Collected Stories of Reynolds Price

by Reynolds Price

  I bonged like a fight-bell, to start his next round.

  He scrambled for the cab.

  I followed, on my side’to keep the girl inside and on her way home (was it her home? was her husband one of those that had gone for the radio?); to preserve Blix’s sense of donating help; changing lives; to avoid solitude. Those were reasons I gave myself anyhow as we drove on south toward Dora’s truck and whosever home.

  A mile from town, houses thinned, all but vanished for miles. We might have been rammed down some time funnel to Judaea, first century—sudden small hills, tan and gray, clumped with low growth (pinyon, sage, juniper), still scattered with snow that had lasted the day and a few lambs scrounging. If I’d seen on my right, in the gap between hills, thirteen shaggy men in dirty robes, wet sandals, with cold horny feet, trudging up with staves for an afternoon rest-and-homily, I’d have thought it only right—as natural, as naturally produced by the place, as the dark kids (Navajo? Mexican?) who’d begun appearing now, home from school, along the road, checking rusty mail boxes set a tenth of a mile before tarpaper shacks, occasional hogans. Two Indian boys, eight and nine, were being met as they walked up a gully toward their hogan by a brother, age four or five, grim as Polyneices with a plastic bow and arrow aimed at their hearts. All among litter. Now that dwellings had begun again, however sparsely, the hills showed litter wherever snow had melted. Nothing native or exotic, nothing blessedly organic that would silently rot but good immortal American litter—fuchsia hairspray cans, wine bottles, white plastic jugs that will outlast Mount Rushmore. All as clear in this light, as equally near, as in noondrenched Di Chiricos or prisoners under question.

  Odd, I thought—the sun was low now, coming from my side—four-thirty, five—and the light was thin and watery. Thin as the air—that would be it; the thinness yielded clarity. Objects hurtled freely toward me through the thinning air, their images at least. We were rapidly climbing. My lungs and my heart seemed suddenly to have new floors, half higher than usual. I’d try for deep breaths, the release of a yawn (I’d slept very little); but depths were not there. I was breathing all right—with Blix and Dora by me, still no sense of shortage—but I felt like a castaway, living on his muscle, no fat, no reserve, hands-onledge department. To comfort myself and to show I’d survived our confrontation, I asked Blix “What’s our altitude?”

  “No idea,” he said.

  “Do you?” I said to Dora.

  She shook her head. “I don’t live here.”

  Blix said “Your grandma does.”

  “Yep. I hadn’t been up here since I was young. “

  Blix chose to make it some sort of last straw. Facing the road, he clenched his teeth and showed them; then he said “Why?”

  Dora looked to him but didn’t answer.

  I wondered if, again, some taboo were involved (Navajo men mustn’t see their mothers-in-law; may children see their grandmothers?) and I watched Dora closely.

  She was neither tense nor smiling—no signal yet of outburst. Her face (the quarter I could clearly see) was an image of patient curiosity—why ask that of me? why be who you are? She couldn’t turn Blix.

  Still not looking, he said “You speak English?”

  She nodded Yes.

  “Then I asked you a question.”

  Patience again, but twitches of baffled apprehension now.

  “How come you’ve never been up here to your grandma’s but are making me go?”

  “You’re helping me,” she said.

  “’In strange territory, with mud waistdeep, that you’ve never seen before?”

  “I never wanted to see it.”

  Blix considered, took nearly a minute. “Maybe you’ll get your wish. Maybe we’ll never get there. Or if we do, maybe you’ll just see it this once.”

  Dora understood what I’d already refused to believe he meant. She said “You think I’m dying.”

  He’d had time for regret, hadn’t meant her to read him so thoroughly. “You told me what the doctors said.”

  “And you think that’s true? You think they know? They don’t know—because I never did tell them.”

  Blix said “Tell them what?”-his pressure leaking.

  “—What’s wrong with me, the reason my arms go dead and I faint.”

  He said “Tell me.”

  “A snake. I touched it.”

  Blix and I smiled simultaneously.

