by Laird Hunt
“Everything,” I said and whacked him across the face with the rolled-up map.
The grin came off his face.
“You were rude to that Klansman, Ottie Lee.”
“You know I can’t stand a Klansman. Last I knew about it you couldn’t either.”
“Tonight’s different. This is Marvel night. Anyway, you know how Bud feels.”
“To hell with crybaby Bud Lancer,” I said. I hit him with the map again. Hard this time and right on his nose. He grabbed my wrist. I tugged away. The heat hadn’t stopped. It had grown stronger. I felt it in my arms. Felt it in my legs.
“You mean that?” Dale said.
“’Course I do.”
“So what are you going to do about it?”
“Quit my job.”
“You going to quit?”
“I’ll quit tomorrow.”
“You better quit.”
“I plan to.”
“You think I don’t know?”
“Know what? That Bud’s the king of the jackasses?”
I hit him again with the map, hard as I could, and this time Dale started laughing like I’d told my best joke.
He stopped laughing when I unbuttoned his pants.
“What are you doing, Ottie Lee?” he said.
“You’re an idiot and don’t know everything, Dale Henshaw,” I said and pulled up my dress. His personal appliance was drooping some, but it wasn’t everything about Dale that was small and I’m being honest when I say some droop down there on that hot, dry night was an advantage. I got this picture as I started of Pops and Bud and the fat speechmaker risen from their slumbers and looking over the wagon boards at me in the moon-dark and it made me whack at Dale’s face again and ride faster. “There’s things you don’t know,” I said to him. Saying it out loud made me bite on a corner of my lip. “There’s lots you don’t know,” I said. Saying it made my eyes turn right, then left, then right again. It made me grunt and growl and groan.
“She didn’t just try to kill me.”
“Easy now, Ottie Lee, you got a lot of drink in you,” Dale said.
“Easy now to hell with you,” I said back. “Let’s see what you got now. Let’s see you do this. Come on.”
Dale was looking up at me, his eyes squinting hard.
“You sure, Ottie Lee?” he whispered.
“Call me Pearl,” I whispered back.
That’s when someone started shooting at us.
It all went quick then. Like an old movie machine got cranked too fast. “Jesus fuck!” said Dale as a bullet winged up over our heads. He’d been flat as a piece of burned pancake the minute before, but now he flew straight up off the ground like I wasn’t on top of him. The gun went off again and Dale jumped back so hard it threw me against the wagon and I cracked my head. It was a big gun with a big report and it didn’t need to go off more than that second time for me to leave off rubbing the side of my head and scramble up on the wagon. The mule was going berserk in its yoke and when I dropped the map and pulled off the brake it leaped forward with a lurch that just about launched me into the atmosphere.
The gun went blam! again and we flew straight down the road and then off it into the shallow ditch where Dale and I had been lying and up into a bean field. Blam! went the gun, and Dale, who had been running behind with his pants unbuttoned, yelped, caught up with us, and climbed aboard. The four boys lay flat in the back of the wagon, hands covering their heads. The gun went off one more time and I felt the night air move next to my ear and thought I heard someone behind us yell out something I didn’t understand, a name I couldn’t catch, then I must have fainted from that bullet I’d almost caught because next thing I knew, I was waking up in a patch of dirt and bean stalk.
“Goddamn, Dale, I fell out of the wagon too,” I said. But no one was there to hear me. The wagon was gone. I stood up and saw where its tracks led off into the dark.
“Hey!” I yelled, but a crop field swallows sound, so it came out quieter than I liked. I yelled again. “Hey, you tin-can fuckers, get back here!” I started to yell once more then remembered that as fast as that mule had been running, we hadn’t rolled all that far from where the shooter had been.
“Shit fuck,” I said, crouching low. The beans were getting tall but they were beat down by the heat and it came to me I’d have to lie down if I really wanted to hide myself. My dress was already a ruin and I’d lain myself down next to the speechmaker in the road and on top of Dale in the ditch so I didn’t see how there was any way some more laying down could hurt. I stretched out on my stomach between the rows and put my cheek down on my hands.
