by Joy Williams
18
PHOENIX, ARIZ. (AP)
A collision with a horse as he drove home from the race track left L. J. Durousseau, the nation’s leading jockey, in critical condition today.
Deputies said the horse bolted into the path of Durousseau’s car during a rain storm. He swerved sharply, according to authorities, but was unable to miss the animal.
I am reading the newspaper and I start to cry. They have taken the man away now. His face was red, sealed and shimmering as though with the cellophane on a box of Valentine candy. The surfers are gone too, leaving a puddle of sea water behind them. Across the room are small signs. A piece of tooth flew through the air and struck my hair, I thought, but I have not been able to find it. And the tiles seemed trampled and discolored where they beat him, but I know that this is just a function of the surface of my eye.
The deputies have sent out for french fries and 7-Ups and I am crying on the newspaper sports section. I have not cried for so long, for so many years, that there seems something wrong with the way I am doing it. I used to think that loving and breathing and crying were things that you never lost the method of but this is just not so. There is nothing that cannot be forgotten and learned in a different way or never learned again.
Ruttkin, too, seems to think that I am not crying but am in the process of something else. He stands beside me and runs the tip of his finger around the neck of my sweater, picks up my wrists and regards my dirty ankles. He has learned this maybe by heeding Dick Tracy’s Crimestopper Notebook. He is looking for a chain, a disc, a tag.
“You ain’t an epileptic? You ain’t a diabetic?” Ruttkin is relaxed. On his knuckles are teeth marks. His shirt is wet where the black man has drooled. “The hospital,” he says, “says there ain’t a bit of change. You aren’t wanting to go over there, are you? If you want, I’ll take you but I’ll tell you about them hospitals, they don’t tell you a thing. You ask and they answer something that don’t make sense. Or they answer you something you never asked.”
I flap my hand vaguely at him. I want nothing in common with this man who is happy as though after a meal, who is showing his teeth at me in a commiserating grimace. I feel uneasily that his discoveries are the same as mine, that the methods he has chosen to get through the days, the weeks and into the years that he can put behind him are no different from my methods. The result’s the same—we trample people in the eagerness to get on with our dying. Yes. I know what he says is true. I cross my legs and kick him in the knee, still crying. He crazily apologizes. I don’t quite understand your question but whatever it is the answer is no. Yes. That’s the attitude. That’s the way of this world. The answers are all to something you’ve never even asked. Now Grady balked at this. Like some, he was more fortunate than most. When he wanted to know how to tune an engine, there were instructions for doing it. When he was young and wanted to shoot and sight and track, there were rules for that too and all he had to do was listen and learn them. He grew up trusting in the sanctity of the right reply. He was confident and hopeful and bright. And not without imagination. And honor. For when he found that I was going to have a baby, he kissed me gravely and married me in the afternoon. The ring was made of wood and too large for me. I packed blue tissue beneath it to keep it on my finger and when the tissue rotted, the ring fell away. I don’t know when but now it’s gone. Grady wouldn’t mind. He traced my thighs and the sockets of my eyes, he was so in love.
Every girl remembers her wedding day. Excuse me … I have a cold and my tongue is green from flavored throat lozenges. It is raining, the sky is almost black. There may be a tornado. As I run from the car, I slip on wet pine needles and fall, catching my hand on the barbed wire fence that separates the chapel from a field. It is auspicious for my hand doesn’t bleed. It lies snagged there as Grady helps me up but there is no blood and Grady laughs and kisses it and folds it up gently in his own hand. Gently, as though the hand had been severed, the ring, the marrying hand, and he were saving it, gently as though it were a wounded bird. There are big friendly mules in the field behind the fence and beside the chapel is the preacher’s pickup truck with a brace of shotguns hanging in the window rack. For everyone is a hunter here, even the meek; everyone is prepared here for something terrible coming out of the black hot southern afternoon that they will have to protect themselves against.
