Finally, he got up, stiff and floating, and walked off into the grid of automobiles, his white head turning from side to side under a red feed-store cap. Several angry-looking people sat in hot cars, their faces carrying the uncomprehending disappointment of boiled crabs. He walked attentively for a long time but recognized nothing, not even his own tall image haunting panels of tinted glass.
Twice he went by a figure slouched in a parked Ford sedan, an unwashed thing with a rash of rust on its lower panels. The driver, whose thin hair hung past his ears, was eating a pickled sausage out of a plastic sleeve and chewing it with his front teeth. He watched the wanderer with a slow, reptilian stare each time he walked by. On the third pass, the driver eyed the still-straight back, the big shoulders. He hissed at the old man, who stopped and looked for the sound. “What’s wrong with you, gramps?”
The old man drifted up to the window and stared into the car at a middle-aged fellow whose stomach enveloped the lower curve of the steering wheel. An empty quart beer bottle lay on the front seat. “Do you know me?” the old man asked in a voice that was soft and lost.
The driver looked at him a long time, his eyes moving down his body as though he were a column of figures. “Yeah, Dad,” he said at last. “Don’t you remember me?” He put an unfiltered cigarette in his mouth and lit it with a kitchen match. “I’m your son.”
The old man’s hand went to his chin. “My son,” he said, like a fact.
“Get in.” The man in the Ford smiled only with his mouth.
“All right.”
“You’re having a little trouble remembering.”
The old man got in and placed a hand on the chalky dash. “What have I been doing?”
“Shopping for me is all. Now give me back my wallet.” The driver held out a meaty hand. The other man pulled his billfold from a hip pocket and handed it over.
In a minute they were leaving the parking lot, riding a trash-strewn highway out of town into the sandy pine barrens of Tangipahoa Parish. The old man watched the can-studded roadside for clues. “I can’t even remember my own name,” he said, looking now at his plaid shirt.
“It’s Ted,” the driver said, giving him a quick look. “Ted Williams.” He checked his side-view mirrors.
“I don’t even remember your name, son. I must be sick.” The old man wanted to feel his head for fever, but he was afraid of laying hands on a stranger.
“My name is Andy,” the other man said, fixing a veined eye on him for a long moment. After a few miles, he turned off the main highway onto an unpaved road. The old man listened to the unfamiliar knock and ping of rock striking the driveshaft of the car, and then the gravel became patchy and thin, the road blotched with a naked, carroty earth like the hide of a sick dog. Bony cattle heaved their heads between strands of barbed wire, scavenging for roadside weeds. The Ford bumped past mildewed trailers sinking into rain-eaten plots. Farther on, the land was too soggy for trailers, too poor even for grazing the lane’s desperate cattle. After two miles of this, they pulled up to a boxy red-brick house squatting in a swampy two-acre yard. Limbs were down everywhere, and cat briers and poison oak covered the rusty fence that bordered the driveway. The old man saw no need for a fence since there was only brush-wracked, cut-over woods running in every direction.
“This is home. You remember now?” Andy said, pulling him from the car. He felt the old man’s long arm for muscle.
Ted looked around for clues, but said nothing. He watched Andy walk around the rear of the house and return with a shovel and a pair of boots. “Follow me, Dad.” They walked to a swale full of coppery standing water that ran down the side of the property, ten feet from the fence. “This has to be dug out, two deep scoops side by side, from here all the way down to that ditch at the rear of the property. One hundred yards.” He held the shovel out at arm’s length.
“I don’t feel very strong,” Ted said, bending slowly to unlace his shoes. He stepped backward out of them and slipped into the oversized Red Ball boots.
“You’re a big man. Maybe your mind ain’t so hot, but you can work for a while yet.” And when Ted rocked up the first shovelful of sumpy mud, Andy smiled, showing a pair of rotten incisors.
He worked for an hour, carefully, watching the straightness of the ditch, listening to his heart strum in his ears, studying the awful plot that was draining like a boil into the trough he opened for it. The whole lot was flat and low, made of a sterile clay that never dried out between thunderstorms rolling up from the Gulf. After four or five yards he had to sit down, the pine trees swimming around him as though laboring to stay upright in a great wind. Andy came out of the house carrying a lawn chair and a pitcher of cloudy liquid.
