Someone To Crawl Back To

by Phillip Gardner

  If you've ever seen the scars, you know they're not a pretty sight. The body's not meant to be opened up. Nature provides the heart with all kinds of protection. There's no way not to leave scars.

  Long ago I got into the habit of sleeping with a pillow on my chest. I tried ear plugs, but I was afraid the house would catch on fire. So I settle for a pillow. Holding that pillow there, I'm sure you can figure out what I think about sometimes. It helps just to have something in your arms.

  So sometime near morning I went to sleep. And the damnedest thing happened. I was dreaming, but in my dream I was dreaming. It was the damnedest thing, really. I mean, in my dream I was watching myself dream. I was lying there and Faith was with me. I was sleeping quietly with her head on my chest, over my heart. And in my dream it was quiet. Everything was quiet except for our breathing. Our breathing was the only sound. Then she began to murmur in her sleep. At first I thought it was just her breathing, but it was a murmur, a voice, and then I understood what she was saying in her sleep, repeating the same words over and over.

  “I can feel it,” she said. “I can feel it.”

  Bird Blinding

  Gale and Buzz Newcomb

  Gale Newcomb lowered the receiver onto the cradle of the bedside telephone, then dragged her sewing chair to the closet, stepped up on it, and felt along the high shelf for her husband's pistol. She gently patted the coarse, unfinished wood, working toward the end of the shelf. When her fingers met the revolver's thick, blunt chrome barrel, they rested there, then moved delicately down to the pistol’s rough metal grip. For a moment, she allowed her index finger to trace the cold crescent trigger, then quickly pulled her hand away. She knew better than to take the gun down, to hide it or throw it into the field. She pushed the cool steel way back, thinking that maybe her husband would have one extra second to think about what that gun could do to a body.

  She stepped down slowly and dragged the heavy chair back to the sewing table, placing the legs in the exact depressions they had formed in the bedroom carpet. She vacuumed over the chair's lines, erasing them. When she had tightly wound the cord and returned the vacuum to its assigned place in the closet, Gale walked quietly to the kitchen and dug inside her purse for lipstick. A pair of cardinals sputtered in the camellia outside the window and two blue jays speared earthworms from the ditch bank just beyond. She applied the red gloss to her lips, then sat with her hands folded before her on the kitchen table, seeing nothing, and waited for her husband.

  “Get your coat,” Buzz Newcomb said, allowing the screen door to slam behind him. She glanced his elongated shadow moving up the hall toward the bedroom.

  “Buzz,” she said, “why don't we just lie down for a little while?”

  She drew a deep breath. Her husband’s form filled the doorway, his whole body seeming to expand and contract like a huge lung. “Getcha damn coat,” he said, and she saw the gun, hanging low like an extension of his own hand.

  In the car, they drove past dead tobacco fields, stalks like stalagmites, stripped of leaves, silhouetted against the bruised October sunset.

  Neither spoke. Buzz stared wide-eyed straight ahead, hunched over the wheel in eagerness and anger. Her talking would only make it worse now. Over the telephone, Gale had explained everything to Buzz, how it had happened. She was afraid to leave out anything. Now she could see him playing her words over and over in his head, putting an inflection here, a pause there, so that she had no idea what he was seeing. Everything she told him was true and exactly as it had happened, how she had met a man driving a pickup as she headed into town, how he'd waved and she'd waved just as folks do, how she'd glanced into her mirror and seen his truck making a U-turn, how he had parked beside her at the dentist's office.

  They drove past the county hospital and merged onto the by-pass. Half a county to cover, she thought, time enough for him to consider what damage could be done and who could suffer it. When he stopped at the last light off the highway, she wanted to open the door and start walking in any direction other than the one they took.

  Three hours earlier she had experienced for the first time the brute power a man could apply to a woman, comprehended fully how a man possessed the strength to twist a woman's arms off at the shoulder, force her thighs apart. A man had conveyed that force to her through a sinister smile and in the tips of his stained fingers when they touched her hand. “I know where you live,” he had whispered in his whiskey breath. And now a second man was going to make him pay for it, only the bill was going to be hers.