Yes, every girl remembers, but as for the ceremony itself … The words, I suppose, would be the same that Father used although Father would first teach that loving is good preparation for dying. I was the only one who learned this. Everyone else seemed uncomfortable at the thought. Perhaps they believed that loving was what made a happy life. And I often wonder what became of those who Father blessed …?
My eyes are breaking from this crying. Poor jockey Durousseau. I cry and cry. I sizzle and choke. A long time before this, in the time when I wept, I cried never for grief but from frustration. That had a pattern to it, a rise and fall, a stretch and slack, an end in sight, but this crying now can go on forever, like this day that goes on into continuing night. The land revenges itself upon us all, for I passed through that time as though through a dream, with no knowledge in my flesh of snowfall or handstroke, knowing nothing but dreaming those days in my head.
… We are going out for dinner. The Jaguar moves like a ghost through the dusk. A graven image, a negative, and us inside, leaning into the turns. Grady, my young man, all blond like wheat, takes the corner and falls out of love with me … love in his watchtower darkling and in ambush is stretching his deadly bow.
For it was clearly love, make no mistake, that met my yearning Grady on the curve. The falling hatchet loves the lamb and when bones ache, they ache for the breaking. It’s love that starves and makes us murderous. And it’s Father who is in the watchtower, watching from his steeple study through the snowy nights, with his hands folded across his eyes. I was so frozen, so embalmed then … I left, a pioneer with no tools for discovery, and not the sense to know that this made all the difference, traveling from the ice and cold and his abstraction into the South, the sun and reality. I was surprised at how easy it was at first. I developed a miming manner and was accepted everywhere. But all the while, he was knowing my life before I lived it, knowing that each step I took would only bring me home again. Oh yes, it was dark and obscure Father who struck my Grady down.
Grady was taken completely by surprise … His face didn’t change, nor the muscles in his throat or arms. He is a good boy. I could see his mind beating, like a yolk dropped too soon in formaldehyde. And now I keep answering but he never asks any more. If I had told him a lie, we could have lived it better than any truth, but he had made me feel so hopeful … He wasn’t afraid of anything. He was so ambitious then, and proud and confident. He thought that life was infinite and incredible and that for every question he might have, there would be an answer and the answer would be right.
Yes, Grady thought that there were only as many answers as there were questions in the world. He believed that, in the end, everything would come out in an implacable and just balance and pairing. Some things existed and some didn’t and he told me he could tell them apart. He couldn’t imagine there were people like me who had answers to questions no one would ever ask, that there were those who lived without a life, like moths without stomachs, lived for years with their lives beyond them someplace, dangling useless on a gallows.
In love, Grady wrapped himself around me like a twining vine. He didn’t know that I had an answer for which there was no question. And that one day I’d give it to him. Yes. The very worst kind.
I cry aloud. Poor Durousseau. The tears splash on the newspaper and on my hip-hugger pants. They are of some cheap shiny fabric and there are marks all over them … a perfect paw print from the dog, quite old, coffee and candle wax and now these stains. Nothing washes out, I’ve found. I do not follow racing any more, although as a child, I had memorized the names of every Derby winner. The jockeys never interested me. In the photogr
aphs, they had the smooth faces of dwarfs, tiny waists and wardrobes. I was a child. They reminded me of evil playmates with terrible knowledge. I dismissed them and dwelt on the horses. I kept their pictures, tracing them out of magazines onto tissue paper. I knew their lineage, records and running times and could recite these statistics without error. Memorization then took the place of something else, something deep, deep, which I did not want to touch. I wanted order and it was everywhere. I memorized everything. There was nothing I could not talk about with vacuity. It was a masterpiece, my childhood.
Tragic Durousseau. Nothing unusual about it. Doom is accurate and vengeance is all the Lord’s. Picture the horse galloping since a colt toward Durousseau … The thing that waits for all of us doesn’t even bother to hide its identity or kid the survivors into thinking it was something else. In the Middle Ages, for example, I know for a fact that when dragons preferred to wear a human shape, there were certain discernible idiosyncrasies. They had wide mouths and flowing red beards and sometimes retained their horns. If you were paying the slightest bit of attention, you could avoid the dragon but this isn’t the case today. No quarter is given. Endings never come outside our experience and there’s no attempt at gamesmanship or artifice. Luck is not involved and wit or caution is useless. You catch up with it even when you’re dragging your feet.