“Can I have some?” the old man asked.
Andy showed his teeth. “Naw. These are margaritas. You’ll fall out for sure if you drink one.” As an afterthought he added, “There’s water in the hose.”
All morning Andy drank from the pitcher, and the old man looked back over his shoulder, trying to place him. The shovel turned up a sopping red clay tainted with runoff from a septic tank, and Ted tried to remember where he had seen such poor soil. The day was still, no cars bumped down the dirt lane; the rattling of the ice cubes and the click of a cigarette lighter were the only sounds the old man heard. About one-thirty he put down his shovel for the twentieth time and caught his breath. He had used a shovel before—his body told him that—but he couldn’t recall where or when. Andy drew up his lawn chair, abandoning the empty pitcher in the pigweed against the fence. Ted could smell his breath when he came close, some thing like cleaning fluid, and he closed his eyes, a memory trying to fire up in his brain, but when he opened his lids the image broke apart like a dropped ember.
Andy moved in close and fell back into the chair. “You ever been beat up by a woman?”
Ted was too tired to look at him. Sweat weighed him down.
Andy scratched his belly through his yellow knit shirt. “Remember? She told me she’d beat me again and then divorce my ass if I didn’t fix this yard up.” He spoke with one eye closed as though he was too drunk to see with both of them at the same time. “She’s big,” he said to himself. “Makes a lot of money but hits hard. Gave me over a hundred stitches once.” He held up a flaccid arm. “Broke this one in two places.”
The old man looked at him then, studying the slouching shoulders, the patchy skin in his scalp. He saw that he was desperate, and the old man moved back a step. “She’s coming soon, the bitch is. I told her I couldn’t do it. That’s why I went to the parking lot to hire some of those bums that work for food.” He tried to rattle an ice cube in his empty tumbler, but the last one had long since melted. “Those guys won’t work,” he said. “They just hold those cardboard signs saying they’ll work so they can get a handout, the lazy bastards.”
Pinheads of light were exploding in the old man’s peripheral vision. “Can I have something to eat?” he asked, looking toward the house and frowning.
Andy led him into a kitchen that smelled of garbage. The tile floor was cloudy with dirt, and a hill of melamine dishes lay capsized in the murky sink water. Andy unplugged the phone and left the room with it. Returning empty-handed, he tumbled into a kitchen chair and lit a cigarette. The old man guessed where the food was and opened a can of Vienna sausages, twisting them out one at a time with a fork. “Maybe I should go to a doctor?” he said, chewing slowly, as if trying to place the taste.
“Ted. Dad. The best job I ever had was in a nursing home, remember?” He watched the old man’s eyes. “I dealt with people like you all day. I know what to do with you.”
Ted examined the kitchen the way he might look at a bizarre exhibit in a roadside carnival. He looked and looked.
—
The afternoon passed like a slow, humid dream, and he completed fifty yards of ditch. By sundown he was trembling and wet. Had his memory come back, he would have known he was too old for this work. He leaned on the polished wood of the shovel han
dle and looked at his straight line, almost remembering something, dimly aware that where he was he had not been before. His memory was like a long novel left open and ruffled by a breeze to a different chapter farther along. Andy had disappeared into the house to sleep off the tequila, and the old man came in to find something to eat. The pantry showed a good stock of chili, but not one pot was clean, so he scrubbed the least foul for ten minutes and put the food on to heat.
Later, Andy appeared in the kitchen doorway wavering like the drunk he was. He led Ted to a room that contained only a stripped mattress. The old man put two fingers to his chin. “Where are my clothes?”
“You don’t remember anything,” Andy said quickly, turning to walk down the hall. “I have some overalls that’ll fit if you want to clean up and change.”
Ted lay down on the splotched mattress as though claiming it. This bed, it’s mine, he thought. Turning onto his stomach, he willed to remember the musty smell. Yes, he thought. My name is Ted. I am where I am.
