by Laird Hunt
“They are lovely machines.”
We danced across the dust and gravel, sending up small clouds and giving it all some good scrape and crunch as we went, and with each twist and twirl I felt my dress lift and my legs cool. We danced what could have been two minutes or an hour and then he let go of my hand and bowed at me again. After which he plunked himself straight back down onto the road and sat there cornroot-style and I joined him.
“I needed that, as I hope you did too,” he said.
“I surely did,” I said.
“Have you ever seen a lynching?” he said.
“I never have.”
“I have had quite an adventure this afternoon and night but I expect it is nothing like being lynched.”
“I expect not.”
“I was threatened with tar and with feathers by more than one of my pursuers but managed to extricate myself.”
“Tar and feathers!”
He shook his head. Lifted up a hand, then let it crumple and fall again.
“Well, now here you are.”
“Here I am.” He sniffed. “Have you ever had to extricate yourself from a delicate situation, madam?”
“No. Not extricate. Not exactly. You wouldn’t call it that.”
He leaned in a little toward me. He had a buttery-soft look on his face.
“It’s just I managed not to die a time or two when I was little,” I said.
“Not to die?”
“Not to get killed. There was a someone involved. But it was a long time ago. Long, long time.”
“I’m very sorry.”
“I am too.”
After I said this he made his way flat onto his back again and I stretched myself out beside him. The road gravel was packed down tight, probably from our dancing, and wasn’t any too hard on my back. There was all the warmth of the day rising out of it and it eased up some of the angry sensation in my legs and back. He had spoken out about stars but I couldn’t see any. There was a haze to the night. All of it spun a little before my eyes after our dancing. And my drinking. And purging. And talking. Oh, my talking. I suddenly felt more tired than I had in years and if I hadn’t slept just recently at the beauty parlor I might have allowed myself a light doze.
Instead, though, I just lay there with the map in my hand next to the speechmaker, who had his hair on straight and smelled not all that bad of sweat and flower water, and let the world spin and spin.
Spin like the record that was on the Victrola when the woman came in off the front porch and took the seat she had been pointed to and sat there with her shoes clanked hard to the floor like pieces of old iron. She was holding a small paper bag. It took her putting it prim on her lap and resting her hands on top of it as she sat there for me to understand that it was her purse. Her face skin was weather-beat. Her lips sunk where her teeth were gone. Her hat had some mesh on the front that had got snagged, a few stray berries that should have been a bunch. I did not move at first when the woman asked after her Pearl. The Victrola was spinning a waltz and I had been listening and thinking maybe Dale and I would take a turn and waltz our way into the bedroom. We’d been talking about how maybe now it was time. Do our part. Populate the earth, set some pups loose to frolic. Then Dale opened the door and the woman sat down with her paper bag and asked after Pearl and I had a bell go off in the back of my head, only it wasn’t just like a bell, it was also like a burning. I did not look up. I had a cup of coffee and the newspaper spread out on the table in front of me. Dale had his robot-and-rocket-ship magazine. We had been picking at Red Hot candies in a bowl. It was just a small burning, but a flame all the same. So it was only when Dale said, “That’s my wife, Ottie, right there, there isn’t any Pearl here, is there something we can help you with?,” that I looked up.
“Ottie,” said the woman. She had her eyes on Dale. “I was looking for my Pearl,” she said.
She said this and the place in the back of my head burned hotter and part of me stood straight up out of myself and walked over and sat down on the floor next to her chair and put my head in her lap. I lay my head down and looked up at her and saw there was more than a chance she hadn’t been bad-looking once. Like the woman in the picture my father had kept at the back of his shirt drawer. My father who had told me, when I was old enough to ask about her, that she was gone, then that she was dead, then that he had stolen me away, then, not too long before he died, that she had been incarcerated for trying, two times, when I was little, to put an end to me.
“They let you out,” I said as I lay there with my head in her lap.
“I’ve been good,” she said.
One of her hands came off her paper-bag purse and stroked gentle at my hair. The bell in the back of my head rang and burned both.
“I’m looking for my Pearl,” she said.
“You know any Pearls?” said Dale to me.
“Yes, I do,” I said.
Only it was the me lying with my head in my mother’s lap that said it. The me sitting at the table—the me that hadn’t moved—told Dale he had to see the lady out, that she had to go, that she had to be gone, that I was going to scream.
“Ottie,” said the woman as Dale led her out. “Ottie Lee was the name of his mother.”
“Whose mother?” said Dale as he saw her out to the porch, the Victrola done playing but still spinning, and walked her down the front path and out to the road, where he put her in his truck and drove her all the way, he told me when he got back, into town.
“You want to talk on this now or later?” he asked me when we were back at our spots, him in his chair but not reading his magazine anymore and me at the table holding the back of my head.
A week later there was a letter, postmarked Gary but with no return address, came in the mail with my name on it in neat writing: Mrs. Ottie Henshaw. When a week after that I opened it, I found a half-piece of rose-colored penny paper that said only It’s dark out here.
