A Piece of My Heart

1

In the dark he could see the long tubular lights nose down the mountain toward Bishop. They crossed the desert after dark, leaving Reno at dusk and slipping across the desert at midnight toward Indio. He sat in the front room in the dark and stared through the doorway, smoking and listening to the beetles swarm the screen and the air sift through the window. Someplace away a cab-over ground down and started across the meadow to the mountains. In town he could hear a car horn blowing a long time and tires squealing, and then it faded and sank back into the night. He breathed a plume of smoke in the dark and ran his fingers through his hair.

“So,” she had said, “how long will you be gone?” setting the dishes on the window sill and staring out into the purple light. “What’s it going to be like?”

“It’ll be all right,” he said. “I’ll be back.”

And she had turned, her thick hair over her shoulders, blacker than his, and disappeared into the house without another word. As if she had just caught herself being lured into an arrangement and had drawn back to save herself on an instinct she had forgotten existed, since for eight years there hadn’t been a reason to save herself. He had listened to the door shut.

In a while he had gotten up from the table and switched off the bulb and gone to wait until it was good dark and he could leave in the cool.

He wondered, sitting alone there, just what you do. When your husband up and just steps out of the life you have with him, after living eight years cultivating a dependence that he won’t suddenly up and drive away into the night without saying why, what do you do? What alterations can you make? He felt he would have to settle with whatever adjusting she had done, when he came back. He tried to think of some other way, and decided there wasn’t one.

He blew smoke in the darkness. A car came along the dirt road, its headlights tracking the shoulder, the radio playing so that it sounded very close to the house. The car reached the end of the road, turned back into the desert, and the music floated away.

At nine o’clock he walked to the back of the house, switched on the bulb, filled the kettle, and set it back on the flame. The kitchen smelled cold, though it was warmer than in the other rooms. The stove smelled of gas. He rinsed the Thermos and set it upside down on the sink. He took down the powdered coffee and sat at the table and waited.

He remembered sitting in the little two-room warming house in Hazen, waiting at the table for the doctors to come from Memphis. He had rinsed the mugs, set them in a line on the wood counter, each with a spoon, set down the tin of powdered coffee, and begun waiting for shooting time, warmed by the gas ring and the bulb light shining at the corners, bending shadows into the back room where the cot was. He waited in the cold until the doctors came down the car path, their heavy cars swaying and rocking, throwing their high beams across the field to the corner of the woods, where he could see through the half-glass door, red cinder eyes flashing and disappearing into the trees.

He had waited at the window until they came inside, old men in long wading boots and canvas coats, and took the pan off the stove and made the coffee while the men’s voices filled the room, laughing and coughing until it was warm, and he had slipped away to wait on the cot until he could see the window whiten and the first silver haze behind the treetops, and herded the men across the field in the stillness toward the timber so that the cabin sank and became just a single light and finally disappeared in the burnt flakes of sunlight. In the cold the men grew silent and morose like lumps of soft coal, plodding into the trees, their boots squeezing together, until the ground gave way to water. He had set them in the boats and waded down into the flood, towing them through the trees until he could hear the ducks squabbling and conniving a hundred yards farther in the deep water. High up he could see their imprint trading cleanly on the pale sky. He set the men out there, held the boats while they stumbled out into the thigh-high water, spoke the directions they ought not go, toward the channel of the creek, then left them wading noisily through the water, laughing in the shadows, until he could not hear them and had towed the boat back to the ground.

He had gone back then across the field to the house and waited, dozing under the light, until the morning had grown up bright and glassy. Then he walked back across the bean rows to the boats, where he would find one of them, always one, returned, lolling in the shallows, asleep and blue-lipped, a strand of yellow hair across his temple, asleep before light had ever come. He towed him sleeping back into the timber, through the black water to where the others were shouting and roiling the water and shooting, to where the ducks were down and bleeding on the lilting surface, swimming in circles among the trees.

He had waited there in that shack for the doctors to come from Memphis, or the fish salesmen to drive from Gulfport and Pass Christian, or the Jews from Port Arthur, driving all night through Louisiana and arriving before light, puking in the muddy yard, and bellowing in the night. He had waited there mornings, thinking of nothing, waiting for whomever old Rudolph took money from (a thousand dollars a head) and sent out, rinsing their spoons and sliding away noiselessly out of the light into the cold back room, waiting to take them in for the ducks.

Until that ended, after three years, without even a notice to old man Rudolph, or a message. He had slipped off with Jackie, under the nappy lights, blue and gauzy as if a chill fog had settled in between them, driving through Little Rock after midnight, all the way to Bishop, where he felt enough distance was opened between him and the shack and the fields and the whole life there that it would be too hard to go back. And when that distance was finally made, he felt safe.

He spooned coffee into the Thermos and poured water until it steamed in his face. He corked it, jostled the bottle, and snapped off the light. He walked back to the front room, sat by the door and listened for Jackie, for her breathing, for any sign, a groaning in the bed staves to indicate she was there, since she had gone without a word and closed herself in the room and never made a sound once the light was off inside. He sat, the chair squeezing in the dark, and waited, listening for the frailest sound. He could feel the breeze channel underneath her door, the gentian running east through the house back to the desert. He stood and walked to the window ledge, picked up his paper sack of rolled-up clothes, and went to the screen and looked across the plateau toward Bishop, dissolved in the night, the road to the mountains invisible except where a pair of elongated lights twisted down off the valley.

He thought that if your life was filled with beginnings, as he had just decided today that his was; and if you were going to stay alive, then there would be vacant moments when there was no breathing and no life, a time separating whatever had gone before from whatever was just beginning. It was these vacancies, he thought, that had to be gotten used to.

He lifted the latch and walked across the porch toward the truck. Jackie lay asleep, hearing him walk across the boards and the wet grass, heard his shoes in the gravel, and the nail settle of its own weight back into the eye of the latch, heard the truck heaving and hissing. And she lay still, unwakened by the sounds, unaware he was leaving, aware only of the sounds and of the cool air rippling the sheet and flowing out under the doorway into the room where, if she had awakened suddenly and sat startled in the bed, she might have called him, thinking he was there, sitting in the darkness smoking, and believed that all this had never happened.

2

Early in the morning he had lain awake in the gray light and let it all revolve through his mind again carefully.

Twelve years ago he had lain under the eaves at Helena in the little rose-wallpapered room, alert to the ticking through the cypress timbers, hearing the weight on the stairs, the coarse shuffing through the door, and turned his head toward it but couldn’t see.

“All right,” he said, startled, a heavy sweet smell riding the darkness. “I can’t see you now. Who is that?”

“It’s me,” she said, letting her quilt subside and releasing the gardenia smell into the room. “I can’t wait no longer.”

Her knees bent into the bedding as he was trying to climb to see her in the dark, and only saw her breasts rolling toward him and disappearing, and her arms taking him up and holding him until, when he tried to talk, he could only say, “Honey, honey.” And that was all.

In the morning she stood and kneaded her eyes and swung her arms through the dusty light, her underarms pale and dark at once. The bed smelled sour.

“Robard,” she said, stretching her fingers through her damp hair. “You wake up now.” (Though he was certainly awake.) She stared at him, her lips everted, and he strived to move his eyes, inch by inch, toward the painful sloping sunlight.

“I got a riddle,” she said.

“A what?” he said, smelling the sheets all around him.

“How come the birds wake up singing every morning?” She smiled and set her teeth edge to edge.

“What?” he said, not hearing it right.

“Cause,” she said, sticking her full belly out and smiling. “They’re happy to be alive one more day.” She laughed out loud.

And all at once her expression changed and she looked at him as if she had never seen him before and was surprised to find him lying there. And he had seen paleness in her eyes, some disappointment he couldn’t calculate but could feel commencing, like some dead zone inside her had uncovered all at once. He thought that it was the print of something lost, something irretrievable, though it was all he knew, and he felt that was only part of it.

A year ago a letter came unaddressed and sat a month in general delivery before the card came warning him to pick it up. It said:

Robard:

We are in Tulare now. W. W. pitches. Come and see me please. I still love you. Your cousin. Beuna.

After a month in the mail slot, it smelled like the same gardenias, thick and rank, flagging to the onionskin so his neck prickled when he smelled it, and he decided then that he had to go, if it was just to see what was there, and could work on explanations later.

He had sat beside her in the Tulare fairgrounds in the smothering night heat and watched W.W. on the brick dust under the lights expel one spiteful pitch after another that no one could ever hit or even halfway see, the last six batters going back without bothering to swing, so that the game was over in an hour and a half.

Beuna had on a red sunsuit printed with elephants running, the halter pinching her breasts up so that he doubted if she could swallow all the way down. Her stomach had forged over her shorts and he thought then that she was much fuller now, after twelve years, but ripe like a peach orchard pear, and womanish in a way that he had never ever seen before and never even really imagined to be possible. She sat beside him and slowly pressed her bare thigh against his until he began to feel like some great whirling gyro were being turned against him. And she never once uttered a word nor made a sound, and for the hour and a half he had sat as though some hot current were passing into his leg, turning a circuit through his body and passing out through his fingers, taking all his strength and resistance as it went.

When she released him, she set her head sideways and stared at him, holding him, like the high point on a compass.

“Robard,” she said, her voice sounding like a bubble rising up out of the cramped insides of her throat. “I love you.”

The first banquet of grandstand lights fell dim, sinking them in queer afternoon shadowlight.

“All right,” he said, looking across the dingy field for some sign of W.W., knowing he was baiting calamity by even being there.

“I’m so wet,” she said. “My God!” She fished her hand in his trousers and squeezed him there until he felt a noise down in his throat that wouldn’t come loose. “Robard?” she breathed, bringing her mouth to an inch from his ear and squeezing as hard as she could. “Do you love me?”

“All right,” he said, unable to get his breath.

“Is that all?” she said, her eyes pinching up meanly and her grip relaxing so that he had time to feel his saliva get thick as gravy.

“You do what you can,” he said, sucking air through his nose, trying to keep his throat constricted.

“Well,” she said reproachfully, staring at her toes on the next riser down. He could hear W.W.’s voice calling out of the dark across the field. Behind him other voices were laughing. Suddenly she had him again, foisting her hand in his trousers as if she were driving a nail and until he felt like some awful vision was about to appear in front of him. The last standard of lights died off, huddling them in a wretched darkness. “Since you put it thataway,” she said slowly, “I guess it’ll be fine.”

On the road back across the desert he began to try to settle things. In general, he knew, things didn’t end in your life because by all sensible estimations they ought to. Or because people involved did things or changed places that would ordinarily make carrying on any longer a natural hardship. Because once a force got a start in you, it grew and took on dimensions and shadings and a life separate and sometimes as complete and good as your practical, good-sense way, he would see that, and understand that nothing in his life ever ended. Things only changed and grew up into something else.