Father is right. Treatment is of little value except to prolong the illness.
Ruttkin kneels beside me. He has missed great swatches of his face in shaving. He hands me his bottle of 7-Up, trying to be friends. I accept it and tilt the neck deep into my mouth, trying to drool in it as much as possible. I would love to give him a bad disease. Hepatitis would be nice, but I’ve never had it myself, and anyone can see that such a sickness would be outlandish for him. I’m sure he’s very clean, never puts his fingers in his mouth and drinks only beer. His distant end lies smugly on his face. In fifty years, he’ll fall asleep behind the filigreed flamingo on the door of a concrete cottage and be buried two days later. He moves at a comfy pace toward death for he knows that he has time to satisfy his needs. God will send him niggers and the discovery of unnatural acts. Each day as deputy brings its own rewards.
He says, “You don’t have to stay here any longer. I’ll take you home.” He goes into the men’s room and returns with a square of paper toweling. I hate him so much, I think I am going to be sick. It smells chloroformed. Cloaca, my dirty mind says. God only knows where Ruttkin found the toweling. Perhaps he is trying to kill me. I think of my friend, Corinthian Brown. It was only for a moment that I thought he was the black man, taken from the bus. This proves how tired I am, how wearying and confusing this continual watching and seeing and translating become. Corinthian does not travel. He has no pretty clothes. He wears shower clogs and the baggy gray khaki of the world’s inmates. All night he works and he spends the days in the gutted cars of Al Glick’s Junk Yard. He waits for beatings, I think, but no beatings come. Even the terrible Glick does not acknowledge him.
Tourists might notice him and exclaim, but the junk yard is off the highway and there would be no reason for them to be there. When I first saw him, he was sitting in the carcass of an elegant Buick convertible with a burnt-out engine. The Buick’s canvas top was down and Corinthian sat in the sun, eating an apple and reading Billy Budd. Yes. He sat in the back seat as though he were being transported somewhere, his arms bare and scruffy in the sun, still as a giant discarded doll. The heat was extraordinary, coming in waves of rubber and battery acid. The sun bounced exotically off the metal and chrome. And no one noticed. Not the terrible behemoth Glick nor Grady who was looking only for a speedometer cable nor the half-breed shepherds who patrolled the junky pasturage. No one but me noticed Corinthian, my friend.
If the deputies have ever seen Corinthian, they have relegated him to the invisible. Corinthian could never be arrested. He would accept punishment gladly but it is not his to receive. You can see how confused I am, to have thought that the drunken victim beaten here was Corinthian.
Ruttkin says, “I’ll take you home. Back to …,” he takes a piece of paper from his pocket, “… the sorority house. If you hadn’t of been walking away from the scene of the accident like you was, if you hadn’t have told me …,” he hesitates, looking for the right word, not wanting to be indiscreet, for he likes me now, he pities me and feels friendly, for I have been quiet this night, and then patient and finally crying, all the right things … “that thing, that shaggy-dog story about you not being in the wreck, about you being in another car, I never would of had to bring you here at all. It was suspicious, you know, you leaving your boy friend there and all.”
I don’t know what he’s talking about. He is going to take me home, not back to the trailer, to the mobile home that never moves, but to the sorority house. No one knows about the trailer. No one has seen it except for the hunters tramping after turkey or pigs.
“That’s right,” Ruttkin says, “don’t cry no more.” I am looking at him wonderingly. He is going to take me back to the sorority house. It is incredible. I am going backward, the returning has begun. “C’mon,” he says. And I stand up and step again on the paper bag that I thought held our bottle of wine. I pat my eyes and press my hair against the sides of my head like any girl and follow Ruttkin to the elevator. The picture of the Governor hangs inside. He looks the same as he did before. He has half-mad eyes and a space between his teeth.