The night had been all noise with never an end to it and now it was nothing but quiet. Just the gentle whooshing of the earth, the tiny stirrings of the beans. I felt cold, then I felt hot. My head hurt and itched at the same time. I’d hit a soft patch when I fell out of the wagon but I knew come morning I’d have about fifteen bruises. For all I knew, those clunkerheads were still lying flat in the back of the wagon with their eyes closed. Probably all saying their prayers. Thinking about them praying made me wonder if I ought to be. Dale and I didn’t get over to church much but we went sometimes. I knew my Our Father about as well as the next person. I’d learned it at the Spitzers’. I’d said it at night in my bed hoping my father would come back for me. I’d said it each time my father had left me there alone again. I’d said it plenty frequent after he came to collect me that last time too. “Our Father,” I said. Only when I said it, my throat caught and it came out wrong. That annoyed me and I was glad I was alone. Then I wasn’t glad. I’d looked earlier out of Sally Gunner’s eyes and seen lights in the trees. Where were those lights now? Had those really been bullets before? Or had it been those lights? Firing blasts from heaven. Salvos from the sky. Was that my message? Was that what the Abraham Lincoln angel had meant? I’d frowned and made faces inside a church where others had their heads bowed. I shouldn’t have ever let Bud drive me down the lane even if it was just to get groped. No matter how bad we needed the money. I shouldn’t have danced with the speechmaker. I should have spoken to my mother. Run down that road after her and Dale. Told her to go to hell. Helped her get there. Told Dale every part of what she had done. There wasn’t any way I could quit my job. Not unless Dale sold that pig of his. He ought to sell his pig. Or we ought to eat her. Chop her and roast her right up.
“Our Father,” I said again and hell if my voice didn’t catch a second time. I’m dead, I thought. I’m lying here dead in my grave and will never rise again. The map is gone with the wagon and I got shot and didn’t know it and now I’m as dead as those boys in their tree. Maybe I’m hanging next to them. Maybe someone sniffed me out. Spoiled goods. Got their gasoline at the ready to douse me. Set me to burn. Surprise! Maybe I was my bright message. Only I wasn’t dead. I could hear my heart. My tongue was dry and my ear was ringing.
“Our goddamn Father,” I said. This came out fine and I pushed myself up onto my knees and into a crouch again. Scanned the surround. Who knew how far away they might be by now? I was turned around some but the wagon tracks looked to lead off in the direction of Elwood. They’d had plenty of time to come to their senses. To come and fetch me. I’d have gone back for them. ’Course I would have. Still, maybe Dale had understood what I meant and told them, My wife is the issue of a madwoman. She’s afraid she’d do things you don’t do. Hurt her own children. Her real name ain’t even Ottie Lee.
Where does it ever end? I was nineteen miles from nowhere; the farce had gone on long enough, it was time to find my way out of the field. Marvel or no Marvel, it was time to go home. I stood up and brushed off my dress and by and by like a bloom birthed out of the long night’s dream a young cornflower woman walked by. I didn’t see it at first but she was holding a pistol in her hand. When she got up on me she raised the pistol and pointed it in my direction. She held it on me as she kept walking and I didn’t breathe, then she pulled the trigger and it went click and she smiled and pulled
it again then lowered it and stopped smiling and spit and then vanished down the wagon tracks into the dark.
Home was where I was heading and home was where I would have gone. I believe that. My pillow was calling me. I wanted a bath. I wanted my side of the bed. I wanted Dale lying there next to me, no matter what he had told anyone else, already deep into his snores. Dale and our property would be my Marvel. A smiling cornflower with her gun could be my Marvel. Old ladies and magic pickles. Catfish suppers. Sweet mules and sleeping pigs and slaughter time. My mother gone up to Gary. Dancing on the gravel in the dark. I quickened my step. Shivering despite the heat, so I rubbed my arms. I’d stop shivering. I knew shortcuts. I’d be home before I knew it. I’d have been home.
But just a hundred yards into my retreat I heard a motor. I saw headlights and put out my hand. Of all the souls it could have been, it was Candy Perkins. She had been to Marvel, seen it all, borrowed a car, and left out to get herself freshened up for more fun. Now she was on her way back.