  When she'd picked up the phone to call her husband, Gale didn't think she could feel more afraid. The man’s voice had wormed its way inside her: “I know where you live,” he said. Raw fear possessed her. She had wanted safety, protection. She had gotten this.

  Nobody would say that she and Mitchell Watford had ever been sweethearts, not even Buzz. The fact is their relationship, if it could be called that, had barely covered the months of June, July, and August. To any observer, theirs would have been only one of a dozen summer flings. Gale was fifteen then, Mitchell eighteen, a senior.

  She laid on a towel in the hot sun that Saturday at Wildlife Lake and watched his long, even, effortless strokes as he swam across the lake and back again. She had willed him to look at her on his approach. The length of him rose from the water, his fingers raking back his coal black hair, his thick chest glimmering. He turned toward the shore, and she felt for the first time the full exercise of her feminine will.

  He offered her a ride home in his new convertible, a black Firebird. She accepted. Everyone turned to watch as he unwound the towel that covered her white swimsuit, folded the towel over the black vinyl seat, and reached for her hand. At ninety miles an hour, Gale clenched the edge of the leather seat and closed her eyes as the sun and the hot wind pierced her thin swimsuit in the afternoon heat. He was eighteen, and she felt new all over.

  It had been a short, hot summer. In September, she returned to New Hope High. Mitchell worked full-time for his father, who owned a crossroads grocery store. That was that. Ten years had passed.

  Buzz, who was a year younger than Gale, knew these things. They had all attended a small, rural high school. Besides, the year following the Mitchell summer, Gale had dated other boys, boys whose names she couldn't remember now, even boys from town, boys who had seen her with Mitchell that summer, seen her blonde hair flying about her cool face, eyes shut to the wind, as if that whirl of golden hair twisted and glided on the music blasting from the black convertible.

  Mitchell had raised her currency among the other boys that summer, and she had raised his among the younger girls. Buzz, who had invested his vanity and pride in constructing the reputation of a ladies' man, hadn't shown the slightest interest in Gale until word of her had somehow been validated by the Mitchell summer.

  Mitchell had disappeared from her life as quickly as he had entered it, taking none of her, she thought. Sure, sometimes she would hear a song from that summer or see a blonde girl in a black convertible. And perhaps during her first years of marriage those summer images flashed before her after Buzz had turned from her and instantly fallen asleep. Still, whenever she thought of him at all in the months and years that followed, his memory held the quality of dreams. She recreated him as it suited her, dressing him in shirts he'd never worn, taking him places they'd never been. She had married Buzz and moved across the county. They had no mutual friends or common interests. He had simply disappeared. She had forgotten about him completely.

  ***

  The small rectangular highway sign said Pharaoh, two miles. When they reached the intersection, Buzz slowed, then ran the stop sign. They crossed the bridge at Falling Creek and rounded a sharp curve. Ahead, black tire marks preceded the splintered leg of a sign for The Risqué Café, a topless video poker bar on the interstate.

  At her five-year class reunion, Gale sat alone folding and unfolding a paper cockatoo. Buzz, who had always been a little vain about his dancing, was on the dance f
loor, approximating his best Travolta moves. The paper bird-of-paradise she held served as the place card for the tropical theme. Gale sat and watched her former classmates, attempting to put names to the fading faces.

  After a time, she found herself crossing the room for punch she didn't really want in order to read the name of a blonde woman who had come alone. The woman had arrived like a stranded traveler. Gale watched as she peeled away from the clusters of classmates that formed and unfolded. Sharon Watford. Gale read the name again, and then remembered. She was the daughter of the local highway patrolman, the fragile bird-like girl who had shouldered the blame whenever a classmate got a speeding ticket.

  The DJ fired up “Stayin' Alive” and the tables emptied. Buzz did his Broadway-on-his-knees slide up to a former cheerleader's chair. Everyone at the table clapped, and the blushing cheerleader stood and took his hand.