In three weeks a letter arrived at general delivery written on drugstore stationery. It said:

Robard:

We are not in Tulare now, but are in Tacoma, Washington. It ain’t nice here and rains. He played good at Tulare and pitched at Oakland one time, but everybody got a hit, and he rode the bus up here the next day and I come by car. It is just a big ditch behind our little house and I am afraid it will flood and drownd me. I don’t know what will happen to me now but something will. Smell this. I love you still more. Beuna.

He held the paper up to the light, standing in the long, airy vestibule of the post office, and smelled the paper where the writing was, and took the letter quick out to the gutter and tore it to pieces and let it flutter through the grate into the dry sewer mouth.

In two weeks a letter came postmarked Helena, Arkansas, with a message written on Holiday Inn stationery. It said:

Robard:

lam home. W. W. says he will pitch at Oakland again and is still at Tacoma playing kid games. His mind will change. I love you more. B.

He had sat on the steps of the post office thinking about W. W. set up in a strange little bungalow in Tacoma, W. W. wondering what could happen to a man’s whole life in the space of one week and how he could get it all back on track and pry Beuna loose from her stepfather’s house and get her back where he was so he could have a chance at Oakland again, where somebody could see him.

A week later a letter arrived that simply said:

Robard:

W. W. has seen the light I knew. . Beuna.

He figured she must have made a bet with herself that she could treat it all like she was the victim and he was the culprit for wanting to stay and pitch baseball, and she had won it.

And after that a letter every week from Helena pleading with him to come, always on the same rose onionback, with loud promises and whatever smells she felt were useful to what she was asking. And he had stayed and stayed and put each letter in the grate and tried to forget about it.

Though he wondered just what it was he had seen years ago and seen up in Tulare the instant he said, “All right,” when she was hoping for something richer, and what it was that made her strand W. W. out in some strange foreign country, just so he’d quit doing the one thing he knew to do. Twelve years ago he might have believed it was just some act of girlishness she played at, brought along by the fact that she liked mingling with her own cousin ten feet out of reach of her mother’s headboard — and that that right there had caused enough private turmoil to make some show of remorse creditable. And the only thing like remorse that she knew then was to make herself look cast down by something mysterious she couldn’t explain and that in all the commotion going on at 3 A.M. there wouldn’t be time to talk about. Except that didn’t work out. It had gone on too long to be just girlishness. And when he had seen her in Tulare, she had fixed on him with her pale flat eyes like a specimen she was studying, and there had been again the same forlorn miscalculation he had always seen, just as though it marked a vacancy she was beside herself wondering how to fill.

3

At five-thirty he had gotten up, dressed, and driven up the Sierra to Mammoth and sat in the truck while the light got darker and turned green just as the rain commenced through the fog. At six-thirty the foreman drove up in a company truck, climbed up into the bed wearing a yellow rain suit, and read off a paper that said the job was closing because the state had to make a study. The foreman said a job was open at Keeler laying pipe for a feeder to the aqueduct, and anybody wanting to sign ought to make the noon list. Men started moving off even before he had finished, heading for their trucks, anxious to get out of the drizzle and down to Keeler before the list filled and they had to scrounge. When the foreman had finished reading the paper, he stuffed it in his pocket, climbed back in the truck and drove off.

He walked back to the truck thinking he could drive back and eat breakfast with Jackie and think about going to Keeler when he’d slept.

He drove out from Mammoth back to the highway south. Up the Sierras the rain was pulling apart, opening gaps to daylight. He was beginning to think that there were some things he hadn’t understood. From the first, eight years ago, when he had left Hazen and transported himself and her across the country, and had started to pick work where he could up the Sierras, he had been as desperate as anybody, and every bit as panicked when a job shut down, and had gone off to wherever there was another one opened. And he had felt the same panic starting, listening to the foreman, the same creepiness the others had disappeared with to Keeler to patch into whatever was there. Except he couldn’t go off and start opening ditches and pitching pipe without having made a choice. When the first job closed in Lone Pine eight years ago, in 130-degree heat, he had panicked. And the first thing he remembered seeing was men rushing like they were bolt out of a cannon. And he’d gone with them because he’d gotten caught up and couldn’t resist. And all that rigmarole, he thought, had just given the panic something to work on, and switching jobs up and down the Inyo had come to seem like the best solution because it was a solution, and that was better than nothing.

Though after eight years now, he thought, he ought to wonder if it was the best solution anymore, and in fact if it had ever been. If he wanted the job he could just drive down in the morning and stand at the site until somebody goggled over in the heat, and step in without any questions.

So that what he was thinking about, of course, was Beuna. All those years of running desperation and internal commotion getting jobs and being anxious might have been just a lot of useless barging around, like a man with his sleeve in a thresher. And that whatever she had infused in him back in Helena, twelve years ago, hadn’t been dormant, given all the activity it seemed to have sponsored, but just misunderstood.

The rain had spread out into a silver sheet below the fog. The truck struck out from under the clouds to the light and started off the long grade toward the desert, where he could feel the air already hotter, two thousand feet up off the flats. The road he could see down below bent across an oval meadow demarking the edge of the Sierra and the desert. A file of poplars divided the meadow along the shoulder connecting the toenail of mountain to the outskirts of Bishop, which sat off a ways in the purplish mist halfway down the horizon.

But what happens to you, he wondered, worrying already — what happens when she manages to infect you with something dangerous, keeping it alive for years on the strength of gardenia odor and a few flourishing letters? What happens when you recognize it’s important — what you did and what she did and would do, and when and how and to whom, and that it’s left you with a kind of ruinous anxiety that just one thing will satisfy?

He took the long curve down into the stretch of shaded road toward town. It worried him, because he knew that things in your life didn’t disappear once they were begun, and that your life just got thick with beginnings, accrued from one day to the next, until you reached an age or a temperament when you couldn’t support it anymore and you had to retire from beginnings and let your life finish up on momentum. And he wasn’t to that point yet! So that whatever she had fostered inside him couldn’t be counted on simply to retire, but to protrude into the middle of everything indefinitely and give everybody a bad time, unless serious adjustments were made to transform her and it into something he could live with, in the way everybody lived with things.

He drove into town to the front of the post office and stopped, thinking, in the heat, that seeing Beuna as an impediment or as something to be survived was only one way of looking at her, and not by any necessity the way she was. He stepped in where the air was cool and dry. The lobby was a long empty arcade with wired-up skylights that clouded the room with submerged shadows. He picked up the letter at the registry and walked back out into the sunlight, looking up the street to see if he saw anyone he knew. He thought about breakfast and decided to let it slide.

He stuck the letter under the visor and started back toward the mountains. He drove out across the meadow until he crossed the Works Progress bridge at Inyo Creek and stopped and got out and walked back to the railing. The breeze stiffened and flicked the page, and he read the words over and over, poring over them, his lips forming the words each time. And after a while he walked down in the yellow and green checkered light and stepped into the sedge and laid the envelope on the surface and watched it turn and dance away until it snuffed like a flicker of light. He puzzled for a moment at the letter, the page fluttering in his hand, and suddenly folded it into quarters and backed out of the wet grass. He climbed the bank and crammed the page down inside his instep and started back toward the truck.

He thought again that to see Beuna as an obstacle was only one narrow-minded way of looking at her. And not the only way. Since another was to think that he was not finished with this part of his life yet, wife or no wife, this part left with Beuna, and with women in general, and that there was still this much left, this much of an opportunity to do with the way he wanted, and that thirty-four was still young, inasmuch as you only got to live one time and this was his time right now.

4

He drove down into Arizona and slept in the afternoon behind a motel in Flagstaff. He got up at four o’clock and drove straight until dark, and slept on the truck seat outside Bluewater, New Mexico, and woke up in the high sunshine and drove into Grants to eat breakfast. At Grants he stepped out in the breeze, between the highway and the Santa Fe yards, and watched cattle cars being switched onto the main line from south Texas, the cattle asleep on their feet in the cool tinted air. He watched the train get made up and disappear out to the east, then drove to Albuquerque and up again across the purple lip of the Manzanos back into the desert.

Out of Santa Rosa a Buick convertible was pulled down off the road and a blond woman in white pants was standing beside it in the sun, shielding her eyes with one hand and waving the other hand lazily as though she were signaling someone up the road. The Buick had had its left taillight bent in, and the warning signal was flashing dimly in the sunlight. He looked up the highway to see if someone was standing back up on the shoulder, but there was no one, only the black imprint of Santa Rosa quavering on the low table of the desert.

When he stopped, the woman quit waving and rested her hand on her hip, but kept her eyes shielded with her fingers. He got out and walked along the car, looked down in the back seat and saw it strewn with beer cans, some with beer spilling out.

“Sun’s real bad for your features, know that?” the woman said indifferently, removing her hand so he could see her small face.

“What’d you do to it?” He motioned at the car.

“He says the pump’s busted, but I don’t know nothin about it. I know it stopped.” She pinched up a piece of her blouse and pulled it away from the skin.

“So where’s he gone?” he said.

“Variadero, building a hamburger palace.” She shaded her eyes again and studied him as if she had heard something she hadn’t liked. He slid in and waggled the key.

“It wouldn’t do me no good to go turning nothin.” She stepped up into the shade of the car and plumped at her hair.

He tried the key. The motor turned over nicely, but quit short of starting. He held the accelerator down and twiddled the key back and forth trying to spark it, but it wouldn’t fire, and he finally stopped and squinted at her standing outside in the heat. She looked a lot like a lot of women he’d passed up, little blue-star ear studs, hot skin that made her look older than she was. It made him just want to slide away.

She stiffened her mouth. “Half them’s Larry’s,” she said, flicking her eyes away, “He drinks his breakfast on the way to work, I drink mine on the way home.” She laughed. “I don’t pick up no hitchikers, though.”

“Nobody said you did,” he said, staring at the big chrome dashboard trying to figure if one of the gauges was measuring what was wrong with the engine.

“I don’t, either,” she said.

“That’s good,” he said, and climbed out. “Look here, I can’t get your boat fired up.” He flicked the sweat off his chin.

“What the hell am I supposed to do?” she said, glaring out at him.

“I’ll take you down the road,” he said.

“Curvo,” she said, raveling her mouth into a smirk.

“How far is it?”

“What difference does it make if you’re going that direction?” she said.

“None,” he said, and started back toward the truck.

She reached inside, yanked up a split package of beer, and came behind him. “I got my valuables out,” she said, and laughed.

“You going to leave it blinking?” he said, looking unhappily at the beer.

“Hell with it,” she said, and climbed in the truck.

She sat high up on the seat, her hand flounced out the window letting the breeze flit between her fingers. She was different the first moment she got in the truck, a little more fragile a framework, he thought, than she had been standing outside beside the car. She had a small round bruise underneath her ear which she worried with her fingers, and every time the wind stripped her hair back against her temples, he got another look at it.

“Air temp makes a difference,” she said, watching the hot air through her fingers. “They put ’em in trucks.”

“Is that right?”

She looked at him, then turned her face into the breeze.

“What is it your husband does?” he said.

