The day of the big chicken stew, Snow in Face had an argument with the man who was driving the gasoline truck, and he was late getting on the road. Then around sunset his cousin the drunk flagged him down three miles away from the store and asked for a ride as far as his wife’s house, which was down a steep drive paved with loose rocks the size of skulls. After dropping him off, he debated whether to go on to the white man’s trailer. What difference would it make if he didn’t show up? The tourist couldn’t get angry and shop somewhere else. There wasn’t anyplace else. Snow in Face stopped his truck at the main road and for a while considered both directions. He looked up in the sky and saw the first star lodged in his windshield, right above his fingers. Then he put on his blinker, his hands turning the wheel without his making the decision.
Snow in Face found him lying face up in the yard and called the Navaho police, who sent a helicopter to bring Joe Adoue to the hospital in Grind. He watched the machine ascend in a thundering whop of blades and kept vigil until it was a dot of pepper against a purple afterglow in the west. Then he went into the trailer, finished cooking, and ate half of the chicken stew, nodding his approval as he chewed.
A week later, Joe was packing his few things to leave the hospital, when his bald old doctor came in carrying a clipboard, raised an eyebrow, and told him that his mild emphysema had not advanced much at all.
“That so?” Joe said.
“Yeah, I guess you’re lucky, all right. What laid you low out there at your place was your bronchitis. A bad attack. I don’t see how you ever stayed alive in Louisiana with that stuff.” He held up a page on his clipboard and said, “Two things you need is an electric stove and a new range hood. Plus your medicine, of course.”
Joe studied the pockets in the doctor’s smock. “I don’t see any smokes. You quit?”
The doctor gave him a long look. “They got too damn expensive.”
The next day he was sitting at his table catching up on his mail, when the phone rang and his wife said she was coming to see him. She told him she was worried about him because somebody else named Joe had called to say a family member ought to visit him. “That you’d been real sick. He’d said something about protecting his investment.”
Joe kept his trailer clean, but not wife clean. Three days after he returned from the hospital, he slipped on a mask and raked the sand around his trailer, washed the dishes, changed the linens in his bedroom, and put on fresh sheets in the tiny bedroom at the other end of the trailer. He scrubbed, dusted, and wiped down every surface until he collapsed, winded, on a small sofa in front of the television. Lorena was fifty-six years old, younger than he was, and she had better eyesight. He pictured her spotting a raisin under the table and frowning, so he got up and swept again.
The next afternoon at three o’clock, he saw a car turn in from the main road. He knew she would take a plane into the regional and rent the cheapest vehicle she could. As it got closer, however, throwing up a wave of dust to the cloudy west, he saw it was a nice midsize sedan, and he wondered if it carried his wife after all. But the person who got out next to the trailer’s steps was indeed Lorena, wearing a light sundress with a nice pattern of abstract, indistinct dots. He was used to her in pants and sweatshirts and figured these were her traveling clothes.
He went out to meet her and she gave him a quick wet kiss that startled him. “Joe,” she said, pushing him back a foot, “you don’t look bad at all. Look at those pink ears.”
“Well, the humidity’s about right today.” He thought he felt his chest wall relax a bit, though it might have been his heart. “The doc says I’m hanging on.”
She looked over at the mountains to the north. “So this is the land of enchantment? Looks like Mars.” She glanced at him. “But in a good way.”
Inside she went to the little bathroom and then did a general inspection. “I see you cleaned up for me,” she told him. He made coffee and they sat looking out the window. An Angus walked around the corner of the trailer and gazed longingly at the hood of Joe’s pickup.
“I’m glad you came for a visit,” he said. “I didn’t realize how much I missed people until you showed up.” He watched her as he would a rare animal he’d come across on one of his walks.
She rested an arm on the table. “I’d have come sooner, but the girls need a lot of help with their kids, and you know me. Always afraid to spend down savings, what there is of it.”
He started to touch her hand, then held back. “I just want you to know that I miss you. Life in Baton Rouge.” He lifted his chin toward the east. “I’m not happier out here or anything. But man, it’s nice to feel okay most days.”
“I could tell from your letters. You write a hell of a letter, by the way.”
He shrugged. “I guess I can say more when I think as slow as handwriting.”
She laughed and covered her mouth with her hand. Suddenly, she stood up. “Hey, you know what I have in the trunk on ice? Some andouille sausage and big shrimp. I’m going to cook you a pot of gumbo.”
He tried a joke. “Man, I should move away more often.”
She got serious at that and sat back down. “Joe, when you left, I began to see you.”
“What? I don’t understand.”
“I know. I mean a hundred things. Like when in hot weather you wore a white T-shirt, and I’d tell you not to dress like a bum in the house, and you’d make that clown face instead of calling me down for saying something like that. After you left, I remembered you built that house for me, paid for it and nailed a lot of it together. A couple months after you left town, I found a few of your Ts in your drawer and thought they were yellowed, so I took them out and bleached them.”
He snorted. “That’s like you. Washing clean laundry.”
“When I was folding them, I thought how there was no one in them. I actually felt through the cloth for you. And there was nobody there.” She began to cry softly and they put their heads together and closed their eyes for a long moment.
Later, supper was like a visit to the old land of moss and fumes, and Joe ate two bowls of gumbo. Lorena changed her shoes and he took her out for a walk down to the mailbox, cautioning her not to touch any of the prickly plants. She wasn’t impressed by a big rattler on the highway, or a brace of tarantulas skittering across the blacktop, but she was taken with the openness of this world, the distance, the red vistas, and the big white cross on the mountain. Coming back they talked a year’s worth, watched television, and at ten he decided it was time to turn in. When he showed her the little bedroom, she asked, “Is your own bed big enough for two?”
He was confused for a moment. “Sure, sure. It’s a double. I just thought…”
“Nah, it’ll be okay. We’re still married, if you remember.”
He brushed his teeth and took a handful of pills in the kitchen while Lorena was in the bathroom. He climbed into bed and looked forward to not being the only one in the trailer, the little woman making him feel safer, as silly as that seemed. His eyes were closed when she came in and turned off the light. He heard her slip off her dress or her robe, he wasn’t sure exactly what she had on, and then lift the covers and roll up against him. He smelled soap and felt her arms slip around his chest, squeezing him as though he were a tree. He touched her and understood with a shock that she wasn’t wearing anything at all. “Oh, my God,” he said, laughing, “this is like our honeymoon. And you’re going to kill me.”
“No I’m not,” she whispered. “Just take a breath.”
Acknowledgments
Thanks to Winborne, my wife, for reading and suggesting improvements for these stories. I owe a great deal of thanks to my agency, Sterling-Lord Literistic and my long-term advocate there, Peter Matson. Short stories are a hard sell nowadays, and he and Jim Rutman have done well for me, and for that I thank them. To Gary Fisketjon, who has to be the hardest working editor in New York, I again take off my hat.
A Note About the Author
Tim Gautreaux is the autho
r of three novels and two earlier short story collections. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Best American Short Stories, The Atlantic, Harper’s, and GQ. After teaching for thirty years at Southeastern Louisiana University, he now lives, with his wife, in Chattanooga, Tennessee.
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