“You look like shit, Ottie Lee, hop in,” she said.
I pulled open the door. Climbed in with what I thought was some jaunt to my step. Raised up one of my eyebrows and gave her a saucy smile. Called up one of the remarks I’d meant to make to her when I saw her again. It was about old boyfriends and beauty pageants. But before I had gotten it even halfway out, I had my cheek on her shoulder and was blubbering like Bud. I cried and sobbed so long and loud, she shut off the engine.
“My good Lord, what’s got into you?” she asked me.
For a while, though, even after she’d started the car back up and got us going toward Marvel, all I could do was shake my head.
CALLA
I stepped up slow from the river, like it was me not the good green water that had decided to follow its lazy ways. Slow through the day and the day’s fierce hell of heat with my feet muddy and my ankles dripping and my forehead on fire from sitting there so long. Fool out there in the beat-down grass. Waiting. There was a horsefly liked the look of my right shoulder and two deerflies trying to sleep in my hair, get all cozied up in my curls, set up in the hot dark, the sweet dark, the devil dark in there. I killed them each one quick, then felt lonely, then laughed a little without any smile to it at myself.
Some old leg-cripple lady I had never seen before was sitting on the porch of a blue house I didn’t know, and when I straightened up from my laugh she gave me a good long frown. I stopped a minute and gave her a smile and slow wave to let her know that it wasn’t entirely all the cheese had slid off my cracker but also so I could look around and try to see how it was there could be a house I didn’t recognize on a road I had walked down many was the time.
“You all right?” said the old woman with her twisted leg. She raised her cane at me when she said it and when she raised her cane up and up into the air over her head I knew it was just the day doing this to me, just the day making its rearrangements against what it had already offered and what it still had in store.
“Yes, I am all right, and I thank you for asking,” I said.
“None of us is all right today, you ask me,” she said. “This is a devil day and what have you been doing down there at the river anyway and I’m here visiting my daughter and this shit hell happens and we all ought to leave on out of this town.”
“I was having a picnic,” I said and held up the basket I had just about forgotten I was holding. Some of the red frill poking out from its lid had river mud on it and the handle had pulled a little loose.
“A picnic!” she said.
“But it was too hot. We gave it up.”
“Too hot I’d goddamn guess. What do you mean, you were having a picnic? Day like today. You know what they’re getting up to over at the courthouse. They’re fetching up their pitchforks. Putting on their horns. A picnic! I’ve never heard the like. I bet ten goddamn dollars you could fry an egg still snug in its shell on the top of your hat. How hot is it? I know we beat a hundred. And that’s just where I’m setting in this porch shade.”
“It was cooler down by the river,” I said.
“Cooler my country ass,” she said. She cackled. She stamped her cane on the porch.
“I put my feet in the mud. It was cool down in there.”
“Girl, you need to come out of the heat. Where are your people? You ought to get on back to them and put your head in some shade. We keep it cooler out in the country. You all don’t have any breezes. They make you pay for them over in here? Is that why no one here has any? This is a motherfucker of a day. No wonder they’re getting their ropes out.”
The old lady kept on talking and I smiled and gave her another wave and wished her a nice visit with her daughter and mercy from the skies for all of us, especially the boys they were set to murder, and she lifted up her cane at me and I walked on, up from the river—an easy mile of streets and houses even if it was hell-poker hot and I didn’t see anyone else past a dead pigeon and a pair of squirrels flicking tails at each other—and back home.
My idea had been I would hose off, then come in quiet through the back door and get my picnic things put away and the dirty basket hidden and myself cleaned up and then who knew what next, who could know, but the house was empty, there wasn’t a one of them there, they were all gone. I’d got a picture in my head when I’d come up from the banks that when I got through the gate I’d walk smack-dab into Aunt V and Uncle D fussing themselves back and forth across the yard, getting ready to leave town, Aunt V fussing small and fast, Uncle D fussing big and slow. Hortensia would be sitting somewhere in the shade while they fussed. Fan in her hand. Maybe singing. Is how I’d seen it. But there wasn’t anyone shade-sitting or singing or fussing in the yard except the old blue jay Uncle D kept wanting to shoot.