She cranked the window up and gave him a stern look. “Hod carrier. He’s eight years younger than I am.” She reached forward, ripped the package of beer a little more and set a can on the glove box door. “California’s the other way, ain’t it?” she said, pulling the top.

“Is that right?”

“You done stole something, ain’t you?” she said, letting her head roll against the window frame.

“Off.”

“You ain’t stole nothin, then. I steal off every day, but it don’t get me anyplace.” She laughed. “You think I look old?”

He looked at her short neck, and he tried to make out he was estimating. “How old are you?” he said.

“That ain’t the point,” she said, having another drink of the beer and setting the can on the armrest. “That ain’t the goddamned point. Point is, how old do I look? Old? You think I look old?” She watched him carefully to see if he was thinking over telling a lie.

“No,” he said.

She raised her head slightly and widened her eyes. “I’m thirty-one. Do I look like it?”

“No,” he said, thinking that if he had one guess out of a hundred possible ages, thirty-one would’ve been second after forty-one. “That means the old man’s twenty-three.”

She gave him a surprised look. “I ain’t worried about that,” she said.

“Nobody said so.”

She took another drink of her beer. “I take him to work in the morning and come get him in the evening. Them little town bitches come wherever he’s at and switch their asses in his face, but they know I’ll be pulling up there in my white Buick at six o’clock holding a sack of beer in one hand and something better in the other, so he don’t have to go nowhere to have fun but with me. I’m the goddamn fun,” she said.

“Where is it you live?” he said, snuffing his cigarette.

“Rag-land.” She pointed off into the desert, where he could see the gauzy pancake hills in the south.

“How far you drive every day?”

“Seventy there, sixty back,” she said. “I mix it up.”

He started figuring miles and looked at her and added it up again, and looked forlornly down the highway. She took a last long gulp of beer and let the can drop between her legs, pinching her mouth in a hard little pucker, as if she had just decided something.

“That’s a hell of a ways,” he said. “I’d let them switch their ass if it was me.”

“You worry about you,” she said. “I own the Buick. If I want to drive it to the moon, I will.”

She turned away and stared at the desert. He figured he’d just get out of it while he had the chance and make a supreme effort to keep his mouth shut.

“I just don’t want to lose him,” she said slowly, speaking so softly he had to look at her to see if she was talking to him. “I’ve had about as much trouble as I can stand,” she said. “I’d just like to have things easier, you know?”

“Yeah,” he said.

She pulled another beer out of the package and peeled off the top. “We ain’t been married but four months,” she said, taking a tiny sip and rotating the rim against her lip. “I had a husband to die on me seven months ago. TB of the brain.” She looked at him appraisingly. “We knew he had it, but didn’t figure it would kill him quick as it did.” She smacked her lips, looked at him again, and wrinkled her nose. “Flesh started falling, and I had him in the ground in a month.”

She gradually seemed to be taking on appeals she hadn’t had, and he decided just to let it go.

“In Salt Lake, see?” She was getting engrossed and tapping her beer against the window post. “We was in the LDS, you know?”

He nodded.

“I was the picture, you know, the whole time we was married.” Her face got stony. “And after he died they all came around and brought me food and cakes and fruit and first one thing, you know. But when I tried to get a little loan to buy me a car so I could go to work, they all started acting like somebody was callin them to supper. And I had been the picture of what you’re supposed to be. I let ’em have their meetings right in my house.” She drew her mouth up tight. “Raymond was born one — see? But I was raised on a horse farm outside of Logan.”

She took another sip of beer and held it in front of her teeth and stared at the desert. It was past midday. The sun had turned the desert pasty all the way to where the mountains stuck up. He watched her while she looked away, watched her breasts rise and fall, and maneuvered so as to see the white luff of fabric between her blouse and her shoulder showing the curve of her breast, and it made him feel a little shabby and a little bad and he disliked himself.

The woman let her breath out slowly. “I had a friend that had that Buick, just sitting in his garage.” She kept looking at the desert. “I told him if he’d let me pay it off a little bit every month, I’d buy it. I always wanted a Buick, and it never seemed like I’d get one. It’s queer to have to get down before all your dreams start coming true.” She looked at him and her nostrils got wide. “Anyway, I quit the LDS right there,” she said, “and got the hell out of that Salt Lake City. Let me just tell you, don’t be fooled by them. They’re cheap-ass, I swear to God.”

He looked at her blouse again to see in the little space, but she had swiveled sideways of him and the space was gone, and he let his eyes wander on back to the road.

She tapped the can against her teeth. “I think I’m better now,” she said. “Less quick to judge. It ain’t easy to have a window on yourself.” She slid back in the seat with her arms folded across her stomach as if she felt better. “Where you going?”

“Arkansas,” he said.

“Where’s your wife at? Did you leave her home to take care of your babies?”

“I didn’t say I was married,” he said, feeling itchy.

“I know it.” She sighed. “You ain’t hid nothin, have you? You’re right up on top with everything.” She smiled.

“I guess not,” he said.

“I ain’t getting after you,” she said.

“Ain’t nothing to get after,” he said. “How come you to get married again so quick?”

“Bad luck,” she said, and laughed and made her shoulders jerk. “Why don’t you drink a beer? I’d feel better if you drank one.”

He took a look in the mirror and saw nothing but the markers flashing back. “I’m fine,” he said.

She pushed a ring top out the ventilator. “Let me slide over — don’t nobody know me at Curvo anyway.”

She shoved across the seat and socked her head against his shoulder and put her heels on the dashboard. She let the can of beer, a soft tuft of foam pushing up through the tap, rest on her stomach, and arced her fingers around his thigh. And all he could think was that he wasn’t going to do anything to stop it.

She held the half-warm beer can up to his face and rolled it back and forth. “Larry likes that,” she said, smiling. “It makes him relax.”

He looked at her hiding up under his shoulder, her green eyes with the tiny black centers peeping at him, and reached around her so that her face was drawn up against his chest.

“Do I look thirty-two?” she said, her eyes mounting with tears.

“God, no,” he said. “You think I look thirty-four?”

“You’re married,” she said.

“So are you.”

“That’s right,” she said. “Let’s don’t talk about that now.” One of the tears broke and wobbled onto her lip.

“I want to know how you got married again,” he said, holding the truck to the road.

She hugged him so the tear got wiped off, and got her arms around his stomach. “Oh, I went to Albuquerque with my car and moved out to Alameda. You know where that is?”

“I ain’t been there but twice,” he said, feeling warm inside.

“It ain’t far,” she said. “I took a little house by myself and drove to work every night at Howard’s. I call it Howard’s.” She drew one fingernail up his leg and made the back of his neck cold. “So I was driving my car one night along this road where there wasn’t any light, drinking Ezra Brooks. And got off the pavement somehow and hit this guy straight on and killed him, just mowed him like a weed. He never even knew what hit him. He just went down boom.” She flopped her hand upside down on his thigh. “Just like that. I didn’t even have time to honk. I stopped and went back and seen he wasn’t moving, and felt of his heart, and it wasn’t even fluttering, and I figured it didn’t take a nurse to know he was dead. But there wasn’t a drop of blood on him nowhere. He was clean as when he’d put that suit on. So I walked off down the road to the Amoco to get one of them boys to call the police. And thank God I had thrown my Ezra in the ditch, cause when I was walking up the road some drunk slowed down and tried to pull up behind me, and instead of getting beside me, the bastard hit me, and knocked me in the ditch and broke my leg. Son-of-a-bitch just kept going, with me all broke to pieces. It wasn’t until the police came along and found my car and the guy I hit that they saw me in the ditch up the road bawling my head off.”

She looked up at him hopefully.

“So how’d you end up married?” he said.

She drummed her fingers on his leg. “Cause they cramped us up in St. Dominic’s Hospital on account of a flash flood in the mountains.” She puckered her lips and didn’t say anything for a time. “Put all them people in the hospital, and I had to share a room with a man. And that turned out to be Larry. He had his hernia operated on from carrying bricks. And quick as he got out, he started bringing flowers, and we started going one place and another when I got out, and we just sorta caught on. Ain’t that romantic?” She smiled.

“How long did all that take?” he said.

“Two months, give a week,” she said, “portal to portal.”

“That ain’t too long,” he said.

“Life rushes,” she said, and eased her hand up and unzipped his pants. “I’m tired of talking,” she said, watching her hand tour around in his trousers as if it were after something that wouldn’t keep still.

5

Curvo was off the highway ten miles on a gravel track that made a giant curve east and then north again and marooned the town, which was only a red clapboard building, two glass-bulb pumps, and a file of butchered outbuildings, with the desert open all around to every direction. He could see that all the outbuildings were cages of various sorts, patched in with coiled chicken wire to permit inspection from the outside. The largest coop, a square weathered shed built of sawed two-by-fours with the door removed and fresh chicken wire basted over the opening, had a newly stenciled sign that said zoo.

He stopped between the pumps and the building and looked out the woman’s window waiting for someone to come out. The building appeared to be a store, and the plate window was flocked with red fishing bobbers and plaquettes of leader line, and a pair of split cane fishing poles crossed corner to corner. A rooster crowed from down among the cages, and he heard it flap its wings as though it was trying to get away from something.

“Where is everybody?” the woman said, lifting her hair off the back of her neck. “Some kid works here — I seen his old flat-bed last week. Beep the horn.” She grabbed at the wheel, but he caught her.

“I’ll get out,” he said, taking a look back at the cages. “What’s your name?” he said.

“Jimmye,” she said.

“Jimmye what?”

“What’s yours?” she said, aiming her chin at him.

“Robard.”

“What is it?” she said.

“Robard.”

“That’s a damn poor name.”

“You’re real sweet,” he said, shoving the door to.

He walked down the row of cages, looking in each one to see if someone was squatting inside tending to whatever was locked up. In the zoo pen there was nothing but a few scraps of wrinkled cellophane and a gamy smell like something had just died inside. The second cage was a high four-poster frame built of creosote posts, covered with chicken wire and full of raccoons, two fat ones and eight or nine little ones piled into one corner. All the raccoons stopped and stood looking at him, then all at once went back to climbing the cage. In the third cage a maroon, black, and gold rooster had removed himself to the top branch of a fresno bole that had been dragged in from outside and gouged in the ground on the side farthest from the raccoons. It looked to him as if the coons were avid to get at the rooster, and were only waiting to find some tiny fault in the mesh that would turn the tide in their favor once and for all. The rooster was eying everything guardedly, his beaky head snapping from one little coon face to the next, in case one came squeezing through the wires, when he’d have a whole new set of worries.

The woman all of a sudden honked the horn and held it a long time so that the quiet in the yard was exploded. He grabbed a piece of dirt and flung it at the truck.

“What-in-the-shit!” the woman yelled inside the cab, her head erupting out the side, her mouth broke open. “Who’s bombing me?”

“Cut out that blowing. You ain’t helping nothin.”

“I’m hot as shit!” she yelled.

“We’re all hot,” he said, frowning and feeling desolated.

She ducked her head back in the truck and disappeared below the back window.