  Later in the night, as someone passed around a bottle, she overheard Buzz laughing with a hunting partner, repeating the rumor that Mitchell Watford had lost his father's grocery store in a poker game, and then the connection was complete. Mitchell had married a blonde-haired girl from Gale's class who had been deeply in love with him before Mitchell even knew the girl was alive.

  Two or three years later, Gale had read a single line in the newspaper reporting that Mitchell had been arrested for drunk driving. But she made no connection between that name and the boy with coal black hair and ice blue eyes who had relieved her of her beach towel and pointed with a fetching smile at the speedometer when the red needle rested on 100. He certainly was not the one who, that dream summer, had unbuttoned her blouse and kissed her neck, and who later sat back against the opposite door with his own shirt open and the full light of the moon shining down on her. He was not the one who had demanded that she open her eyes and look down at her own nakedness in that light—not the possessor of the voice who had whispered to her that her fingers were her own.

  That was not the man who had stepped from the yellow state-owned pickup today and lumbered toward her, the beer-bellied figure with hollow colorless eyes. It was not the man from the moonlight who hours earlier had said to her with a broken smile that he had been looking for her house, that he knew now where she lived.

  If she hadn't been so afraid, Gale would never have called her husband. But for a moment she was afraid, really afraid, and in that moment she had reached for the telephone. And now there was no way she could undo what was about to happen.

  The pistol rested on the seat between them, as innocent and unknowing as a retarded child.

  Gale saw the dirty yellow pickup parked in the drive a quarter mile ahead. For a few seconds she had convinced herself that the truck wouldn't be there, that Mitchell wasn't a man who had a home, that he lived in bars, slept in that truck in the lot outside The Paradise Lounge. Now she looked at the man she had married. “Please,” she whispered and waited. But he didn't answer.

  Buzz shut off the engine. The house was a small, faceless brick structure with no porch, just two brick steps leading to the front door. White metal shutters stood on each side of the only window. Buzz softly closed the station wagon door. His eyes slowly, deliberately panned the freshly mowed backyard. He turned and carefully tucked the pistol between his belt and the small of his back, then moved quietly around the back of the car to Gale's door.

  “Wipe off that lipstick and get out,” he said with the soft firm tone he'd use with a bird dog. Gale closed her eyes, lowered her head.

  “No, no, no,” she murmured.

  Buzz took one step toward her and spoke in that same soft voice.

  “Get out now.”

  Gale opened the door.

  Buzz waited for her, then extended his hand, but she held back a step before following him to the front of the small house. She lifted a toppled tricycle left near the door and set it upright. Buzz gave the door three measured knocks.

  Sharon Watford looked down without recognition at the couple at the foot of the steps. Bill collectors often came at suppertime. She didn't speak. She stood tall and waiting. Her thin limbs were pecan brown and dry, and although she was far along pregnant the skin on her face was so tightly drawn that she seemed to be facing a great wind. Her thin blonde hair hung straight down to her shoulders, too long and straight for a woman of her age and condition, and her immobile lips seemed translucently vacant of blood. One hand moved instinctively for the door handle, the other to her bulbous belly. She just looked at them, her dark, deep-set eyes fierce against the man and woman at her door.

  “I'm sorry to take you from your supper,” Buzz said softly. “I'm here to see your husband.”

  The scraping sound of a kitchen chair ushered from behind her, and a small, blonde boy of about two ran tottering toward the pregnant woman and wrapped both arms around her leg. She lifted the child without taking her eyes from Buzz and Gale, then retreated one step back from the door.

  “I promise this will only take a minute,” Buzz said in that same soft lyrical voice as he opened the screen and stepped inside. He stood almost apologetically, his arms loose, his head tilted slightly in deference to the woman. Sharon glanced back over her shoulder and stepped aside.

  Behind her, filling the kitchen doorway, Mitchell Watford wore a black sleeveless tee shirt that barely covered his belly, and the black hair covering his arms, shoulders, and neck formed a kind of shadow around him. He didn't speak, just looked down at the white paper napkin he wiped his hands in.

