The Evening Road

by Laird Hunt

  “We were hungry, that’s true enough even if you didn’t mean it, but that’s not why we were fighting,” said the shorter one, picking up his own sandwich. He had wrists I liked the look of. They were slimmer than it seemed they ought to have been, almost delicate, despite his broad shoulders.

  “Then why were you two fighting?” I asked.

  They both shrugged. Said something about the hot day. About a nightmare shift they had just pulled over at Fuller’s, where they did day labor by the ovens and sometimes worked nights. They said something about the boys in jail the cornsilks were making the neckties for. About how big the moon had been lately. About how they had fought each other plenty in the past. How they had known each other since they were boys. How the world was a mean bastard and seemed most days like something you needed to take a swing at.

  We stood silent together a minute, then the shorter one gave out a kind of snort sounded strange after the quiet we had fallen into and said he reckoned I had played a trick on both them and the cornsilks in their car, that it was a good trick and he bet, from looking at me, that there was more where that came from. He had had a smart-as-a-whip aunt named Betty Peconta with the same look in her eye. She’d once tricked a salesman out of a barrel of Swisher Sweets and she had smoked every last one of them too. I told him that I didn’t think it had been what you could call a trick, at least not the kind his aunt had played, and the taller one agreed with me that you wouldn’t call it a trick; it had been more of a strategy. Trick or strategy, said the shorter, it didn’t matter: I was here talking pleasant in the shade and not getting beat with a pipe or who knows what. He said it paid sometimes to be clever in this world, and I said not enough, it didn’t, and they both nodded their heads.

  “Did you really eat an orange today?” asked the taller one.

  “I did. Still have some of the taste in my mouth.”

  “I had an orange once. Up in Wabash. Only it was kind of dried out. Was this one dried out?”

  I shook my head.

  “She doesn’t want to talk about oranges,” said the shorter one.

  “Maybe she does. How in hell do you know?”

  I said it was true that I didn’t. That it had been delicious and I didn’t know what else to say.

  “Delicious is saying something,” said the shorter one. “Delicious is plenty.”

  Delicious it was and delicious is plenty, I thought. I asked them their names and the taller one said, “Ben Able,” and the shorter one said, “Robert True.” I told them my name was Calla Destry and that I lived over on the east side and maybe would still live there again after lynching day had done dug its graves. I thanked them both, then told Ben Able he needed to shift his weight and cock his right hip when he threw his hook, demonstrated what I meant, had Robert True hold up his hand and punched hard into it, smiled when he said I hit harder than Ben Able, which I don’t doubt was accurate, picked up my basket, said I was glad they had enjoyed their sandwiches and asked them if now I could give either one or both of them a ride.

  Ben Able said they were heading not too many miles down the road, that they had a place in mind where they could wait out the day and the night too if it came to that. I said I thought it would come to that and they nodded and Robert True said if I didn’t mind maybe they could ride on the running boards until we came to their turnoff. I said I didn’t mind, that good old-fashioned gallants like they were could ride inside the car or out of it. Out of it, they said. And you can just slow down a speck when we get to the turnoff and we’ll jump off and be just fine.

  So we went over to the car and after they had taken a good long look at the mop doll on the front seat, I climbed in and they climbed on, crouching and holding on to the spare tires and we started down the road. We went by fencerows and barns and shacks and some underfed cows rooting in a mud puddle like pigs. We were pluming up plenty for a while then we hit good blacktop and the pluming stopped and we passed a great yellow swath of honeysuckle and I breathed deep and sped up and Ben Able smiled a set of pretty white teeth in the window at me, and Robert True, his long hair streaming behind him, did the same, then tapped and made a gesture I should roll the passenger window down. I leaned over and did this and he smiled again and reached in and grabbed up that mop doll and yanked it out the window and for a second I thought he was going to throw it into the ditch. Instead he held it out up next to him and hollered and Ben Able pounded on the roof of the Dictator and hollered too.