A latch snapped at the end of the row and a little girl in jeans let herself out of the last cage and walked up squinting in the sunlight, as if he were someone she was accustomed to. She drew her hair away from her ears, catching it high up with a rubber band, making her face look perfectly round.

“You got a mechanic?” he said, looking behind her to see if anyone else was coming up out of the cage. The girl was wearing a shirt with arrow pockets and mother-of-pearl buttons that belonged to someone bigger than she was.

“What’s the matter?” she said, her face arranging itself into a little frown.

“I don’t know,” he said, looking back at the truck, hoping the woman wouldn’t lay down on the horn again. “These here your animals?”

The girl surveyed down the row of cages as if she were trying to make up her mind. “Yes,” she said.

“They’re nice,” he said, taking another uneasy look at the truck and trying to think how to bring up getting her Buick worked on.

“You want to see Leo?” The girl cocked her head into the sunlight so that she could see him with one eye only.

“I seen him if that’s him,” he said, pointing at the rooster.

“That ain’t him,” she said, smiling slyly. “He’s back yonder.” She motioned behind her.

She walked back to the cage she had just come out of, past two box pens that were empty, and stopped outside the last one and pointed in at a big rufous-colored bobcat lounging in the dust, staring at nothing. The girl looked at the bobcat and then at him as if she was expecting a compliment. He studied the bobcat a minute, feeling a little cold commotion inside that had to do with wild animals and the suspicion of what one could do to you before you got turned around. At the bottom of the cage, almost at his feet, there was a big long-boned jack rabbit resting on its haunches, eying the cat quietly, its skinny ribs shoved against the wire so that tufts of fur gouged through in tiny hexagons.

He looked at the girl, waiting for her to say something that explained.

Leo began panting, and strings of thick clear spittle slid off his tongue into the dust. He seemed unconcerned with the rabbit, though the jack seemed intensely concerned with him, and stared at him, its skinny ears flicking around nervously and its nose testing the air as if it were gauging the seriousness of its predicament.

He stood back and stared at the rabbit, and didn’t say anything, though after a minute he noticed something about Leo he hadn’t seen before. The right back paw was missing at the low joint, the stub matted with thick reddish hair and sprawled behind the other one as if it contained the same big padded paw.

“What come of his leg?” he said, catching his knees and staring at the cat’s empty leg.

“Borned bad,” the girl said, looking at Leo the way he’d seen a salesman look at used cars. “Hillbilly give him to my dad in Missouri. Found him in a hollow log, starving.” She wrinkled her nose as if there were something nasty about it. She squatted on her heels and wiggled her fingers through the wires and called the cat, who rolled over onto his back and squirmed in the dust and stretched his forelegs straight up in the air. “C’mere, Leo,” she said, and the cat relaxed and looked at her with his head upside down, eyes half open and gleaming. The rabbit looked at her intently and squeezed back into the corner where she was.

“He thinks I’m calling him.” She giggled. “Don’t he wish.”

“I wouldn’t doubt it,” he said.

The rabbit went back to measuring the distance.

“You see my coons?” she said, standing and walking up the row to where the coons were decorating the wires.

“I saw ’em,” he said.

He looked back at the rabbit and had an impulse to kick the gate open, but the cat bothered him, lounging in the dust, half awake, waiting for somebody to make just such a move. He followed the girl back up the row.

“Got the two old ones,” she said, “and the rest just come by themselves.” She looked at him as if she were waiting to see what he would say. “I’ll sell you one for sixty cents.”

He could smell foulness drifting out of the first cage. “Don’t think so,” he said.

“Yes I will,” she said, looking at him professionally.

“I’ll buy that rabbit,” he said.

“Ain’t for sale,” she said, and looked out across the empty road and slowly bent her line of vision toward the truck sitting in the dead sunlight. “That your truck?”

He studied the truck. It looked like it had been dropped out of a passing airplane. “Yeah,” he said.

“Can’t you fix your own truck?”

“Lady’s car needs fixin. Ain’t the truck.”

“Lonnie won’t be back here before tonight,” she said. “But he won’t work on nothing. Be too dark. He won’t have the right light.”

“Who else is there?” he said, feeling put off.

“Nobody,” she said. “He’s in Tucumcari. Be roaring drunk when he comes back. Won’t work on nothin.”

He looked at the sun, cerise and perfectly round, pushing a porous shadow from the raccoon cages over the tips of his toes, and thought it might be two-thirty.

“Is that the woman in the truck?” the girl said.

The back of the woman’s head was visible in the oval window. She was working on her face in the rear-view.

“That’s her,” he said.

“You’ll have to spend the night then, or go to Tucumcari,” the girl said, turning back to the cages. “There ain’t no mechanic from here to there. There ain’t nothing up that way.” She pointed up the road into the desert. “Lonnie’ll be good in the morning. He’ll fix it. He ain’t but twenty-two, but he ain’t a fool.”

“Where’s your daddy?” he said, looking up at the desolated back side of the house. A white tub washer was set outside in the dirt with one leg bent up.

“Gone,” she said, and pursed her lips.

“Are they dead?” he said.

“They gone to Las Vegas. They ain’t come back.”

“Do you expect them?”

“I guess,” she said, and looked at him indifferently.

He was getting nervous. “What time is it?” he said.

The girl consulted her wrist watch, a thin silver strippet with a face as small as her shirt buttons. “Three o’clock,” she said. “We got a room. Got a fan in it if Lonnie ain’t sold it.”

A breeze lifted off the desert and passed through the cages and carried the raccoon foulness back in his nostrils.

“I got to clean that empty cage,” the girl said, wrinkling her nose to let him know she could smell it.

“What was in there?” he said.

“That there rabbit,” she said, moving a strand of her yellow hair from across her temple where the breeze had left it.

He looked back at the rabbit hied up against the wire, studying the bobcat strangely. A tiny vein of panic opened inside him. “Lemme buy that rabbit,” he said quickly.

She frowned. “Leo gets hungry when it gets cool,” she said. “That rabbit don’t know that, though.”

“I bet he’s figured it,” he said.

She giggled and let him know it didn’t make any difference what a rabbit knew. The breeze worried the stray short hairs above her forehead and made her look grown.

“What’s your name?” he said.

“Mona Nell,” she said, wagging her shoulders and forcing her hands down inside her pants pockets. “What’s that woman’s name?”

“I believe she said Jimmye.”

“That’s my daddy’s name,” the girl said, and laughed.

He looked at the truck and the woman sitting high up in the seat, her back facing him, teasing her hair in the mirror. He felt like he ought to get away, and at the same time felt helpless to maneuver a way to go about it.

The girl giggled again and squatted and began teasing the raccoons, who were piled up against the chicken wire.

He walked back to the truck feeling as if the girl had applied pressures on him that he couldn’t quite put his finger on, but that had him whipped.

“Where the hell is everybody?” the woman said, scowling out the window, her hair plumped up and her eyes purple as a bruise.

“Gone,” he said softly. “Won’t be back till night.” He leaned on the window sill and looked back at the girl, squatting in the dust.

“That’s the shits,” the woman said. “What the hell am I supposed to do if I got to get Larry at six?” She fattened the corners of her mouth.

“Looks like two things,” he said, staring at the ground. “Ride to Tucumcari. That kid said there’s mechanics there. Or stay put and call somebody. You can get Larry to come get you.”

She frowned at him as if she didn’t like hearing him say the name. Her eyes got small. “They got a telephone?”

He looked at the eave of the house and saw a trunk line strung to the road. “I guess,” he said.

She looked at the wire. Perspiration had formed in the roots of her hair. “Son-of-a-bitch, Larry Crystal,” she said.

It occurred to him that she had just said her last name.

“He’ll be off with his piss-ant brother drinking beer quick as he sees I ain’t coming. That’s the trash he is.” She lowered her brow as if she could see all that was coming.

The first truck to pass the station hissed through the curves and ground out into the road — a tandem hauling diesel smoke into the desert. There was large writing on the sides through dust and coagulated grease, WHACK MY OLD DOODLE, and below that, TAKE ANOTHER LITTLE PIECE OF MY HEART, as though one line followed on the other and made good sense. He looked at the writing and scratched the back of his neck and wondered what that meant. He thought about asking her to have a look at it, but she looked mean and he decided against it.

“What time is it?” she said.

“Something till,” he said.

The girl was down at the far end of the row of cages and was cooing to the bobcat, saying his name over and over in a sweet voice.

“Let’s get out of here,” she said.

“Where we going?” he said.

“A tourist court up at Conchas. You and me is staying in it. Let’s git.”

He looked at her to let her know he was considering it. “What about the car?”

“Shit on it The car ain’t going nowhere.”

He rested his forehead against his wrists and stared at the dirt, trying to think about what to do. “I thought you was worried about it,” he said.

“Let’s get out of here, all right?” she said. “Worry about that tomorrow.”

“What about. .?”

“What about shit!” she said. “Leave my business to me. If I need any advice, I’ll ask your little cunt you’re so hot about.”

“I ain’t hot,” he said, keeping his head sealed against his wrist and spitting in the dust.

She got quiet, and he decided to let things be quiet awhile.

“I’m waitin,” she said.

“What’re you waitin on?” he said.

She glared, and her eyes darkened in the middle, and he understood it was the way she looked when she wanted to seem angry.

She sat staring straight out at the long curve in the road, breathing deeply. The breeze switched and came up from behind the building. The girl sat on her haunches, making a high-pitched hooting noise like a dove. He figured the woman needed time to figure out he wasn’t going to have himself ruled by somebody that didn’t mean anything to him, no matter what the reward was, or even if it meant giving up the reward.

“Ain’t no need being mad,” he said into the hollow of his arm.

She looked away.

“Ain’t no need to go somewhere else.”

“I’m past the point of carin,” she said, letting her shoulders relax.

“They got a room right here,” he said.

She looked at the long red building, then at him and back down the road.

“The boy can look after the car in the morning,” he said, feeling things sliding away from him.

She caught a corner of her lip between her teeth and drummed her fingers. “They got a air temp?” she said.

“Fan,” he said.

Her pale face seemed to pale more while he looked at her, like coarse cloth held to the sun.

“Might as well,” she said, looking out in the desert toward the hazy cactus figures pinpointing the horizon, and sighing. “We can’t dance in this heat.”

6

The girl led them inside the house, where it was murky and cool, and stood behind a store counter before an old ledger book. The room was lit by whatever light could angle through the flocked window, and by a mint-colored bulb in the cold case at the back of the store. He had to get near the page to see to sign, and when she pointed the place, he looked at the book for a moment and signed “Mr. & Mrs. S. Tim Winder,” using the ballpoint chained to the ledger. The only other registry on the page was at the top, written in square penciled letters that said “RAMONA ANELIDA WHEAT, THE QUEEN.”

The girl led them between two steepled rows of Vienna sausages and Wheat Chex, through a green portiere and up two flights of stairs to where it was quiet and hotter, and where it smelled to him like an icebox that had been locked up and left in the heat. Sunlight illumined a square of green linoleum, and the room drew together inside like a kiln. There was a brown metal bed, a serpentine bureau with a doily, a chair, and a string-pull ceiling fan with one blade removed.