  She struck his shoulder with her clenched right hand. “You listen. It’s the truth. When I went to school, about eight years ago, we had this teacher—a man named Simmons—and everybody say they’re scared of snakes. So one day he come into school with a snake—live and moving—and all the other kids, they jump back scared. But he say, ‘No, it won’t hurt nobody but rats and prairie dogs’ and he say ain’t nobody brave enough to touch him? So I say yes. All the other kids yelling at me—‘Don’t touch no snake!’ But I been brave so I walk up and he hold it out between his hands, and I rub it one time. Then he say to me ‘Hold it,’ and he hand it to me, so I take it and hold it. It’s so strong in my hands, I can feel it living but I never been scared. Everybody else real quiet now. It was real dry. Then I hand him back and I go sit down. Everybody tell me, coming home, that I’ll get sick and I’m still not scared. But I got sick. You know how?—like now, fainting, falling down, my arms going dead. I was real bad sick and nobody knew why since I wouldn’t tell them; but my mama get a man and he come and sing all night and all day and—you know what?—I don’t tell him neither, but he pull a snake right out of my arm. That morning. And I was better. That’s all that’s wrong with me.”

  She had transformed, telling it—from her prior sealed silly petulant self to something not larger but harder, lighter, radiating faith in the simple lies that would not slow her death. She looked on at Blix’s profile a silent moment, then faced the road.

  He said, “Well, I’m glad. Glad you know.” No irony, no pity.

  He’s abandoned her, was what I knew next. He’s left her to die—her face ten inches from him, her thigh touching his; she’s farther away than if he’d never come, never borrowed her narrow but deep resources. So I took her part—again, remember. My whole addled heart flowed across to her now. She was not of course looking. I saw her as the lady in Dickinson’s poem—

  Because I could not stop for Death—

  He kindly stopped for me—

  and merely to companion her, this moment on her trip, I said (aloud, calmly), “Here’s all that’s wrong with me.”

  Blix was first to turn—long enough to swerve the truck; I could hear our drunks tumbling.

  Dora listened, not turning.

  I knew she listened. I said it for her. “I am left alone because I wanted to be.”

  She still didn’t turn. She had not understood.

  Neither had Blix but he wouldn’t rest in that. He said, “Did you really want it badly as that?”

  Dora looked on at her own hands, flat on her flanks, and began to move her fingers as though playing some tune, some instrument. Random, atonal—her own “Sugar-time”?

  The clear revelation, as though her hands made signals—that not only did she not follow me or Blix but was already bored and had lapsed into music not misery—came to me as comic, exhilarating. After years apart, after life-between-the-eyes, still we were talking like college roommates—or (better) like ladies in late-Henry James, hieratic, oracular, lethally threatening, playing slow holy tennis in their heavy silent skirts. And that quick vision produced another—or a feeling not a picture. The ballooning of pleasure in my belly, chest, throat—astounding (in me, after these weeks, months) as grace descending on me in the beak of a dove. No sense of its cause or source till I spoke—my answer to Blix produced as the crest of the rise reached my lips-“Yes, what I wanted.” I had not known that. But finding it now and saying it aloud—in a snow-covered desert with dusk coming on, to a truckload of cripples—I looked again to Dora, in hopes that she still would not understand.


  Her fingers played on, a little slower than before and her eyes watched them. If she’d followed a word of what was said or meant, it had done nothing to her. Surely she’d heard—seen!—every day speeches, acts, that would shrink my pleasure to tepid tameness.

  It was Blix I had struck. I could see it in his side face—tight again, bluish—though the truck required his energy just then. Having come maybe twenty miles south of Gallup on the narrow paved road, he was turning right now—at Dora’s signal—onto what seemed a ten-footwide dirt track, deeper in mud than the one to Atso’s.

  I thought at once of boyhood newsreels—the Second War, halftracks mired to the axles in French or German mud, bone-tired dogfaces sunk to the calves in its loud cold clasp.

  Blix had turned too fast and, in the first few yards, had to jockey furiously to hold us in the road—the single set of ruts from the last mad truck that seemed our only hope of continuing. But when he’d saved us from ditching and slowed to a crawl and shifted into fourwheel drive, he could speak-he’d saved it for us through his little crisis—“What’s wrong with me—why I’m in this fix, where I’m here today in mud thick as shit—is I can’t believe there are people like you.”

