Collected Stories of Reynolds Price

by Reynolds Price

  He didn’t ask (has he really forgot or does he not want to know?); but to give him the chance, I rode in silence; and when he did speak, it was now, at last, to include me in his purpose, his new grip on life, his charity (I am not ironic; I’m seriously needy). He said my name—which in itself startled me (he’d not said it before, I realized; eight months with the Navajo and he had their fear of using any man’s name).

  I faced him across the long empty space.

  But he faced the road—or the track he was struggling to lay through mire—and said, “Do you want me to ask you any questions?” (He only possessed the barest facts, from my last letter to him.)

  I said, “Ask. I’ll answer some. Some I won’t know. Some I’m not up to tackling. “

  If he’d had questions ready, that threw him into silence. Or maybe it was only his struggle with the mud.

  So I turned from him and tried to watch the famous scenery. Surely solace waited there for the lacerated spirit? Rainbow colors; stones, even plants, the shape of the light; God’s imagination pressed by the local conditions (self-imposed in His case) to an effort, say, as total in its perverse triumph over limitations as Michelangelo’s on the Sistine’s architecture, Beethoven’s over the human voice. (Lesson: I could do it too. Question: Why should I?)

  Blix had found his tongue—ithyphallic in tension—“How alone do you feel?”

  Long as I’ve known him, I wouldn’t have given him credit for that much-to rock me off-balance with the Compassionate Unexpected, verbal Pentothal. I found of course that I welcomed the dose and without calculation, said, “Fairly completely. But I don’t much mind. That’s hardly recent.”

  Blix nodded. “No company?”

  I said, “Aunts and uncles, a few colleagues, neighbors with casseroles”—then realized he was on detective duty: was adultery at the bottom? catting round again? So I said, “But no, less company than you’ve got here, by one precisely.”

  He smiled—on my side of his face at least—at the puncture of his tactic. Then he struck for the heart. “What was it about?”

  My sources on suicide are not entirely limited to the Navajo overview. Masochistic as it’s been, the books I left behind on the bedside table were Durkheim’s Suicide and Menninger’s Man Against Himself. So I gave the readiest answer—“She wanted to kill somebody, she chose herself, and—the key to her success was—she also wanted to die. Hence the pistol—rare for women.”

  He said “That’s what you believe?”

  I said “You know it’s not.”

  “Had she warned you ever?”

  “From the day I met her. She’d been issuing warnings since she learned to talk, since she learned to move (eyes, hands)—she never spoke them.”

  “Did she leave a note?” he said.

  “Not to me. Not a word.”

  “To anybody else?”

  “If so, they haven’t told me.”

  He said “That’s something.”

  “How?”

  “What’s not written is easier forgot.”

  I said “Think again.”

  He said “OK,” which I took for kindness; but after the last few yards of mud, the highway regained, the grind of the four-wheel drive reduced, he said “What comes next?”

  “In what?” I said—“this day, this conversation?”

  “Your life,” he said.

  It issued, ruptured. I regretted every syllable that rushed my teeth—“Are you the man to ask that?—Mr. Ambition, Clear-Sight, Dr. Steady-Aim?”

  He was quick but calm. “No, but you’re here. You’ve always been aimed before; God knows, on-target far more times than me—”

  “Block your metaphor,” I said. “The target succumbed. But I know, Blix; I’m sorry. I’m just treading water—no signs in the sea.”

  “You’ll make it,” he said. As though it were a fact as dry and indisputable as a grain of rice.

  Blix has such impeccable credentials as a man whose lips never touched a lie that I had to say “What makes you sure?”

  For the moment, his tone (still loose in the truck), his unsmiling profile seemed to promise a chart, a followable plan which he now possessed and offered to give. But he said, “Because it’s all you’ve wanted.”

  “What’s it?” I asked.

  “To be scraped, like you are, bare—owing nobody life, help or any piece of you. Did you ever come for her, ever donate that much?—a teaspoon as rich as Eagle-Brand milk of all your precious life-codes treading cream? Or is that secret too?—being saved for who?”