“You better open a window,” the girl said, blinking in the heat and holding her ponytail up to let off the hot air. “It’ll cool off when the sun moves. You’ll be hollerin for a blanket.”

“Ain’t there no toilet?” Jimmye said, looking desperate in the heat.

“That fan works.” The girl reached on her toes and yanked the string. The motor hummed as if it were straining against resistance, and the blades stayed still. “Pot’s downstairs,” she said. “We got two.”

He went to the window, pried it up, and stood back to allow in the breeze, but there was no moving air. The truck looked abandoned in the lot, sunshine gleaming off the hood. He tried to think about what had gotten him up this far, up into this room when he should have been on the highway halfway to somewhere, and he couldn’t figure it at all.

“Ain’t there no sinks?” the woman said.

“In the pot,” the girl said. “I’ll put a glass in there. Lonnie’ll be back tonight. You’ll hear him cause it’ll be a noise when he does. He gets drunk as cooter brown.”

“I can’t wait,” the woman said, flouncing on the bed. “What else does he do?”

“Nothin,” the girl said, and let her jaw fall open and shift back and forth while she stared at the woman. “Check-out’s eight-thirty. You get charged another day.” She threw the key at the dresser and slammed the door before the woman could speak.

“A.M. or P.M.?” she yelled, but the words got slammed in the door. “Little split-ass. A kid pimp — ain’t that the shits,” she said.

He stood staring down at the truck.

“I know you,” she said, laughing and bouncing lightly on the bed. “You got the eye for that little twat.”

He walked across and stood in front of the bureau and looked at her and sighed, his hands in his pockets, wondering whether it would do just to leave her sitting, go off for a Grapette, and never show back.

“What’re you lookin at?” she said, and slumped on the side of the bed, watching him meanly.

He shook his head.

“What’re you shaking your ugly head at?”

“Not anything,” he said, trying to quit thinking.

“You think you’re some hot young stuff, don’t you?” she said.

“I hadn’t thought about it,” he said.

“Oh, yes, you did,” she said. “You thought you were too good to screw me, but I got some bad news for you — you weren’t.” Her eyes had gotten round again and she looked frightened. “You’re right to my level. It may of took you a while to get here, but you’re here, by God.” She retired to her elbows.

“Where’d you get that colored mark on your neck?” he said.

“He give it to me,” she said proudly. “It ain’t a mark. Don’t you know what a hickey is, Robert? Did you think somebody’d been beatin up on me?”

“I didn’t think about it,” he said.

“I guess not.” She poked around after the mark, as if she thought she could feel it.

The fan had begun circling. He picked up the chair and brought it to the side of the bed. He sat with his elbows on his knees and his face collapsed in his hands. She smiled at him and he knew she knew everything.

“You gonna stay mad at me?” he asked quietly.

“I ain’t mad,” she said. “You ain’t nobody.”

“That’s right.” He listened to his breath escaping between his fingers.

“You ain’t hidin nothing—are you, Robert?”

“No,” he said.

Her smile sweetened and flesh collected in a little pouch under her chin.

“How come you’re up here with me? I’m a married woman,” she said. “Ain’t you married?”

“I guess,” he said.

“Ain’t you got no sense of right?”

“I guess not,” he said.

“This here’s adultery, boy,” she said, smiling keenly. “Who’s it paying the bill?”

“Whoever wakes up second, I reckon,” he said.

She pressed in his direction, letting her legs scissor a fraction. “You going to strand me, are you, Robert?” She let her calves rub his knees, her pants pushing above her ankles.

“What’s-his-name’ll be to get you,” he said.

“Sure will,” she said. “You better hope he don’t find you here, or there’ll be shit to fly.”

She kept smiling, and he had the impulse to get out the door and not stop until he had reached the line to Texas.

“He won’t find nobody but you,” he said.

She pushed off her elbows and straddled him, her pants squeezed up on her knees, her eyes wide. He set his hands along her calves and wedged them inside the material, and felt the cords in her thighs. She lay on the spread, breathing evenly and letting her head wag side to side.

“He won’t find me,” he said. His throat was dried up.

She hummed in her throat and turned her face so that she stared at the metal uprights above the foot of the bed.

He unbuttoned her pants and slid them around her thighs. Her skin was bluish. She hissed through her teeth as though it were a pain commencing. He laid her pants over the chair back and pushed his hands up her legs. She bridged her neck and sank her elbows in the ticking.

“Robert?” she said, her arms laid out, her hands made into fists.

“What?”

“Do you think I look thirty — I mean, with you looking at me?”

The linoleum buckled. He tried to get himself onto the bed and pay attention to what she was saying all at the same time.

“No, sweet,” he said softly.

She drew her legs up and eased his hand, faced down the bedspread and smiled.

“You don’t look twenty where I’m at,” he said.

“I ain’t mad at you no more,” she said, her voice lost inside her throat.

“That’s sweet,” he said. “Now that’s real sweet.”

7

At seven o’clock it had turned gray down in the east. The coons were against the wires, staring at the sun sagging by degrees. Leo lay quietly, eying the rabbit, who had dozed as the day cooled and was not awake, the breeze pushing back lightly against the hatch of his fur, laying bare a smooth white undercoat.

He lay beside the woman in the brown light feeling the breeze draw through the room, pulling the curtains and plucking the flesh on his arms. The screen slammed and he could hear the girl move out in the yard, cooing at the raccoons. The woman shuddered and he looked at her expecting her eyes to open, but she lay still, breathing as if she were barely alive. He could smell the sage on the breeze, a faint burning aroma in his nostrils, and he could hear the raccoon claws clamber down the wires to the child.

“You make me feel kinder towards the world,” she had said, and he couldn’t figure out why, and lay with his chin in the pillow, listening.

“Don’t you feel that way all the time?”

“No.” Her lips were to his ear. “I get contrary, get people in trouble.”

“Don’t he make you feel good?”

“Larry does. Sometimes.”

“How come you want to foul up with me?”

She turned on her side and crossed her arms beneath her chin. “I don’t trust him,” she said, as if it were something she always knew, but had just realized.

“You’re up there every day,” he said. “What ain’t there to trust?”

“If I wasn’t up there, he’d be humpin some bar bitch like he is right now.”

“But you are up there,” he said.

“And there’s a lot of tonk bars between Rag-land and Variadero, too — see?” she said.

He graveled his chin in the pillow and tried to figure that out. “Looks like you got him jumpin the creek.”

“You’re sweet,” she said, and gave him a kiss on the shoulder. “I love him. But I can’t trust him not to wipe me out.”

“So what does that mean?” he said.

“I got to cheat on him so he don’t have a chance to leave me like I was in Salt Lake.”

“That don’t make sense,” he said.

She smiled. “If I cheat on him a little, and he knows I’m liable to anytime, then it balances me — see? He can’t feel like he’s put nothin on me, cause he knows I’m probably putting something on him already. It gets dangerous when you feel like you can fool the other one anytime you get ready and not pay for it. Everything starts splitting. You got to stay balanced.”

She ran her fingers through the hair on his belly. “I want you,” she said in a queer high voice.

“Wait now,” he said, picturing Larry laying bricks in Variadero and wondering where his wife was while the sun was going and whether or not she was liable to show up, or whether she was stopping over in some tonk bar and not making it in until tomorrow. “Does he know that’s how you’re playing it?”

“Let’s don’t us talk,” she said, grabbing him up in her tight little fist and rolling her eyes back. “I need it right now, understand?”

“But wait a minute,” he said.

“No waits,” she said. “No waits.”

When she had gone to sleep he lay and stared at the ceiling, spattered with the gold tinsel of water seepage. He understood that when it rained, it rained until the boards soaked and the water shot the walls and set the house floating like an ark. He dozed and felt himself drawn to a powerful commotion as though the sky were driving through the cages, drowning animals, filling the truck bed, and buoying him inside until it was necessary to hold the bed staves to be saved from drowning. There were lights in the yard, flashing through the panes across the wall in his room, revolving rectangles of light across the wall, and he had sat up startled and faced them and heard the groan of someone’s pickup and two doors slamming and the soft lilt of voices in the yard. He walked out on the low plank porch and stood where his mother was watching the two men angrily while they talked one at a time in quick low tones, trying to avoid her eyes and get the story told and get gone. They stood silhouetted in the truck lights that fanned the grassy spiderwebs, and for a while his mother stared at them while they talked, watching them intently, snapping her eyes over one and to the other, holding them unmovable until they finally talked so fast the words ran together into gibberish. And after a while she just stared past them into the headlights, and they finished and left. The way the woman told it, his father had gone up into the hills early in the evening to attend a service, and took the woman with him in his car. And three-quarters of the way up the long grade, full of roots and chuck holes, winding up the Bostons toward the top of Mount Skylight, where the tent was supposedly staked on a high knob, the old car had failed where they forded a creek, a ribbon of spring water squirreling down the mountain toward the Illinois River. The woman said she got out and went into the bushes while his father stayed and monkeyed with the dashboard wires, trying to get the car going before it got night. And when the woman came back from the bushes, it had begun to rain, “an unimaginable rain,” she said, that smacked the sides of the car like a lanyard, and the water rose over the bottoms of the doors and swirled and shot past the car so that a strong man couldn’t have walked through it without falling. And she said she could see him inside humped over the dashboard studying the wires and fuses, unaware, she guessed, that the creek was up or that it might not do to be out in it. She herself, a plump, slope-eyed woman from Tonitown, said she never imagined what the outcome would be, and went up and squatted underneath a plum bush to wait for the rain to stop and the creek to subside so they could go on to the church, which turned out to be accessible by some other road. And as she sat, the water got dark and creamy, and rose, and pieces of split-off pine timber came down the chute, and she got wringing wet watching the limbs batter the car and the water rise to the door locks. She said she believed Mr. Hewes did sense something was not right, because he opened the window and said something to her that she couldn’t hear and tried to open the door, but the water was against it and the other side was busted from before she knew him. And she said that he closed the window and looked out, laughing and grinning and making funny little signals with his hands, signals she said she couldn’t make out any better than what he’d said. She said for a long time, maybe ten minutes, the two of them sat and looked at each other, she on the bank under the plum bush, wet, and he shut inside the car with the ugly water raging around, smiling and making signals, perfectly dry. Until, she said, the water seemed to wash over the car all at once, without a wave or a tree limb to hit it, or any inkling that it was losing purchase, and just suddenly, rolling, it rolled over and the water over it and it out of sight into the darkness.

Robard felt himself to suffer the long breathless suspension, suspended between the moment of purchase and the moment when whatever it was had knocked him unconscious and made it feasible for him to drown in the floor of his own car, so that he felt that at any moment at all he could expect the impact and the long slow daze that ended by dying.