  There’s a mind made for magic in there,” my Leander said to me once as we were resting one next to the other by his pond. I had come to see him as I always came, after dark in the borrowed Dictator, after we had done one of our nighttime drives and I had left Aunt V and Uncle D and Hortensia back at home.

  “What kind of magic?” I said.

  He took my hand and kissed it, then kissed it again and said, “The world-whipping kind.”

  Only kind of whipping I had ever thought about giving the world before I met Leander was the fist variety, the variety Ben Able and Robert True had been talking about, the Roscoe kind. Roscoe had called me over after he saw me palm-smack a boy bigger than I was for making fun of me about Hortensia. I had smacked the boy hard enough to make him take three steps back and I would have smacked him again only Roscoe had me come over and straightaway asked me if I wanted to run with him. And we did. To trouble and away from it. Leander said he liked a girl could hit hard and think smart both. Said that as far as he was concerned there wasn’t any kind of girl in the world better than that. Roscoe would have laughed at me about my hands shaking, but he had liked having me run with him and it was him had taught me to stop palm-smacking and to punch.

  Aunt V had watched me punch a great big cornsilk girl had made some remark about the color of my hat ribbons on market day not long after they had fetched me past all hope from the orphan house. I had punched her hard in the mouth and the great big girl had gone down on one knee. I would have punched her again like Roscoe always told me I should if they kept talking, and that great big girl had kept talking, but Aunt V had grabbed my arm and hauled me away.

  “But that’s how you do it,” I said.

  “And you’re lucky she’s cornsilk garbage and by her lonesome,” Aunt V said. “You’re done with doing things that way.”

  Uncle D felt just the same. So when Roscoe had come up from Indianapolis to see me not long after I had put that girl-giant onto her knee, Uncle D met him at the door with his service revolver. Roscoe had started in right away to talking his fat-fist sauce and calling Uncle D “old man” and “Grandpa,” and Uncle D, showing no signs of weak eyes or any of his big smile I already loved so much, had put his gun in Roscoe’s face and then, when Roscoe still hadn’t shut up, he carefully, slowly, lifted his gun and fired a round into the doorjamb about an inch above Roscoe’s head. Roscoe didn’t come back for a while and I did get done dropping cornsilk girls after that. So done it wasn’t long before I had a job selling flowers around town. And not much more than an inch after I started that job I sold a flower to a man calling himself Leander.

  So that even as I joined in the hollering and went fast down that road with Ben Able and Robert True, Leander was wiggle-dancing in front of my eyes and singing out the things like I had magic in my head that he was always saying to me and that I had hoped he would say to me down at the river that morning but he hadn’t because he hadn’t come. And maybe that was because it was lynching day and maybe it wasn’t. Either way I didn’t give much more than a tinker’s nod when first Ben Able tapped on the window and then Robert True called out that their turnoff was just up ahead. It was only after I slowed down and Robert True handed the mop doll back in and they jumped off at the mouth of a dirt lane went twisting back into a barley field that I thought to wave. Only I didn’t know if they saw me do it. And I was thinking about slowing down and maybe even turning around to give them a better fare-thee-well when about that time appeared in my rearview mirror a vehicle of some stripe or other
and I thought maybe it was those sorry cornsilks come back with friends. So I hollered out a good-bye even though there wasn’t anything outside the car but the corn now to hear. The corn close everywhere around me as I brought the Dictator back up to speed.

  Leander; Roscoe; Hortensia; our parents, who’d died in a laundry-house fire... it was the fuel gauge on the Dictator brought me out of my reveries. I had been rolling south and west, set on my idea of what I was going to do, when I hit a hard bump on the road and my eyes flicked up, then down, and I saw what I should have seen ten miles before. I gave a good swallow at the way the fuel dial was pointing to empty and even pulled over a minute next to some wild white hydrangea to think.