—
In the middle of the night his bladder woke him, and on the way back to bed he saw Andy seated in the box-like living room watching a pornographic movie in which a hooded man was whipping a naked woman with a rope. He walked up behind him, watching not the television but Andy’s head, the shape of it. A quart beer bottle lay sweating in his lap.
The old man rolled his shoulders back. “Only white trash would watch that,” he said.
Andy turned around, slow and stiff, like a sick person. “Hey, Dad. Pull up a chair and get off on this.” He looked back to the TV.
Ted hit him from behind, a roundhouse, open-palm swat on the ear that knocked him out of the chair and sent the beer bottle pinwheeling suds across the floor. Andy hit the tile on his stomach, and it was some time before he could turn up on one elbow to give the big man a disbelieving, angry look. “You old shit. Just wait till I get up.”
“White trash,” the old man thundered. “No kid of mine is going to be like that.” He stepped closer. Andy rolled against the TV cart and held up a hand. The old man raised his right foot as though he would plant it on his neck.
“Hold on, Dad.”
“Turn the thing off,” he said.
“What?”
“Turn the thing off,” the old man shouted, and Andy pressed the power button with a knuckle just as a big calloused heel came down next to his head.
“Okay. Okay.” He blinked and pressed his back against the television, inching away from an adversary who seemed even larger in the small room.
And then a tall, bony face fringed with white hair drifted down above his own, examining him closely, his features, the shape of his nose. A blistered finger traced Andy’s right ear as if evaluating its quality. “Maybe you’ve got from me some sorry blood,” he said, and his voice shook from saying it, that such a soft and stinking man could come out of him. He pulled back and closed his eyes as though he couldn’t stand sight itself. “Let the good blood come out, and it’ll tell you what to do,” he said. “You can’t let your sorry blood ruin you.”
Andy stood up in a pool of beer and swayed against the television, watching the other man disappear down the hall. His face burned where he’d been hit, and his right ear rang like struck brass. He moved into the kitchen, where he studied a photograph taped to the refrigerator, an image of his wife standing next to a deer hanging in a tree, her right hand balled around a long knife. He sat down, perhaps forgetting Ted, the spilled beer, even his wife’s hard fists, and fell asleep on his arms at the kitchen table.
—
The next morning the old man woke up and looked around him, almost recalling a different room. He concentrated, but the image he saw was like something far away, viewed without his eyeglasses. He rubbed his thumbs over his fingertips, and the feel of someone he’d known was there.
In the kitchen he put on water for coffee, watching his passed-out son until the kettle whistled. He loaded a French-drip pot and located the bread, scraped the mold off four slices, and toasted them. He took eggs and fatty bacon from the refrigerator. When Andy struggled upright, a dark stink of armpit stirred alive, and the old man told him to go wash himself.
In half an hour Andy came back into the kitchen, his face nicked and bleeding from a month-old blade, a different T-shirt forming a second skin. He sat and ate without a word, but drank no coffee. After a few bites, he rummaged in the refrigerator for a can of beer. The old man looked at the early sun caught in the dew on the lawn and then glanced back at the beer can. “Remind me of where you work,” he said.
Andy took a long pull on the can. “I’m too sick to work. You know that.” He melted into a slouch and looked through the screen door toward a broken lawn mower dismantled under the carport. “It’s all I can do to keep up her place. Every damn thing’s broke, and I got to do it all by hand.” The lawn mower looked as if it had been hammered by lightning.
“Why can’t I remember?” The old man sat down to his breakfast and began to eat, thinking, This is an egg. What am I?
Andy noticed his expression and perhaps felt a little neon trickle of alcohol brightening his bloodstream, kindling a single flicker of kindness, and he leaned over. “I seen it happen before. In a few days your mind’ll come back.” He drained the beer and let out a rattling belch. “Right now, get back on that ditch.”
Ted put a hand on a shoulder. “I’m sore.” He left the hand there.
“Come on.” Andy fished three cans of beer from the refrigerator. “You might be a little achy, but my back can’t take the shovel business at all. You got to finish that ditch today.” He looked into the old man’s eyes as though he’d lost something in them. “Quick as you can.”
“I don’t know.”
Andy scratched his ear and, finding it sore, gave him a dark look. “Get up and find that shovel, damn you.”