8

Behind the house the clouds had piled against the sky. The sun had gone and left the sky indistinct and pinkish. In the east it had been dark a long time. He lay still in the smoky light. There was a chill in the room, and he could hear the girl outside teasing the raccoons onto the rungs of the cage. He rose quietly, dressed in the corner, and carried his shoes out the door. On the floor outside the girl had laid a blanket, and he brought it inside and spread it over the woman, covering her until her fingers clutched the basting and she drew it around herself and slept on. He slipped down the stairs into the store, where the cold box glowed and the compressor hummed in the gloom. He took a candy bar out of a plastic jar and a soda from the cooler and stepped into the lot, where the air was slow with the fragrance of sage.

The little girl looked up when she heard the screen slap, and went back to tempting the raccoons when she saw it was him.

“You got a Butterfinger?” she said, keeping her eyes averted.

“And a Grapette,” he said, squeezing candy out of his teeth and taking a look down the cages.

“Seventeen cents,” she said.

Her hair was full of fine gold threads mingled with what was almost white. “I set you a blanket out,” she said without looking up. “It’ll get cold. I knocked but didn’t nobody answer.”

“We must’ve dozed,” he said, taking an interest in what he could see of the cat’s cage, but feeling reluctant to go down to

The raccoons nibbled and licked the girl’s fingers when the celery was gone. The rooster perched on a low branch and studied the raccoons curiously, as if he couldn’t understand anything about them.

“What about your rabbit?” he said, stuffing the candy paper in his pocket.

“What about him?” she said.

He glanced down the list of cages. “His time must be about up?”

She giggled and pulled a cellophane bag of peanut hulls out of her shirt pocket and began feeding hulls to the coons one at a time. “His time came and went,” she said.

He looked at the girl quickly, feeling bested. “I thought you said he didn’t get hungry till the sun went down.” He walked up toward Leo’s cage.

“I can’t tell Leo when to get hungry,” she said.

“I didn’t hear nothin,” he said, looking up at the window with the chintz curtains flagging gently outside.

“Leo don’t make no noise,” she said. “Sometimes the rabbit makes a little peep, like a bird, but usually it just gives in and don’t say anything.”

Leo was lying against the back wire tearing off a piece of the rabbit’s haunch and beginning to chew it deliberately. He searched the ground, but there was no sign of a struggle in the dust, as if the rabbit might have made a dash when Leo decided his time had come. There were two skid tracks where Leo had dragged the rabbit back to his own precinct, and it occurred to him that the rabbit might just have died of fright. After sitting in the sun all day staring at Leo’s eyes, the final seconds might have been too much for him, and when he saw Leo get up, it may have been over right then. The long wait must have got him. Leo gurgled at a sinew and pawed it with his front feet, stretching it backward until it snapped.

He felt an awful anguish and looked at the girl, who was watching him, squatting in the dirt. He felt maybe somebody ought to sit down and talk to her, and tell her she wasn’t doing things right, give her an idea on how things ought to be. Except it wasn’t his business and there couldn’t be any use making it be. If she wanted to feed rabbits to wildcats, then there wouldn’t be any way on earth to make her quit, since somebody had taught her that that was a thing to do. And there wasn’t any changing that.

“What time is it?” he said.

She looked at her wrist watch. “Seven-forty. Dark by eight,” she said.

He saw the sky was steely down to the horizon. A flicker of bat slipped through the air and disappeared.

“Lonnie won’t be back till late,” she said.

“Do me a favor.” He rubbed his fingers through his hair.

“Depends,” she said.

“Tell that lady”—he eyed the window, inside of which the air was dark—“I had to leave.”

The girl got up off the ground and dusted her jeans and stuffed the cellophane in her shirt pocket. “Who’s paying?” she said.

He opened his wallet and took out a bill.

“Three dollars and seventeen cents,” she said, watching the empty Grapette bottle dangle off his finger.

“Keep the rest for the favor,” he said.

“She ain’t sick, is she?”

“Tell her I said I had to take off. She won’t care.”

“She ain’t going to like it,” the girl said confidently, rocking on her heels.

“She won’t care,” he said.

“What you say,” the girl said, and glared at him. “You ain’t foolin nobody.”

“I know it,” he said, moving toward the truck.

The girl stared at him coldly.

He could see the last stippets of gold in her hair. He took a look at the window and saw the curtains swell into the breeze, and started for the truck. He dropped the bottle in the oil can by the pumps, and the girl watched him a time, then broke for the house, her ponytail licking her shoulders as she disappeared in the store, the screen door whacking shut. He could hear her hit the inside stairs. He let the truck idle, watching the door as if he were waiting for the woman and the girl to come boiling out like bloodhounds. But no one came, and he let the truck idle out onto the road. He watched the house in the mirror while it sank, and it satisfied him to think that when the woman woke she could as soon feel kindly toward the world, and toward herself, and toward Larry and maybe toward him.

At eight-fifteen it was dark. He passed Tucumcari, a strip of dairy bars and gray stucco buildings with lights frozen in the darkness. He watched the drive-in lots and along inside the lighted cafés for someone that might be the girl’s brother, some kid standing up against a building waiting to get sober. He watched for a flat-bed truck parked back in the gravel lots, but there was nothing to fit what he had made up in his mind, a boy holding a bottle by the skinny neck, staring cross-eyed at the sky as if he hadn’t figured out some mystery that plagued him. He stopped at the east edge of town and ate Mexican food and a bowl of custard and drove the thirty miles into Glenrio and from there past the signs into Texas before midnight.

9

In the night he had driven over the flat husk of Texas to Oklahoma. After two o’clock his legs cramped and his eyes got tricky, framing figures on the fringe of the road caught in the headlights, then vanishing when the truck got into them. At two-thirty he hid the truck in a pecan orchard, slept an hour on a sawbuck table and woke in the cold odor of green pecans, pressed dew in his eyes and started into Arkansas.

The letter in his shoe said:

Robard. I have me a plastic bag and a way to use it once I see you in your flesh. It can’t wait forever. You have got to come and get it. This here is me. Beuna.

Underneath her signature was a mark on the paper where she had pressed something wet, then allowed it to dry before folding it in the envelope so the paper was wrinkled and blotched a fishy yellow shade, but wasn’t stuck together. Around it she had drawn a circle in ink with an arrow pointing down from the words “This here is me.” It made him feel hot inside. Though it was true enough that after that hotness expired nothing else was certain. The best he could remember, Helena was a weedy cotton plant on the skin of the delta. He had stayed around in 1959, working the Missouri Pacific in Memphis and deadheading down to save rent, boarding with his mother’s cousin two days a week, and whomping Beuna both nights in the attic, then spending the day slipping around waiting for dark. All of which added up to maybe fifteen days sum that he had ever spent in Helena, Arkansas, which made him nervous when he let his mind play on it. Since fifteen days was almost too little an acquaintance to hope to come back after twelve years and carry on what he was hoping to carry on in the midst of everybody and have it work out the way he wanted without there being a slip-up somewhere and somebody noticing some irregularity. And he figured the only thing to do would be to be fast enough and cute enough when the time came to get out before the shooting started.

He had gone about settling some things before he left Bishop, standing at the screen, explaining to himself that in behalf of being smart, he couldn’t afford any reliances, since there wasn’t anybody to rely on and since there wasn’t any reason to believe the place or anybody in it would turn out any better or kinder or any more understanding than they had been when he tried to make it honest, working for old man Rudolph, and had gotten squeezed out by the innate stinginess that infested the place and everybody in it like an air that you couldn’t breathe, but couldn’t live without. He had just told himself that very thing over and over standing at the door waiting for good dark to settle, and by the time he left Bishop, he had it fixed in his mind.

Except that back behind whatever little plans he had was at least the reliance that the place would hold him up long enough to do what he came to do, pay him, in a sense, for having been born there and having put a good-hearted attempt into staying when it was clear nobody like him ever should stay. And the moment he figured he had kept that reliance, in spite of all he had schooled himself to believe, he had had the strongest unfaltering feeling he had made a mistake somewhere, and that the thing he ought to do was turn around and go back without another say-so. Except it was way too late by then, and he couldn’t ever turn around now, not after getting this close. And it would all have to be worth it.

10

In Little Rock he ate breakfast and got back outside in the chill to the phone booth. He took off his shoe, got the letter, and flattened it on the shelf where he could see. He got Helena and wrote the number at the bottom of the letter just below where it said “This here is me,” and dialed the operator. The phone started ringing a long way off. Morning traffic came slowly. He watched two policemen saunter out of the café and stand looking at the truck, talking like they thought they wanted to buy it, then laugh at something and drive out of the café lot.

The phone was answered by a voice several feet from the receiver. “All right,” the voice said.

“Beuna?” He could barely get the word audible.

“What do you think?” she said. He heard the receiver strike something hard as if she were trying to hammer more words out. “Who is this?” she said, her voice drifting away then reviving. “W.W., it better not be your asshole trick.”

“It’s me,” he said, feeling the words stop up in his throat.

“I’m hanging up,” she said. He could hear her pounding the plunger. “Get the sheriff,” she said.

“It’s Robard,” he whispered. And everything seemed to slide back, like a whole panoramic world had moved into the background, leaving him in the calamitous center, alone and unprotected. A fishy sweat crept up in his palms, and his short hairs got stout.

“Who?”

“Robard.”

“Oh, shit!” she said, as if some foulness had happened where she was.

“Beuna?”

“Where are you? God!”

“Little Rock,” he said, switching hands and wiping his face.

“I’ll come meet you,” she said, all out of breath.

“No,” he said. “I’ll be there. Don’t do nothin.”

“Robard, I’ve been so awful,” she said, sobbing. “It’s giving me the shakes to hear you.”

“Don’t do nothin,” he said. His hands started trembling.

“Robard?”

“What?”

“I’m gonna come on the phone.”

“Don’t now,” he said.

“I’m going to, it’s just doing it.”

“Don’t, just don’t do that, goddamn it now!”

“I can’t help it, things comes on you.”

“No!” he yelled at the receiver.

“Robard?”

“What?”

“Can we go someplace? It ain’t got to be far.”

“We’ll see,” he said. His mind sunk into gloom, as if he were caught in some commotion he needed to control but couldn’t quite make slow down.

“Robard?”

“What?”

“I got my little bag?”

“I remember.” He could see the little bag, without knowing exactly what could happen with it.

“We’re going to have to go to Memphis to do it. There’s these rooms in the Peabody Hotel that’s got shower baths with eight nozzles that shoots you everywhere at once.”

“All right,” he said, gasping.

“Robard?”

“What?”

“I want to do it in that thing with you.”

“We will,” he said, wondering what you did. “I’ll call you.”

“W.W. ain’t here days. He’s workin at the BB plant and playing ball at Forrest City. He don’t come back until late.”

“All right,” he said, his mind whipping. “I can’t come today.”

“You got you some girl?”

“No,” he said, pressing his head against the window glass and leaning until the booth started to groan and he had his entire weight concentrated on just one cold spot of glass.

“Why can’t you?”

“Look, I’ll call you,” he said.