  ’Course there wasn’t any thinking to it, just some figuring, so I picked up the mop doll and threw her onto the backseat and took off my hat and slipped out the dollar bill I kept tucked moist inside it under the label. I set the dollar on the seat under my leg then reached into the basket and pulled out the gun. The safety was on so I tugged it off and put it back in the basket. Then I put my hat back on and drove three miles east and two miles north and pulled up under the shiny orange signs of the Gulf station outside Elizaburg. We had driven past it plenty was the time late at night when the lights were turned off and all was quiet. Uncle D kept fuel cans in the shed. Filled them at a cornflower-friendly station in town. Had stories he didn’t like to tell about cornflowers and corntassels and cornroots running low on gas when they were out in cornsilk country. Stories that ended badly. That was our style of story in those days. Which hasn’t changed. Not near enough. There I was and there you go.

  I had barely got the Dictator turned off and the engine still ticking loud when the attendant came quick out of the building and started wiping at my windshield with his rag. He wiped awhile and even started talking about how much bug splatter there had been on the roads lately and how thick the sweat bees had been and how much we needed rain and what he had had for his lunch, and I kept my head down low under my hat. The while of wiping was over quick enough, though, and he came around to my window still talking about sweat bees and sure enough some were landing on his hairy forearm even as he talked about them, digging in down at the loud arm glisten and sucking it up with their face straws.

  While he wiped and talked, an old woman came out of the building behind him and sat herself down at a bench by the door. She was dressed in blue calico and scuffed black shoes and didn’t have any teeth. I looked sideways at her, and the attendant went around to the back of the Dictator and started pumping and while he pumped did some more wiping at the back window with his free hand. He had set aside the talking and was whistling now. He wasn’t a bad whistler. He was well into his middle years and had a gut on him bulged out of his beige work shirt that looked like it contained a fine-size pig. He finished his pumping and started back around to my window, and as he came around the old lady leaned forward, looked hard at me, and said, “Goddamn, boy, that child in there you’re pumping gas for is a cornflower.”

  She croaked this out and, flash-quick, the attendant’s greasy forearm and those sweat bees had been on it got fused in my mind. I saw that arm flying in with yellow wings through the window and grabbing at me and yanking me off my seat and into the station where it would beat on me until I was just a pile of mash then leave me to the old lady, who would sweep me up and throw me out with the garbage.

  As he came up to the window I pulled the gun out of the basket and held it in my lap. If he saw it I didn’t know straightaway because what he said next, and he looked me square in the eye when he said it, was “Fifty cents, please.”

  I looked at him and he looked at me.

  “Fifty cents, that’s it?” I said.

  “Yes, miss, we don’t try to take advantage here.”

  “That’s a goddamn cornflower, Erastus!” the old woman said. She had leaned back against the wall of the station. Her words came out flabby because there wasn’t any teeth to help them. Aunt V had trouble with her teeth. She worked on them every day with Colgate powder. Made all of us work on ours too.

  “Be still now, Mama, I’m with a customer here,” said the attendant.

  I had left the gun in my lap and taken the dollar bill out from under my leg. When the attendant took it from me, our fingers touched a little and he said excuse me. There were three sweat bees working an angry scrape on his forearm. Others hovering in the air. I tipped him ten cents.

  “You come back here anytime now, miss,” he said. “It’s a damn awful shame,” he continued after a pause.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I’m no sir. I’m Erastus Fellows and go to Quaker meetings and that old lady on the bench wishing you bad luck is my mother and she doesn’t go. It isn’t every bone in her body is evil. Just the majority of them.”

  “I can hear you. I can hear every word,” the old lady said.

  “I know it, Mama. I know you can. And yet here I stand, still speaking.”

  He tipped his hat at me and said, in a lower voice, that setting the Quaker ways he believed in aside, I was wise on a day as bad as this one to carry a gun, that I should keep my eyes open and watch careful where I stopped. What was happening in Marvel wasn’t right but it was happening, and I had to look careful.

  “It’s just plain wrong,” he finally said.

  “Wrong?” I said.