  I said, “Who do you suggest? Name somebody—Dora?”

  “Good as any,” Blix said. “Take her—my blessing. She’ll be ready when we round this curve right here. Look up on the left, any second now! Just say ‘Dora, follow me’ and she’ll follow, forever. No wait—no going home to get the kids or say goodbye, no toothbrush to pack. And a taboo on suicide—of course, she’s petrifying.”

  I said “Stop.” I meant the truck—stop and let me out. I would walk to my car and head for home.

  But Blix thought I meant his speech and did stop that, as we rounded his curve on Dora, ready.

  I dreaded that he might pursue his urging in Dora’s presence—be converted, by his own life and the nearness of mine, to monstrosity.

  He stopped in the mud by the gas pump however and, as Dora came toward us, said quietly “Just a minute.” He got down and said four words to her, then went to the back to pump his own gas.

  Dora opened the driver’s door and climbed up the high step to sit beside me—so close (already, with Blix not there to crowd us) that I had a quick thought of contagion—she’d infect me—and pressed against my door.

  But she said “We got help” and pointed out the window at a knot of people advancing on the truck—four Indian men, all five-foot six, all in khaki pants, not a coat among them (white and blue shirtsleeves) and a single woman (more nearly a girl) in a Pendleton blanket, machinemade, green, dirty and hideous. The men walked in mud as though it were pavement (or familiar at least, if miserable); the girl lurched.

  I asked “Who are they?” and turned to look through the small rear window into the tarpaulined truck-bed where they hoisted and jerked and shunted one another.

  Dora said “My brothers.”

  I could see the girl groping at a man’s hip pocket for a bottle, and the bottle’s label as she seized it, studied it a moment—LAIRD’S STRAIGHT APPLE BRANDY. “Who’s the girl?” I asked.

  Dora said “Somebody’s wife.”

  I stared on backwards—which poor somebody? The girl had leaned against the rear of the cab and was sucking off a good inch of brandy, raw. She’d have emptied it—and still been unappeased; a face like a gully, that famished and demanding—if the man who seemed to own it hadn’t wrenched it down from her. The bottle socked her teeth; I heard it through plate glass. The other three men laughed; the girl bawled and rocked in misery.

  I asked, “What help are they going to be?”

  Still not looking, Dora smiled. “They’re strong. And they want to go home.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “Up where my truck was trying to go—my grandma’s; there.” She pointed rightward, across the highway toward the line of low hills in middle distance, pink where the sun had begun stripping snow.

  “Why are they down here, then?”

  “Looking round.”

  Blix opened his door, climbed in and sat. He cranked, then said—toward the glass but to Dora—“This is our help?”

  “Yep.” She smiled.

  “The girl’s pregnant—right?”

  “I guess so—yep.”

  “God bless her,” he said and shifted into gear.

  “—Us,” I said. I was looking across Blix and Dora toward the store.

  A man had rushed out and was loping toward us—an Indian, tall, his white hair banded by a blue forehead rag in the old style, face all but bursting with barely held fury. Geronimo.

  Blix seeme
d not to notice and engaged the clutch.

  But Dora said “Wait; my daddy” and nodded.

  Blix looked, depressed his foot and waited, straining for calm but betraying fear—when the man had stopped a foot from the truck, a foot from Blix’s face, his windowglass was still tight shut.

  So the man simply waited, staring down.

  “Roll the glass,” Dora said.

  Blix rolled it down, took Badonie’s first look and tried the Navajo greeting (one of his three phrases)—“Yah-ta-hey.”

  Badonie said only “You going to Gallup?”

  Blix said “Yes—passing through.”

  Badonie stepped nearer—the last step available before cold steel—but turned his back and looked toward the store—a long wood bench bearing five old Indians, three women, two men. One man wore the old high-crowned black hat and held a pint-bottle, half-full on his knee. Two of the women watched it—its guardians or threats? The third woman—separate—watched the air before her, past us, the south hills. Among pure misery, she condensed a purer brand—no mixture, no compound: Silent Pain. Badonie faced Blix again and pointed toward her. “That old woman yonder has been waiting two days to go in to town. She been sick and her son-in-law—he’s a Navajo policeman—said he’d pick her up here and take her to the hospital. So she walked to here yesterday morning early—from way back that way, five or six miles—and he didn’t never come. She waited all night and all day today. He hadn’t never come.”