“You ain’t got to bite my head off,” she said.

“I got to go.”

“Do you love me?”

“I can’t talk about that.”

“You said ‘All right’ the last time. I remember.”

“What else you want me to say?”

“I don’t know,” she said in a small voice. “Say ‘All right’ again and that’ll be enough.”

“All right.”

A silence opened through the line.

“Just think about that,” he said, “and them shower baths.”

“God,” she said, moaning. “You’re going to make me come.”

“I’ll be there,” he said, wanting to get out.

“Robard?”

“Huh.”

“Is something the matter with you?”

“Nothing is,” he said. He folded the letter with one hand and stuffed it in his shirt pocket on top of the Butterfinger wrapper.

“I thought something was the matter,” she said.

“Everything’s wonderful,” he said.

“It is,” she said. “Don’t you think everything’s wonderful?”

“Yes, hon, I do.”

“I do,” she said sweetly. “Now that you’re here, I do. Everything’s been so awful.”

“I’m hurrying,” he said, unable to get his breath again.

“Oh, good God,” she said, and hung up.

11

He stopped in Hazen to buy cigarettes and walked toward where the old man kept his rooms. Hazen was fifty miles from Little Rock, a rice prairie town along the Rock Island, a white stone grain elevator by the tracks, a few cages and poultry houses catering to duck hunters, and a smatter of houses and mobile homes in the oaks and crape myrtles, and all the rest save a pecan orchard given up to the rice, planted in tawny, dented fields to the next town, twenty miles in all directions.

By the time he had come up from Helena eleven years ago and gone to work for Rudolph, watching his sluice gates in the summer and sitting out winters in the little shotgun house the old man had built as a warming house for the duck hunters, Rudolph’s troubles were all over with and there wasn’t anything left for the old man to do but sit up nights and wonder about it.

He crossed the Rock Island tracks and walked down the right of way through the suck weeds and across the gravel path to where he could see the white plank house with the old man’s rooms recessed in the dark corner under the south eave. He could remember the old man slumped on the broken shingle of his mattress, his undershirt catching the pale light in the room, coughing and snorting and staring across the empty floor, trying to think of something to say by way of important instructions, before he sent him back to the pump house to tend the gates. He could hear the landlady downstairs, rattling the tiny trays she used to coddle the old man’s eggs, while Rudolph rested his belly on his thighs, drifting in and out of sleep, waiting for the word to come into his head that he could give and that might make sense to somebody. Finally he would murmur something low out of the cavity of his chest, some gate to close or spillway to wind open for an hour or a ditch to inspect for seepage, anything to keep the help moving water from place to place. The old man would stop and snort and gaze out in the dark, and he would slip down the stairs, through the hot kitchen, and take out across the cold fields. Like that.

When he had first come up from Helena there had been, he remembered, a man named Buck Bennett who had worked for old man Rudolph, hired to run local fishermen off the reservoirs, patrol the roads, and see over the property when he wasn’t too drunk to find the deputy’s badge the old man paid for, or too drunk to keep his old jeep out of the bar ditches, where the old man promised it would remain, since he wouldn’t let a wrecker come on the property to pull him out, though he said Buck could come and look at his jeep whenever he wanted to if he had any doubts about its still being there.

Buck would come down late in the evening, drink a pint of whiskey, and sit on the one claw-toed chair the pump cabin had and talk about the old man.

Buck said that the old man had come down sometime in 1941, from Republican City, Nebraska, had sold his half of his father’s pig farm to his brother Wolfgang and moved himself and two steamer trunks on the train to Little Rock and put himself up in a commercial hotel at the foot of the Main Street bridge and bought himself a Buick coupe and drove all over the country between Little Rock and Memphis looking for cheap land. And after not very long, Buck said, he bought eight hundred acres of swamp fifteen miles back out of Hazen, land that no farmer had even thought to abandon, much less cultivate, since La Fourche Creek ran straight through the middle of it and flooded every spring, leaving a solid counterpane of silt and randy water on top of the entire parcel so that even the rice farmers had given up on it and just kept it for duck hunting. He said that Rudolph, who was in his thirties and strong as a bulldog, had gotten hold of the land and practically gnawed every tree on it with his own teeth and built up a maze of bar ditches and ramparts and iron sluice gates to channel the water out of the lows and into an old dead-tree reservoir he dug out with three World War I scoopers. In a year’s time he had gotten the land set up to be a farm, built a two-story shingle house and a metal windmill, and transported an Austrian man and his family down from Republican City to live on it and run the farm, and promptly moved himself out of the commercial hotel and into the R. E. Lee on Markham Street and fell in love with the lady who owned it and six more like it in Memphis and Shreveport, and whose husband had been drowned falling out of an inner tube on Lake Nimrod, leaving it all to her.

Buck said that before very long Rudolph had communicated his feelings to the lady, a small wiry red-haired woman named Edwina, and that they were married in the hotel lobby with a bang, and that right away Rudolph moved up to her suite on the eleventh floor and started ordering baskets of fruit and cases of whiskey and running the bellboys up and down the elevators bringing him one thing after another, until Edwina had to tell him the hotel was for other things than just to make him happy.

When the farm started making more money than he could count (though not more than he could save), Rudolph began carrying Edwina’s friends to shoot ducks on the big reservoir or back in the woods where he had left the water standing in the winter. Though, Buck said, every time he did it he arranged to get mad and raise hell with everybody for driving too fast on the gravel roads that he had graded personally, or for killing suzies instead of greenheads, or for some infraction of the rules that he was making up as he went along, and finally ran all her friends off entirely when they wouldn’t do things the way he wanted them done, though Buck said it was hard to figure out just how that was. He began carrying an old steel-barrel 12-gauge across the seat of his car as a convincer when he came on somebody he didn’t like or wanted to run off. And all the time living in Little Rock like a caliph and staying up in the suite drinking Evan Williams and eating fruit and ordering people around including Edwina, and making everybody wish they had never seen him.

Buck said it didn’t seem like any time until Edwina had him divorced and married herself off to an Italian named Tarquini who was fifteen years younger than she was and wore his suits halfway up his asshole, and whom Rudolph had taken out to the farm two separate times before he found out what was happening on the days he stayed at the farm by himself and left Edwina to her own devices. Buck said Tarquini was just some interior decorator from Chicago that Edwina had hired to re-deluxe her hotels, but couldn’t resist getting in the sack with since she and Rudolph weren’t seeing things eye to eye.

In the settlement Rudolph made Edwina donate him a room in the R. E. Lee for life and one free meal a day, and when it was over he went back down to Hazen, where he could go to the farm when he wanted to and drive his old grader down the roads and along the bar ditches and run everybody off he didn’t like and spend time figuring out just what had happened to him.

Buck said he guessed the old man probably used the farm to get back at Edwina by just never inviting anybody she ever knew or that he ever knew when he knew her to hunt with him, and by paying him, Buck, to take people in and out all winter for a thousand dollars a season and letting that information get back to Edwina by mentioning it to the waiters in the dining room when he came into town to eat his free meal and stay in his free room.

He said the old man would come down to the cabin late at night and have a bottle of Williams and an old R. E. Lee Hotel glass and pour Buck a level and watch him drink it, then sit back and cry like a baby. Buck said he had to just keep on drinking until it was gone, because he couldn’t stand listening to the old man cry and tell the story over and over again. Finally, he said, he’d tell Rudolph his was just a clear case of bad timing, and then go to sleep. The old man sat there, he said, staring out the screen door into his rice fields not able to sleep because he had a problem he couldn’t understand. And Buck said that he never would have drunk so much if it hadn’t been for all those nights.

He walked around to the side of the house and knocked on the door, thinking he could ask what had happened to the old man and go on. The old woman came to the screen and smiled as if she recognized him, and said Rudolph still had his rooms.

He thought he ought to forget it and go back. He smiled at the woman and she pushed open the screen and he got inside before he knew it and she pointed up the narrow hallway to the upstairs, and he went up. He felt like he was making a mistake acting like he wanted to see the old man when he didn’t want to at all, and was disappointed to know he was alive still, when he shouldn’t have been alive at all. The door at the top was closed, and a thin pane of light radiated over the sill. He could hear the woman reading her newspaper out loud in the kitchen and the sound of her chair groaning.

He knocked and the old man said to come in, standing in the middle of the room under a hanging bulb, wearing poplin pants and no shirt, staring wild-eyed as if he were getting ready to make a charge. He looked heavy-chested and bent to one side, his white hair stuck up in tussocks over his ears. He regretted ever coming inside.

The room was sour. The old man looked at him intently, as if he thought he recognized him, the way the old woman did, but couldn’t be sure.

“See Minor,” he said suddenly, “about the work. Don’t see me.”

“No sir,” he said, and pressed back against the molding of the door, thinking about getting out.

“Who is that?” Rudolph said, and stepped up under the bulb.

“Hewes,” he said. “I used to work on number two.”

The old man got a step closer. “Took off without saying whoop-dee-doo, too,” the old man shouted, like it had happened last night. “I come out a week later wonderin where in the shit you was, and there was my house wide open, lights burning, propane still in the pipes.” He took a step back and humped down beside his desk table. “What do you say about that?”

“I had to leave of a sudden,” he said, fixing his eyes on the single closed window behind the old man’s head.

“Well, there ain’t no more house!”

“What come of it?” he said.

The old man squinted as if he had just decided he was really somebody else. “Remember Buck Bennett?”

“Yes sir.”

“Buck Bennett was a crazy son-of-a-bitch. You remember that?” The old man smiled companionably as if he could see Buck at that very moment drunk and falling down.

“I guess,” he said.

“He was a drunk, now.” The old man reached down and jerked his white sock up and plowed at his nose. “He took five bone sawyers from New Orleans back in there on two, forgot to light the jet after he’d turned it on. The bone sawyers got there drunk, and they all sat down to wait for shooting time, and every one of them went to sleep and didn’t wake up. They found Mr. Buck’s cadaver on the bed with a doughnut in his hand. He musta eat that doughnut and went to sleep, and all the rest of them just sat out there at the table and put their heads down. They didn’t even get a doughnut.” The old man pawed his face and gawked as if it had been a great inconvenience.

“When did that happen?” he said, trying to envision Buck’s old face, and unable to work it back out.

“December, six years ago,” he said quickly. “I didn’t see the bastard for two or three days. He didn’t come to get my instructions. So I figured he was drunk, and went out to his house and there they all six of ’em was, and the place smelled like hell. There wasn’t no way to get it out of the boards. So I went out, after they had carried them all off, with a gallon of gasoline and put a match to the son-of-a-bitch, and burnt it down and plowed it under.” He smiled. “So there ain’t no more house. I put soybeans in there right where you lived.”

“What do you do with the hunters?” he said, still trying to fathom up Buck’s face.

“Put ’em in Minor’s house. He’s got sense to keep a fire lit. I don’t employ no more drunks.” The old man’s tiny blue eyes seemed to hold tears in them.