We are back in the Ford, traveling across town toward the college campus. Ruttkin turns off the sheriff’s radio. He is off duty. After he drops me off, he is going home. He says, “You know when I was called to the phone back there, after we corrected that problem with the nigger?” I am shivering. The night has turned cold and I can’t find the handle on the door to roll up the window. “You know the time? Well that was the hospital and I’m a new daddy.” He slurs the word hospital. I don’t care. How can words hurt me now? There are too many goddamn words in this world. As for the hospital, I have never even been inside one.
“It ain’t the first time,” he says, “but it’s like the first time. It’s a boy.” He sets his hand between us on the seat. “I got three boys.” He counts them off on his fingers.
I nod. I would like to ask him if his wife has a problem with caked breasts. I read a cure for it. The cure had something to do with warm pancakes. I think that was what it was, but I may be mistaken so I don’t mention it. I am very hungry. I haven’t eaten in more than twelve hours.
Ruttkin is so proud of himself. Smiling, he shakes his head slowly and chews on his lip. I am bored. I do not even wonder what his wife looks like or how sow-bellied Ruttkin makes love to her, I am so bored. We pass a drive-in movie. An enormous plastic sign on the roadway says
TONIGHT! BLOOD-O-RAMA!!
Four Fiendish Features
Blood Fiend
Blood Creatures
Brides of Blood
Blood Drinkers
Both of us bend forward to peer at the screen which is momentarily visible. Two women in evening gowns are sitting on a floor throwing letters into a fireplace.
“My wife wanted a little girl,” Ruttkin says, “but I wanted a boy.”
“That’s good,” I say.
“Name of Ronald,” he says. “Already his name is Ronald and he ain’t but half an hour old.”
“Did your wife eat a lot of iodine before she had Ronald?” Ruttkin turns his face toward me and drops his jaw. “Iodine,” he says.
“If she didn’t get enough iodine, Ronald will be a cretin.”
“Oh? Yeah, well,” Ruttkin asks, “where would she be getting this iodine?”
“Fish.” I don’t know why I’ve begun this. If I had the strength, I would punch Ruttkin in the mouth, push him out the door and run over him with his sheriff’s deputy’s car. First and reverse, first and reverse, back and forward. Ironing him.
“Ugh,” he says. “Fish.”
I don’t know why I’ve begun this and try to pretend that I haven�
�t.
“She may have been eating fish, I don’t know. I work nights and take my meals in town. She should know the right things to do.”
It must be very late. Everything is quiet and there’s very little traffic. The moon is small and high in the sky. On one side of the road is a long deep park and on the other, all-night convenience stores and empty shopping centers. We have almost come to the college. Near here, I remember, is a place that has one million baskets for sale. Another store sells towels and another, sixty-nine different kinds of sandwiches. It does not seem possible that I am being returned to the sorority house, but I realize that it’s my own fault. I want to go back to the trailer and smell the good smell of Grady’s clothes. I would fix the place up for him right away. He’d be pleased. I’d burn the brush that blocks the door, empty the wastebaskets, tidy and clean. I’d let the air come through. I’d wash the blankets and make him a nice breakfast.
Ruttkin is saying, “Iodine is a crazy thing to have to eat.”
I close my eyes and fold my hands across my stomach. I would like to ask him to turn the car around and take me to the trailer, but I can no more ask him this than I can anyone anything. Change is beyond my range. I am in my black and steel diving bell anchored to the bottom of the sea. With my eyes closed, I can smell the oil heaters burning in distant orange groves. It must be close to freezing. The temperature has fallen by half since Grady and I began tonight. The wind blows coldly in my ear. My throat is sore.
The car slows and turns and stops. I feel that I have to remember all this. I am being kidnapped. I must be able to give instructions to those who will want to come after me. The car moves forward, turns and stops for good. He cuts the engine and opens his door. I do not open my eyes and he does not open my door. I sit in the dark for a moment and then my eyes flap open of their own accord. We are not outside the sorority house but in front of a little store. Everything is bright and clean. Ruttkin walks out with a paper bag.