—
When Andy drove to a crossroads store, Ted dragged his feet to the ditch and began turning up foul, sopping crescents. The other man returned to sit in the shade of a wormy gum, where he opened a beer and began to read a paper he’d bought. In the police reports column was a brief account of a retired farmer from St. Mary Parish, Etienne LeBlanc, who had been staying with his son in Pine Oil when he disappeared. The son stated that his father had moved in with him a year ago, had begun to have spells of forgetfulness, and that he sometimes wandered. These spells had started the previous year on the day the old man’s wife had died while they were shopping at the discount center. Andy looked over at Ted and snickered. He went to the house for another beer and looked again at the photograph on the refrigerator. His wife’s stomach reached out farther than her breasts, and her angry red hair shrouded a face tainted by tattooed luminescent-green eye shadow. Her lips were ignited by a permanent chemical pigment that left them bloodred even in the mornings, when he was sometimes startled to wake and find the dyed parts of her flaring next to him. She was a dredge boat cook working her regular two-week shift at the mouth of the Mississippi, and she had told him that if a drainage ditch was not dug through the side yard by the time she got back, she would come after him with a piece of firewood.
He had tried. The afternoon she left he’d bought a shovel on the way back from the liquor store at the crossroads, but on the second spadeful he had struck a root and despaired, his heart bumping up in rhythm, his breath drawing short. He left the shovel stuck upright in the yard like his headstone, and that night he didn’t sleep one minute. Over the next ten days the sleeplessness continued and finally affected his kidneys, causing him to get up six times every night to use the bathroom, until by dawn he felt as dry as a cracker. He drove out to buy quarts of beer, winding up in the Walmart parking lot staring through the window of his old car as if by concentration alone he could conjure up someone to take on his burden. And then he saw the old man pass by his hood, aimless as a string of smoke.
For the next two hours, the heat rose up inside Ted, and he looked enviously at the cool can resting on Andy’s ca
tfish belly. He tried to remember what beer tasted like, and could sense a buzzing tingle on the tip of his tongue, a blue-ice feel in the back of his mouth. Ted looked hard at his son and again could not place him. Water was building in his little ditch, and he placed his foot once more on the shovel, pushing it in, but not pulling back on the handle. “I need something cold to drink.”
Andy did not open his eyes. “Well go in the house and get it. But I want you back out here in a minute.”
He walked into the kitchen and stood by the refrigerator, filling a glass tumbler with water and drinking it down slowly. He rinsed the glass at the sink and opened the cabinet to replace it when his eye caught sight of a stack of inexpensive dishes showing a blue willow pattern. A little white spark fired off in the darkness of his brain, almost lighting up a memory.
Opening another cabinet, he looked for signs of the woman, for this was some woman’s kitchen, and he felt he must know her, but everywhere he looked was cluttered and smelled of insecticide and was like no place any woman he knew would put up with. The photograph on the refrigerator of a big female holding a knife meant nothing to him. He ran a thick palm along the shelf where the coffee was stored, feeling for something that was not there. It was bare wood, and a splinter pricked his finger. He turned and walked to Andy’s room, looking into a closet, touching jeans, coveralls, pullovers that could have been for a man or a woman, and then five dull dresses shoved against the closet wall. He tried to recognize the cloth, until from outside came a slurred shout, and he turned for the bedroom door, running a thumb under an overalls strap that bit into his shoulders.
The sun rose high and the old man suffered, his borrowed khaki shirt growing dark on his straining flesh. Every time he completed ten feet of ditch, Andy would move his chair along beside him like a guard. They broke for lunch, and at one-thirty when they came back into the yard, a thunderstorm fired up ten miles away, and the clouds and breeze saved them from the heat. Andy looked at pictures in magazines, drank, and drew hard on many cigarettes. At three o’clock, the old man looked behind him and saw he was still thirty feet from the big parish ditch at the rear of the lot. The thought came to him that there might be another job after this one. The roof, he noticed, needed mending, and he imagined himself straddling a gable in the glare. He sat down on the grass, wondering what would happen to him. Sometimes he felt that he might not be able to finish, that he was digging his own grave.
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