  It was offered as fact, with the veiled passivity of subject peoples. The Negroes of my childhood would come like that, to the backdoor at night, with some tale of woe—someone’s shot, cut, dying; then would stop and stand silent. You would think they were waiting, confident in the cunning of their desperation; but at bottom, they were not. They were calmly, utterly, hopeless. They had merely told the truth, had been impelled to come not so much in need or expectation of help as in the simple—simple!—wish to tell a story: This is what’s happening; I want you to know. Then if you acted—said “Climb in the car” or “I’ll get the doctor”—your act was accepted with, again, calm grace, not as due response but as miracle (miracles were not infrequent), a blessing detached.

  Badonie seemed now to stand like that—as the old woman sat—beyond hope or pride; and when Blix said “I’ll take her,” he said “OK” and, not going to her to help or explain, he called out to her in Navajo.

  In maybe ten seconds—the time it took to reach her—she stood and started toward us.

  Dora said, “Mae Clain. She just got rheumatism.”

  The woman was moving to the back of the truck; so Blix climbed down and said to Badonie, “Tell her to come up here.”

  He did and she came and—the two men standing back—she struggled up the step and onto the seat beside Dora, twelve inches from me. She at once faced forward—a face as text-book Indian as the Buffalo Nickel’s, seamed as skirts on Egyptian statues, the oiled black hair scraped tightly back (not a white strand in it) yet impossible to date. Sixty-five? Eighty-five? either or neither. Her only sound was shallow breath, labored from her climb; her only admission of kinship with us (even with Dora who touched her) was the high scary odor that leeched from her rapidly as hemorrhaging blood. Made of metal like us but an older grade whose hardness shames.

  Dora also didn’t speak or look—some clan taboo?—and when Blix remounted, neither did he. (I glanced quickly back—our helpers were oblivious, tussling round their bottle.) He looked out at Dora’s father still.

  Badonie said, “OK. You going to town?” He had never acknowledged Dora. She lived with him.

  “Now,” Blix said.

  “She got a daughter live in town somewhere”—he seemed to mean Mae Clain not Dora; but he gave no directions, again made no connection. He held up his hand to Blix’s open window, a little package in it. I could read the label—SKOAL WINTERGREEN FLAVORED CHEWING TOBACCO.

  Blix looked on a moment, then reached out, pinched a half-inch, stuffed it in his lower lip, said an awkward “Thank you” and we rolled away.

  Dora giggled through the first hundred yards.

  I had stopped guessing why—the source of the power of her unannounced swings from woe to mirth. Now that I knew she could not harm me—being worse off than I—I could witness her presence with nothing worse than boredom. But after ten or so silent miles—the heater working beautifully, Mae Clain’s odor taming—I wondered what we were, what this truckload constituted in the eye of God (or a thoughtful onlooker, possessed of the facts)? A Ship of Fools? Blind Leading the Blind? Wise and Foolish Virgins? Try it another way—who would be the ideal painter to paint us? Goya? (does one of us possess the dignity, the unworked stillness, to bathe the others in his idiot light?). Brueghel, surely. We are all lean enough. But what would Brueghel call it, what would be his allegory?—four drunk Indian men, one pregnant drunk squaw (all huddled in cold wind on the springs of a truck—the passengers) and we up front, the steerers (two sick Indian women, both abandoned by men; Blix and I). Name us, name us!

  We were in the hideous heart of Gallup (standard-American hideous—gas stations, burger stands, cat’s—cradles of wires, slush in gutters; its one unique feature, on every corner as invariable furniture or like berserk Christmas decorations, a Navajo couple, drunk, in velveteen, gorgeous silver and turquoise, haranguing each other in the hoarse voice of hatred—wide mouths, clenched fists); and I still couldn’t think what we were or where headed—The Lame Entering First? but entering what?