  Buzz stepped toward Mitchell, then looked back at his wife, his eyes dragging her inside. Gale entered the room, stopping a few feet behind her husband, who waited ceremoniously for her to take her place beside him. Sharon's wide, savage, jealous eyes raked up and down the length of her. And in that instant she felt the pregnant woman transforming her flesh into the flesh of every woman Sharon had long imagined and angrily feared. Gale turned her eyes away, feeling at once naked and betrayed.

  Buzz spoke without emotion to the man standing across the small room from him. “I'm going to ask you just one question, and you are going to answer yes to that question. And then this will be all over and I will go back home and have myself some supper. You're gonna say yes and then this will be over.”

  Sharon looked back at her husband now. The child in her arms reached for her face and attempted to force her eyes to his, then sensing failure, looked at his father. Gale's eyes shot from Buzz over to Mitchell—who glanced up at her, then out the window to his left, then back down to the paper napkin in his hand. He pulled at the napkin, forming small white wings. Gale wanted to stop it.

  “Buzz,” she pleaded.

  “Look at me,” Buzz said to the other man, moving his hands behind him, lifting himself to his full mental height, finding the pistol's grip.

  “Oh, Jesus, Buzz, oh Jesus,” Gale murmured.

  “You do understand don't you—” Buzz paused until Mitchell slowly lifted his eyes—”that if you ever even look at my wife again, you're a dead man?”

  Mitchell's eyes studied the white wad of paper napkin, which rested in one hand, then passed it to the other, slowly, as if he were judging its weight. The remaining light from the afternoon seemed to drain from the room, leaving dull red particles of dust floating in from the open door and window. For a moment the white napkin appeared to glow, its light trailing from hand to hand like a tiny, fluttering white bird.

  “It is a yes or no question,” Buzz said in that Sunday school voice. His hand gripped the pistol. He lifted it slightly.

  A deep surge in her belly made Gale shut her eyes to keep from vomiting. She saw the pistol, felt the concussion of its blast, smelled the hot blood and flesh, heard the baby's one-note scream. A tremor rushed up her body, and when it reached her eyes they flew open with a start.

  Mitchell was looking at her with that crooked smile, with those distant, accusing, triumphant eyes. And Buzz, who had seen that look and knew instinctively its message, turned in wide-eyed disbelief from Gale Newcomb to Mitchell and
then back to his wife.

  Mitchell's eyes shifted without expression to Sharon, who stared vacantly at the floor, as if it went down forever. Again he trained those dark, knowing eyes on Gale, then guided them slowly and deliberately to Buzz, where they came to rest. The pistol had cleared his belt before Gale could grab Buzz's arm.

  “This is all a misunderstanding,” Gale said in a breathless gasp. She was looking at Sharon now. “This—all of this—is just a mistake, Buzz. Nothing happened. Listen to me, nothing happened.” She gripped Buzz's arm with all her strength, felt him trembling.

  Mitchell turned his eyes on Gale and raised his lip again in that broken smile he'd given her earlier, a chilling look of conquest or collusion, which he next brought down on her husband.

  “Listen to your wife,” Mitchell said, his voice cracked and hard. “She's probably got some things to tell you, son.” He again turned that smile on Gale, who could only think of the killing she couldn't stop.

  “Mitch?” All eyes turned to Sharon, who looked down toward a bottom she couldn't see. “Mitch? You’ve got to come clean. You can do it now or you can do it before the Lord, Mitch. But you got to come clean. For once you got to come clean. It might as well be now.” She stroked the baby, who had fallen asleep. The room was dark, except for the kitchen light. Each silent second fell upon the previous one, until the compression of soundlessness filled the small room. A breeze rushed through the screen door, and a dissonant, growling rumble slowly ascended from the metal spring holding the door shut. The smell of freshly cut lawn filled the room. Mitchell shifted from one foot to the other, and his shadow fell over his wife.