  I said, “Is your pronoun singular or plural?”

  He said “Meaning what?”

  “—Meaning me alone, as a single monster, or Dora and me?”

  He drove a little more—or his hands rode the wheel; the truck seemed safely locked in its ruts. Then he said “Plural.”

  “There are,” I said. “Touch us and see.” I held out my hand, palm down, across Dora. Rough as the ride was, it hung there steady.

  He had the guts to do it—the stagey guts. He let me wait suspended as his free hand moved to Dora’s arm (but cloth not skin); then he moved for mine and, watching the road, covered and pressed it with his own strong fingers as though really confirming.

  He held for so long that I felt how much colder he was than I, felt my warmth passing toward him, and rolled from his grip. I said, “Careful, but I feel my power leave me.”

  “Jesus,” he said and before I could wonder (was he joining my joke—one more rally in our match—or was he further appalled?), he had lost control (or obeyed the track and the Great Sky-Pilot) and sunk us in the ditch. We were listing heavily leftward, unsavable clearly; but he gunned the gas in a try to blast us free. The drunks were hobbling like empty hogsheads. Only when we’d plowed twenty yards up the ditch—deeper each yard—did he stop, kill the engine and sit a moment, silent.

  Dora and I were also silent, as though at the shrine to a fallen hero. I thought one thing—“I didn’t buy boots; I am in suede shoes.”

  Then Blix said “Beg my pardon.”

  I thought he’d slipped, had meant to beg ours so I said “Of course.”

  “No, do, please,” he said. He lowered his head almost to the wheel.

  Dora looked to me and nodded in confirmation—we were back on ground she could recognize.

  “I am Prince of Darkness, then,” I said. “Now you know. Don’t hold it against me.”

  Blix shook his head. “I do.”

  But by then the drunks were bailing out in back; their girl was wailing.

  I turned, before Blix, and could see the two men already on the ground, the girl starting down. “We’re ditching our ballast anyhow,” I said.

  Blix didn’t answer but opened his door and stood on the little ledge and said to the men “Just wait.” Then he leapt far out, across the ditch to the low snowy shoulder and looked down from there at the truck, the buried wheels, not at me or Dora (now the least of his problems).

  Dora turned to him though and slid into his place behind the wheel.

  I said to the back of her head “What now?”

  She looked back quickly and gave a short giggle, her first for hours. Then she slid across the seat to Blix’s door and—with no hesitation, barely looking as she went—she jumped up toward him and landed in soft snow; her sneakers sank to the ankles at once.

  My being the monster permitted me to hold my own inside, warm and dry anyhow, till word to abandon ship. I did lean across and say to Blix, “I’ll drive if you’ll push.”

  He took it calmly—someone would have to drive; someone had volunteered—and nodded, not looking. Then he said to Dora, “Whoever they are, tell the girl just to wait.”

  Dora said “She won’t listen.”

  Blix said, “Tell her anyhow; then they can’t blame me.”

  Dora shrugged and went.

  Then one of the men, the smallest, came up, mud already to his knees, and said “You ain’t going to move.”

  Blix took it as offered, as fact, delivered calmly, disaster number soand-so; and he clearly believed it. But he said, “Yes I am. I got chains in back.”

  “How you going to put them on?”

  Blix said, “On my hands and knees in the mud” and walked back to start.