  We had turned south by then—HOSPITAL ONE MILE—when the old woman jerked forward, slapped the dashboard and croaked in Navajo.

  We were moving slowly—through small gray houses packed onto low hills—but Blix slowed more and asked Dora “What’s wrong?”

  “She say stop.”

  Blix pulled to the curb and stopped, looking forward.

  The woman was struggling to rise now—clawing at Dora, the dashboard, the seat, to exit on my side.

  Dora sat still, as though a cat were playing.

  Blix said, “Do me a favor—see what in God’s name’s happening.”

  Still not moving, not touching the woman, Dora said a short sentence.

  The woman let out a long ululation—a single syllable in the pit of her throat, surely no word—and again strained to stand.

  Dora was silent.

  Blix turned, laid one hand on the woman’s shoulder and said through clenched teeth, “Help out, for Christ’s sake.”

  Dora faced him and smiled. “What you need me for?”

  “I can’t turn her out here in the road. She’ll die. What the Hell is she after?”

  Dora said, “She say she got a daughter lives here. She’s going there now.”

  “Where, here on this street?”

  Dora said another sentence.

  The woman groaned again.

  Blix said “I’m helping you.”

  Dora said, “You can’t stop her. She know what she wants.”

  I knew Dora was right and reached for my door-handle to climb down and help the woman leave.

  Blix said to me “Sit still.”

  “She’s old enough to vote,” I said.

  “Oh Jesus,” Blix said.

  He had worked, I noticed, through the names of deity in an interesting order, impersonal to personal—God to Christ to Jesus. He was in personal need.

  He was looking now at me—first time in an hour—“Mr. Scorch,” he said. “Everything scorches in your little wake.”

  “Or stiffens,” I said.

  “Or bleeds.”

  “This woman’s got nothing but rheumatism; that’s not mortal.”

  “Try to understand. I work here. I’m responsible. I told Dora’s father I’d leave her with a doctor.”

  “Then do it,” I said. “She won’t jump out. Do it by all means if it’s for old Cochise, your friend at last, your chewing-tobacco pal.” I opened my door and slid down to the road.

  The old woman crawled over Dora in
an instant and, in two steps, joined me—or passed me, briskly, in her own direction.

  Until then, I hadn’t thought my way beyond freeing her; but the sight of her now—small and boned like a bird, consuming her freedom like a trail of suet laid suddenly before her—suggested again the simple solution: Leave; there are things you can spare yourself, you owe him nothing. I had turned her way, back away from the truck, and reached the tailgate (heading where? away) when Blix met me head-on, arriving from his side—and as two of the drunk men climbed out and strode off.

  Blix halted among his collapsing duties and said “Wait please” toward the farthest gone, the woman and the drunks.

  The two men stopped, faced round; but the woman never paused. (At the sight of Blix—dry-faced and pale—I’d been the first to wait.)

  He watched the woman for a moment, then abandoned her—what did it cost him? with what could he pay and whom? pay whom? He said to the men, “Are you helping us or not?”

  One of them took a few steps nearer. “We going to get my radio.”

  Blix said “I can’t wait.”

  The man considered, nodded.

  “How’ll you get home?”

  He pointed high, the way we were headed. “That ain’t my home,” he said and they left.

  Blix looked then to me and slapped his flanks in desperation. “—Mine neither,” he said and smiled.

  The drunk pregnant girl had one leg out the tailgate, struggling down.

  I pointed Blix to look and he took it by the ankle and firmly shoved her back—not a word. The skin of her thin leg had dried till it took his gesture like a slate—as she fell back howling, I could see he had written on her skin with his nail, a zagging white line, impossible to read. Blix scrubbed his hand.

  I said “What’s it mean?” and pointed to her marked leg, out of sight in the truck.

  Blix had not seen it. “Look. I’m fighting,” he said, “not explaining human life.”

  “Fighting what?”

  “To draw breath one more hour and unstick a truck worth two hundred dollars that may not be there when we get there.”