”
She had not expected him to ask. “None of your business,” she said, knowing it was childish even as she said the words. She turned away from him and started toward the restaurant, seeing the sidewalk just in time to step up to keep from falling over the curbing that fronted it. She forcefully regained her composure, realizing how close she had come to sprawling to her knees before this man right there on the sidewalk.
There Is a River Page 21