We lay there quiet. There was rustlings in the trees and some crickets chirruping but otherwise it was just us. There was a nice-size part of me could have kept on lying there a week and another part feeling the gravel—even smooth as we had made it—getting to be sharp against my back. I was set to come to some kind of a decision when the speechmaker said, “Madam, I have been more casual with you than I ought to have been. It is an inner failing and all my own. I apologize. It was a liberty I feel the moral pain of to engage you in dance. You please me greatly, but I am reeling from personal and professional setbacks at the moment and, further, I am spoken for.”
“Well, if it comes to that, I’m spoken for too,” I said.
“Even if I did like that dance.”
“I’ll never forget it.”
“Then we understand each other.”
He found my hand and gave it a squeeze. Those fine fingers of his. It was right then as I was squeezing them back that the boys started hollering for me to hurry it up.
I gave out a good sigh. “You’re going to have to join up forces with us,” I said.
“Will the others welcome me?” he said.
“Hell with them if they don’t.”
“Can you help me up?”
“Can you help me?”
We neither one of us could help the other and finally it was Pops appeared and called out to Bud and Dale that the speechmaker from Ryansville was on the ground.
“I’m down too,” I said.
But it was the speechmaker that the boys fussed over and pulled up and smoothed down and steered along the road and helped up into the wagon, leaving me to heave myself erect alone. I accomplished the task but only because Dale called out at me with a cackle anyone could have told meant he’d been at his jar some more that I needed to pick my ass up or get it drove over. When I got to the wagon, though, Dale was waiting there ready to help me up and the speechmaker had one of his pretty hands out and Pops and Bud were bowing and grinning like I was a noble lady and they were servant men and all I could bring myself to do was
tuck the map in close to my chest and shove them out of the way and hop up a little faster than probably I should have and take my place on the driver’s bench.
It took them a while to stop the playacting and calm down, with the speechmaker talking about what a fine wagon we had in our possession and what a fine, fine mule. “Aren’t you a good boy,” he said, and the mule perked up its ears. He kept saying fine and then he said remarkable—only he said it with a French accent—and pretty soon we were all laughing, Bud loudest of all, but Dale closest to my ear, so I had to push him away a little, since his breath was so awful, and tell him I’d had my dance without him, which caused him to jump up and into the back of the wagon and do a little heel-click and a hop step, then bow and give me a grin. Dale’s display induced Bud to try to juggle the whiskey jars and he broke one of them. Having their supply diminished settled them down somewhat and they all sat back on their bench to chew the inside of their cheeks and consider their sins.
“I have not had a drop this whole long night,” the speechmaker said as we got started up.
Bud said, “Look here, we can change that real quick.”
The neat glugs of the speechmaker and the cheers of the boys beside him was the kind of pleasant prospect I had to consider as we rode along, our company complete, into our final miles. My head had cleared considerably after my dance, and I was holding the map and the boys were happy, and all was good and well and the past with its toothless ladies ran along behind the wagon and couldn’t catch up. So when we saw the smudge of white up ahead on the side of the road and Pops, who had taken the reins for a while, slowed the mule down, I got grumpy at the interruption.
“Well, what is it, did someone lose some of their laundry?” I said.
“Quiet down now, Ottie Lee,” said Dale.
“It’s a Klansman, a real one, looks big, he’s on the road to Marvel,” Bud said.
“Let’s pick him up,” said Pops.
If that pointy-head pile of white sheets walking itself along the side of the road heard us come up it did not give any sign of having done so. Its eyeholes looked straight ahead and its arms churned the air alongside it. It must have been wearing dark shoes and socks because you couldn’t see them and the whole ensemble looked to be floating just up off the ground. I never could stomach anything wouldn’t show its true face to the world, but the boys got excited.
“Climb on up here, friend,” Pops said.
No answer.
“We got lots of room,” Pops tried again.
“My friends don’t lie,” said the speechmaker, joining in. He gave a kind of wiggle through the air with his fingers when he said it.
“Stole this rig from a cornflower,” said Dale.
“We sure did,” said Pops.
Bud gave them each a sharp look. “You were both against it,” he said.
“Never mind that now,” said Pops. “I was there. You all saw me. I helped do it. And here I am driving this fine rig. What do you say about that, good sir down there, ain’t this a fine wagon we got?”
But the sheets didn’t look up. Wouldn’t. I wondered if he had a bottle under his robes.
“Offer him a sip,” said Dale.
“You offer him some of yours,” said Pops.
The speechmaker gave a kind of greasy smile at them both and leaned over the side of the wagon and held out the jar he had in his hand. After a minute he gave a shrug and reeled his arm back in.
“Perhaps later,” he said.
“Yes, sir, whenever you get the itch.”
“Feel that old scratch in your throat.”
They had been squawking like that awhile when Bud spoke up.
“Listen, we all up here believe in the great Kluxnation,” he said.
The others thought this was putting too fine a point on the pencil, because they kind of looked off to the side when Bud said this, and I just gave out a plain old snort, but that didn’t stop Bud, now that he’d got started, from waxing big about the wonders of the Klavern and about all the fine Kluxmen he knew. He said he had met a surefire Wizard once and maybe even set down to a hog supper with a Cyclops. That particular good old boy had eaten fifteen pork chops and called out for more.