  He had a little smile on his face now was probably meant nothing but kindly and his forearm didn’t look like any monster sweat bee and his little eyes were bright. He nodded and gave the window frame of the Dictator a sloppy pat then stepped away. And here is the second funny thing that happened in my head while I was at the Gulf station in Elizaburg on that lynching day. Even if it was him being kind and his mother over on her bench gumming out hate, the truth is if I had been out of the car and had my feet under me, I would have hit him, not his mother, then hit him again, then done a dance and stamped him into the ground. I would have stamped him and his kindly words and his “Fifty cents, please” into the ground. Then thrown salt and lime powder onto what was left. Then I would have spat into the lime powder and watched my spit sizzle. Then let the old lady toss him out with the trash.

  Wrong wasn’t the word for what was happening. It was a thousand miles from what needed saying. There wasn’t any word on the earth a cornsilk could say and make it sound right and so what a cornsilk needed to do was just keep his kindly mouth stapled shut. Even this sweet fat Erastus Fellows who had maybe never hurt a fly or a sweat bee and pumped his gas for all.

  I had the gun in my lap and now my hand went back around it. I could shoot him and let his old mother, who at least said what she thought, gum out a few last words over his body. Maybe I could get out and hit him first. Lord, I could hit hard. Robert True had said it, and Roscoe couldn’t give a fig about me and my mind magic, but he had made me his lieutenant. A few good punches, then blam! And maybe one right now. Right now out the car window. All this came upon me so quickly I had to take a deep breath and shut my eyes and let my traitor hands that had started into shaking again go limp to push it back down. When they were open again, I thanked him and left the gun in my lap and started the Dictator and drove away.

  I’d meant to head straight on down west and south again and get to where I knew now for sure I was going, but what I did once I was out of Elizaburg and into the countryside was stop and get out of the Dictator and scream. I screamed, then pounded on the passenger-side spare tire of the Dictator, and then yanked the mop doll out of the car and smacked it over and over again against the ground and then against a tree. When I was done smacking I pulled myself and it up onto one of the lower branches and found that once I had started climbing I couldn’t stop, even holding on to that mop doll. I got up to a high branch, screamed again, then thought about the boys in jail or already out of it and I tied mop doll up and let her hang and I liked letting her hang instead of those boys something fierce.

  I watched her hang awhile, twisting this way and that, and felt my brea
thing settle. It was an oak tree I was in. Strong. The leaves fluttered dark and full in the hot air of the afternoon. I saw my hands had calmed some and seeing that made me breathe even more easy and looking at her and feeling calm and breathing more easy and seeing out over the fields I realized I was thinking about that piece of butcher paper on Big Bob’s desk. His map picture had dribbles of whiskey on it. Pot of silver paint. Getting ready for its frame of pictures. Garland of cornflowers. Land below could use some whiskey on it. Drops to settle it down. Calm its creeks. Cool its lanes. Suck out all its slivers. Quench its thirsts. Catch a spark and set it aflame. I looked out and let my eyes trace along the field edges with silver. Cobwebs across the shivery corn. Big Bob had written Marvel at the middle of his page. So I knew since I was already miles from Marvel that I was somewhere out on its edges. Maybe part of that frame he was planning to make. All of us one after the other out on its edges. None of us knowing just what we were looking at.

  “Wrong,” I said. I said it thinking about Erastus Fellows but also because I didn’t know what Big Bob’s picture map was for. How could I know? He hadn’t said and I’d barely seen. I said “Wrong” and wished Hortensia was there and felt emptied out and didn’t think about shooting anyone anymore. Just thought about Big Bob’s shop and the quiet there and the map picture lying on his desk in the cool dark.

  “Oh, Calla,” Hortensia had said. The last time I had seen her. The last time I saw her. Five years, it was. Couple of happy young fools playing dolls and trying to teach ourselves the “Wang Wang Blues.” Sitting there in the front yard of the orphan house. Put that on Big Bob’s map. Day a cornsilk couple had come and had us run races together and climb trees just like this one and even swim in the White River then had talked about how light-skinned we both were and what a marvel that was, especially Hortensia, and you could hardly tell and we had both smiled because we were young and stupid and then they had showed us how they only had one spot in their Ford and then they had told us their choice and then they had taken her off with them forever.