“Uncle D?” I called out. “Aunt V? Hortensia? Where are you all?”
I searched the house. Top to bottom. Just like I thought maybe they were playing hide-and-seek on me, were up in the attic behind Uncle D’s old war trunks, or in the big second-floor closet behind Aunt V’s Sunday gowns, or down in the basement where it was darker and cooler, where the rats took their naps and ate their snacks, where the spiders set up their webs. I went next door and I knocked. I went across the street and knocked there too. No one answered.
“Hey, now,” I said and stood in our front yard, in the sun, mud on my feet, basket in my hand, tapping my elbow against some of Aunt V’s begonias. They were bright and pink in the burned-out yard. Everything sun-charred like the sky had left its iron on too long. But not those begonias. I felt down into their dirt. She had just watered them. She never watered in the middle of the day. With the wet dirt on my fingers, I went back inside, into the living room, looked up at the light fixture, and there it was. Uncle D had a big glass eyeball with a hook on its top he’d hang when everyone left the house. “To keep watch.” Whatever there was to see, it would see it then whisper it all later into his ear.
“Aunt V?” I said. The big glass eyeball spun slowly. They had really done it. I rubbed hard at my own eyes with the fingers I’d had in the begonia dirt and made a crumbled smear across my face. I went to the kitchen sink and spit then, a good big gob, because I didn’t like the taste of sweat mixed with dirt.
We’re going to leave you here,” Aunt V had said and I had laughed out loud and Uncle D had said, “No one is leaving anyone,” and Hortensia had said, “I’m scared.”
“Scared of what?” I had said and Aunt V had said, “That’s just like you to ask a fool question,” and Uncle D had said, “That is a dumb question but she isn’t a fool.”
“It’s not like they’re going to lynch us all,” I said and Hortensia said, “How do you know that, Calla Destry?” and Aunt V said, “You don’t know what they are going to do and that’s just the truth,” and Uncle D said, “I would like to see them try,” and I said, “I’ll only be gone an hour.”
“For a picnic!” Aunt V said.
“I made a promise,” I said.
“What we need to do
is go down there and bust them out,” Uncle D said.
“I don’t want to go down there,” Hortensia said.
“I like Uncle D’s idea,” I said.
“No one is going down there. They got half the cornsilk town and half the cornsilk countryside down at the courthouse,” Aunt V said.
“Just half?” I said. “We can handle half!”
“We’ll give you your hour, then we’ll go bust them out,” Uncle D said.
“No one is busting anyone out,” Aunt V said.
“I’m so scared,” Hortensia said.
“One hour,” Uncle D said.
I had been gone for two. Maybe more, if I was honest. Sitting down there by the river with my basket. Watching the dragonflies. Counting the reeds. Thinking on the speech I was going to make. What I would say if he said one thing or what I would do if he said another. Sitting there making up songs I didn’t have the voice to sing. Waiting for someone who didn’t come. Just like the fool Uncle D had said I wasn’t.
I’m not a fool, I thought. A car went by. I left the eyeball and the begonias behind and ran to the front gate and looked out after it. It was a cherry-red roadster. Cornflowers I didn’t know in the front seat. Nice little car. Couldn’t help but think of those boys they were getting their ropes ready for. Those boys had had a speedy car too. I’d seen the older ones plenty around town. Who hadn’t? I watched until the roadster got gobbled not too far down the street by a heat mirage.
You know why he didn’t come, I thought.
There was still begonia dirt on my face. Warm and wet and done being crumbly now. The front yard had been quiet after the car had passed but suddenly here came the blue jay ugly-winging his way around from the back and set in to screeching like it was him had made his decision and was bragging it up to the neighborhood. The jay was loud and the begonias were bright and I said, “Say we go find him,” so I lifted the lid of the basket to make sure the gun was still there. It was sitting snug and dull-shiny in the middle of the two untouched ham-meat sandwiches I had made, each flanked in its turn by my good shoes, which I had put in there for safekeeping.