  I suddenly thought, “I am at their mercy. Again I have volunteered to be at the mercy of incompetents who can harm me, ruin me. Why? Blix asked me ‘What next?’ and has made me see the answer—to be free in my own life, free not to volunteer for work I neither need nor want, free not to yield again to Love the Great Occupation, TimePasser, Killer. Free to say ‘So what?’ to everything but food and air. Yet now he has wrecked me in a desert mudhole with night coming down, the air cold and thin, my only hope for rescue three drunk Indians, one that’s turning to stone and a social worker with his head up his ass about six light-years.” I knew of course there was no real danger. We were hardly more than two miles off the highway. If we were firmly stuck, if worse came to worst, we could simply walk out and hitch a lift to Gallup and thence, by bus, to Dunder (and my rented car, and home)—providing the Indians stayed drunk and docile, didn’t kill us for our cash. But what then? what next?—once home and free? At that, I felt as precious as uranium, made of energy, each cell an atom that could radiate, steady and generous, for years without visible exhaustion—the radiance of simple knowledge; of what I know, having had my life; the wasteless conversion of mass into power. Power for what?—further life and freedom. So I sat, a little huddled round myself as round a glow, while the truck rocked gently with shoulders from beneath and voices came to me in Navajo and English, exasperated, stripped of the upholstery of kindness—“Stand there, goddammit … Hold this, goddammit … Why dontcha put it here?” We were now, I thought, The Drones and the Mate—I the consort chosen (for qualities) and groomed for union, toward which I am borne through dangers and trials. Union with what?—that new life and work, my fresh rich chance, clear hope, ahead. If they rescue me now, award me survival.

  Blix jumped to the shoulder again, at my left—a mudbaby, frowning.

  I slid a little over and lowered the glass.

  He said, “Please crank it now and drive it slowly out.”

  “Why don’t you?” I said.

  “You’ll need me back here—need all three of us pushing. “

  I looked back at Dora and the one man in mud, then quickly through the window into the cab—the girl and the second man unconscious, flat-out. I’d need Blix there, as he’d said, so I nodded.

  “Drive slow and straight,” he said, “till the ditch goes shallow; then gun it out into the center ruts and keep moving slow. We’ll have to jump on.”

  I cranked, shifted gear, waited till Blix yelled “OK” from the back, then released the clutch slowly. The wheels spun once; then the chains gripped somehow and—heaved by three shoulders—I moved straight forward at my leftward-listing angle for maybe ten yards till the ditch, instead of shallowing, deepened. Or the mud did. I still moved, but slower; the list was increasing with every yard, the left wheels sinking. I’d gone twenty yards and I wanted to stop—I was wrecking us deeper than we’d been before; an axle would break—and I did raise my foot from the gas an instant.

  But Blix yelled “Go!”

  So I floored it and went, wallowing grandly—the drunk girl, the girl!—and the
truck saved itself. Or saved me maybe. The ditch never shallowed but, slowly, the wheels were grinding rightward; and I was borne out and up, across to the haven of the center ruts—Blix still close behind me, still yelling “Move!”

  I moved a little faster, feeling the sudden need to leave—leave the three rescuers, filthy, in my wake and flounder ahead (with my two oblivious drunks). Toward what though? So I slowed and, seeing I had reached a short level stretch at the crest of a rise, I stopped and waited.

  First to reach me was the man. Embarrassed by his speed, he looked back to Blix and laughed and said, “Him! You ought to hire him. He’ll get us there.” (I could hear Dora giggle.) Then he gave me a fumbling army salute, said “Pretty good all right!” and vanished toward the rear.

  Blix appeared and stood two steps away, looking.

  He of course said “Jesus.” Then “Hand me that towel.”

  I was still at the wheel, giddy from success and vision and the height; but I looked to the floor and saw a wadded towel. “It’s dirtier than you,” I said.

  “Most things are.”

  “I advise against it, Doc. Barely sterile,” I said.

  “Me neither,” he said. “But you’ll sterilize it. Just touch it once for me.”

  I took it up, held it a moment before me—Blix made a sizzling sound—then threw it out to him.

  Dora had come up and waited separate from Blix, but watching him. My wheels had spun mud into her face and hair; but—unlike Blix whose hands hung isolated beside him, untouchable—she seemed not to mind. Her hands touched her skirt. And she was breathing as though the air were sufficient, calm and thick. As though she were home, despite her denials.

  Blix scrubbed at his hands and wrists—his face was clean—then handed the towel to Dora and said to me “You did it.”

  “Black magic,” I said. “It was nothing, just my Powers.”

  He stepped toward me, not looking back to Dora, and said, “My thanks. Now see can your Powers get us all the way there, wherever there is.”

  I didn’t want to yield my grip on the wheel; but Blix had a foot on the running board already, scraping off mud. I hadn’t moved. Dora came to her door and climbed and entered.