“And I’ll tell you what,” Bud said, “the serving ladies brought it right over to him. I’ve never seen a man eat as much and treat the others around him as kind.”
A true Christian, this likely Cyclops of the Kluxnation had been. The world needed more like him. And more like this man walking with such good strong strides through the dark. The Klan was as good and American as fresh peach pie and it would make him proud, Bud said—while I just kept on snorting—to have one of its members ride to the lynching in a cornflower-stole wagon with him and his friends.
“That was handsomely put,” said the speechmaker.
Bud patted the bench beside him and said, “Come on up.”
“Shut your stupid mouth or I’ll climb up there and rip it out of your face and feed it to your friends,” said the big Klansman.
And with that he left the road and set off across the field and a few seconds later all we could see of him was the bobbing of his pointy head above the corn.
The boys grew glum after this, and if they had sipped at their drinks before we had met the Klansman, now they slurped them down like someone had set loose the spigots at the soda shop. The mule went just as nicely and the wagon just as gently as before, but after that parley, as the speechmaker might have put it, I couldn’t conjure any image of a ship or of days gone by with ladies to curtsy and men to bow. Only image came to mind was my father, of all things, late in his days, picking drunk through some salt- and pepper shakers in one of his dusty sample boxes.
You ain’t no captain and this ain’t no ship and you ain’t a fancy lady and the only mystery to it all is why that speechmaker hasn’t lost his hairpiece yet, I said to myself. It was just farmland. Indiana. Middle of an August night. Night full of trees and ropes.
First Bud climbed off the bench and went to set in the back of the wagon, then Dale joined him. We bounced along a while like that, then Pops turned to me without a word and handed me the reins. I took them and he climbed into the back of the wagon with the others. The four of them clinked their jars together and set to slurping down all they had left.
“We’re about at Marvel,” I called back over my shoulder and gave a whack into the dark with the map, but none of them made a sound except Dale, his fine line of jaw lost in the shadows, who let out a long, soft belch. Bud seemed the worst off. He was slumped in the corner of the wagon with his legs splayed out in front of him, not crying again but more like he had got one of his big fists finally pointed at the right target and knocked himself out. I started, even then, to get up a joke about this, but changed my mind and thought I’d do better to let it go. Everyone knew that even though the Klan wasn’t much more than a shadow of what it had been, Bud wanted into it and the Klan wouldn’t let him in. After he lost his family he had stepped out casual some years before with the sister of one of the big boys in the local Klavern and she had told her brother and that had been that. You crossed the Klan and the Klan closed its doors and you were considered ahead of the game if they just kicked in your teeth and skinned you alive. Bud thought he’d got off lucky with a burning cross in his front yard. But then the next night some boys in masks showed up before the garage cinders had stopped smoldering and tied Bud to an engine block. They each one of them, did those boys, carried a knife, which they brandished before him awhile then put to work. Bud said they didn’t do any real damage, just tickled him some, but this was coming from a man put bonus money in my paycheck to drive down the road with him once a month and let him tug on my hair.
Anyone who wasn’t a Klansman or—come to think of it—that boy on his bicycle had told Bud Lancer to shut up, that person would have been sleeping it off until next Sunday. But there Bud lay like he was ready to be stuck with any number of sharp Ticonderogas, and maybe do the sticking himself. Next
time I looked over my shoulder, all four of them, even the speechmaker in his fine linen suit, had splayed themselves out like that. They had their heads propped up against the wagon sides and looked like it was all they could do to keep inhaling air and get the jars up to their lips. I dropped the reins into my lap and unrolled the map, thought maybe it could still help me study my way forward, if I could just figure how to read it, but without Dale lighting matches there wasn’t much beside the sheen of the pictures around the edges I could make out. Everything in its middle where we were was dark. Even Marvel, where the shimmery lines came together, was obscure, the picture of the courthouse easy to imagine, impossible to see.
Woe to the man with a wobble in his legs.” My father liked to say that. In fact, it might have been about the last thing he said out loud on this earth. That night, it could have been Dale’s song. Since about a mile on down the road after I thought they were settled, he got roused up enough to half stand, say, “Lordy me,” and fall right out of the wagon. He landed with a pillow-punch sound in the ditch grass and I set the brake and climbed off to see whether he had broke his neck. The others in the back hadn’t moved a smidge. Bud was sleeping like a baby, Pops looked like his trick in the tree had caught up with him and he was about ready for the embalmers, and the speechmaker was drooling onto his hand and had a long fat leg dangling over the wagon side. Dale was lying still on his face so I put some elbow grease into it and flipped him over. He had a scrape on his cheek and some leaves in his hair. He was looking at me and grinning.
“Some night, wasn’t it,” he said.
“The night ain’t over,” I whispered back.
“What’s left to do?”
“What’s left?”
“That’s what I said.”
He kept grinning. There was bubbles of his whiskey breath popping on my cheeks and nose. There was whiskers of what could have been steam coming out his nostril holes. Some of that steam hit my face and I felt a heat rising up in me.