“Buck said he wouldn’ta drunk so much if you hadn’t brought him the whiskey,” he said.

“He’s a goddamn liar,” the old man shouted, rising out of his chair, his eyes snapping. He grabbed the backing on the chair and squeezed it until the cane cracked. “Buck was on the goddamned hooch the first day I seen the bastard, and it was hooch that killed him by muddying his goddamned mind so he couldn’t even remember to light a goddamned pilot.”

“He figured you give it to him so he couldn’t do anything else and so you wouldn’t have to pay him nothing. He couldn’t do nothin about it, Mr. Rudolph, but he knew it.”

“Buck went to California — you know that, don’t you?”

He watched the old man’s face twist out of one angry expression into another one.

“He went out there and learned how to be a soak and come back here and tried to turn it into a skilled trade,” the old man said.

“Some people ain’t lucky,” he said, watching the old man grow madder and madder, and feeling better.

“Some people don’t know when they’re good off.” His eyes flashed. “They have to fuck it up. What’re you doing here, Hewes — trying to fuck up something?”

“I wanted to look at you.”

“What the hell for?” The old man was hunched up underneath the bulb, glaring.

“If I had a good idea, I might just think about twistin your head off.”

The old man smiled instantly. “Old Buck might not of known very much, but he knew how to kill hisself good enough. You don’t even know how to do that, Hewes.” Rudolph’s smile broadened until he could see dark splotches on his gums.

He looked at the old man in the cone of scaly light, leering out at him, until he felt the urge to go away and come back in the night and burn the house down and everything with it.

He went back out through the kitchen all the way to the truck without stopping. But when he got in, he tried to think about Buck killing himself, waking up in the cold little house and looking out and seeing nothing at all, knowing that in an hour or a half hour the doctors would be there, and there was nothing to look forward to beyond sitting there with the old man while he stared at the fields and cried, until he himself went to sleep and the old man sat there mumbling half-awake about Edwina and Tarquini and how he let it get away from him. And he thought that might finally just have been enough to make him turn on the propane and go to sleep, that it was all just a kind of weariness, and the best thing to do was to go to sleep. He sat in the truck and tried to think what all that meant to him. And he sat for a long time, listening to the trucks hiss on the highway to Memphis, and decided that while it made him feel bad, it didn’t mean anything to him, and didn’t affect his life at all.

12

When he had worked in the switchyards at Helena, the old heads used to say that once the river had been where the town was now, and that the town was set up on the Kudzu bluff that overlooked the present town, and where the town of West Helena is now. They said one night the river simply changed its course, removing itself five miles to the east, leaving a thick muddy plain for the residents of the bluff to stare at and get nervous about. They said little by little the people on the bluff ventured down and started establishing themselves where the river had been, and building stores and houses. And after a while everyone moved down and they changed the name of the town to West Helena and called the new one in the bottom Helena. The men in the yard called this movement The Great Comedown, and swore that the town, by coming off the bluff, had exercised bad judgment and would have to suffer misfortune because, and it seemed to make good sense, the town now existed at the pleasure of the river, and they believed anything that owed to the river would have to pay, and when it paid, the price would be steep.

When he had told Beuna she gave him a pained look and said, “Ah, shit, Robard. We’re all dying sooner or later. Them assholes think they figured the reason. But I’m satisfied there ain’t no reason.”

He got to Helena at noon and drove straight down the bluff into town, the sky pale and hot, and kept straight on through, uneasiness brewing inside him. The streets were wove up with country people in town for lunch. He thought everybody who noticed the truck was noticing him, and anybody who noticed him was a threat. He watched the doors and the alley mouths, in case W.W. should suddenly come striding out of some beer bar and stand mooning at something in the traffic he thought he recognized but couldn’t figure why, but would if he had another minute to ponder it.

When he had shown up in Tulare, W. had gotten gloomy, as though some bad idea was trying to hatch out in his mind that he wasn’t going to let live because of the slowing effect worrying had on his fast ball. Instead W. had gone around moping and frowning and acting as if he had a quince in his underlip and couldn’t talk, but was still highly agitated. He had tried to stay where W. could see him anytime he wanted to, thinking that might dewire whatever W. was trying to figure, but couldn’t quite get clear.

In the hot grandstand he asked her if she thought W. might be thinking, and she laughed so hard her flesh had gone into violent quivers. “What with?” she said, in the meanest voice she knew. “His mind ain’t nothin but a baseball. Baseballs don’t get suspicious, far as I know.”

Except, he figured, watching people traipse back and forth across Main Street in the sunshine, W. might not turn out to be so altogether slow if he found out what was happening to his wife while he was screwing parts in BB guns. All those years when he could’ve been cashing big pay checks, but instead ended up building air rifles for three-eighty an hour and pitching Industrial League at Forrest City, might just have built a big reserve of unrelieved nastiness that he could start relieving if he could just catch somebody diddling his wife and figure out a way of getting a shot off.

The only alternative then was just to be smart and stay off. He had figured that out long ago. But waiting for the light, thinking everybody who walked in front of the truck was having a look at his license plate and a longer look at him, he could see just how much business he didn’t have idling around town. He would have to come after dark, collect Beuna, and run her to someplace where they wouldn’t have to jump up every time a bug hit the screen or start grabbing clothes for fear it was W.W. coming to pick up his cleats or leaving his pail before going off to hit fungoes. He figured he had to park the truck, back in to a wall, and not get near it until he had to, since every time he got in it he ran a risk, and every time he got in it with Beuna, he was pleading to get shot.

He pulled through the intersection, stopped, and made an inspection back up the street, thinking if he waited he just might see a face. When he didn’t, he got out, stepped inside the drugstore, bought a newspaper, and drove full tilt out of town, keeping bandaged to the road.

A mile and a half past the last motel, he stopped at a drive-in and parked on the side away from town. The restaurant was a little pink cinder-block with a red and white keyboard awning strung out the back. A girl came down under the awning, took his order, and went off. A breeze picked up off the fields, stirred the dust, and made the awning groan and sway over the struts.

He opened the paper and stared at the Help Wanteds. There was a job in Helena to install linoleum tile, another one in Helena for a drag-line crew with the Corps of Engineers, a job to relocate in San Bernardino, a job in Elaine to guard somebody’s land, offering two meals and a room, and a job running a stamping machine in the BB-gun plant.

He hinged the paper over the steering wheel and stared out under the awning toward the fields, back of which he could make out the low perimeter of light green softwoods, beyond which was the river. The awning buckled softly in the breeze and the sun rolled behind the clouds, and he could smell his sandwich frying in the cinder-block kitchen. He tried to think just what it was he was doing. Without even intending, he had gone straight for a job, just like finding one was bone-hard necessity. It was aggravating. Because what was supposed to happen to Jackie, lying back in her room thinking God knows what? Making plans not to see him again, gone by now to where he wouldn’t ever find her? It had seemed to him that when breaks came in your life, the decisions got made ahead of time. Judgment was supplied and the sides were weighted and one got chosen on balance. And that was the way he understood life got run, not counting the unforeseen. When he left Hazen, it had been at the end of a long time spent thinking and puzzling. Sides were added and the answer found, though it came in the middle of the night and seemed like foolishness even though it wasn’t. But he wondered if decisions didn’t really get made in reverse, acting one way, then supplying the reason based on the number of people who got maimed or made happy. And if it wasn’t just ignorance to think decisions got made any other way. In this very case, there seemed to be no decision to make at all, only things to do for which he could supply reasons later, when he saw how it worked. So that the only thing he could do about Jackie, lying back there making plans, was just to see what happened and write a postcard.

The girl came back, supporting a tray with a beer and a sandwich. She smiled and fitted the tray to the window and wiped her hands on her pants.

“You going to want something else?” she said, tearing a check off and laying it on the rubber mat. She had a little wisp of mustache on her lip that she bleached.

“Which way is that BB-gun plant?” he said, trying to make her out through the condiments.

The girl stared back toward town and pointed. “Thataway,” she said, frowning toward Memphis.

“Then which way’s E-laine?” He licked the mayonnaise off the rim of the bun.

“Thataway,” she said, pointing down the highway that ran in front of the drive-in and disappeared into the softwoods. Her cheeks were rouged up and she had peppered brown all around her nose to be freckles. “Twenty miles,” she said. “Ain’t nothin but a store and a quit gin, and some old man’s fishin camp over the levee. I used to go down there when I was married.”

“Ain’t you married no more?” he said, wondering who’d marry her in the first place.

She shook her head and looked put out. “I quit him,” she said.

“What for?”

The girl removed a strand of dry hair from her cheek. “He cramped my style.”

“Well, would you say that E-laine was about as far away from that BB-gun factory as I could get?”

She turned and stared up at the cinder-block restaurant a moment and faced him again.

“I’d say there’s lots of places you could get farther away from that BB-gun plant than E-laine, Arkansas, though I doubt if you could find a worse one.”

“I need me a place to be low and still get out to the plant when I need to.”

“You ain’t going to find you no lower place than that,” she said.

“That’ll do it,” he said, and smiled at her, and the girl tapped the tray with her fingernail and walked away.

13

The River Road ferried out along the telephone lines into the marshed fields and pecan orchards eight miles, then angled back through the cypress and followed the shingle of the old river, a long shining horseshoe stoppered at both ends by green-and-orange shumard swamps.

The road twisted finally back into the fields, past standing cotton wagons and silver ammonia tanks on trailers, frosted in the sunshine. He surveyed the long grass levee, amber and flat, reaching away from the tip of the swamp down the margin of the true bottom, back of which was the dark invadable land the levee had been built to guard.

Elaine was a single plank grocery building at the highway, with the wetted fields sprawled against it. The ruined gin sat in the opposite weeds, the metal walls bent in and twisted, exposing the thick oxidized machinery and the cypress rafters that supported what was left. The store was a pale plain rectangle of bricks anchoring the end of a tractor lane that bore back into the boards and over the levee. A “Be Sure With Pure” circle was faintly stenciled on the wall facing north, and a shingle was strung to the eave saying GOODENOUGH’S.

Across the tractor path a light green ’57 Oldsmobile was parked in the dirt with a white Servel refrigerator standing inside the trunk. The car had been backed up to the highway, and given a sign painted on the door that said NIGHT CRAWLERS $1 PAR CARTON FIREWORKS. Dark green stars had been put on the sign, and the doorhandles on the Servel had been sawed off and replaced with a big hasp lock.

The boys were squatted in the dust beside the refrigerator. He parked the truck by the store. One of the boys jumped up and waved and stood watching as he walked across the road.

“Yes suh,” the boy said, rubbing his hands and smiling, uncovering a large empty space in his mouth where a lot of teeth had been. Both boys were white-headed and red-faced, and had their hair slicked and glistening in the sun. The boy standing was older, though the one sitting had eyes wide apart and a big mouth that made him look serious. The younger boy still had his teeth, and when he squinted they all showed at once. A tick-tack-toe game was scratched in the dirt, and the younger boy was eying the game, using a cotton twig to prod at the two squares that were empty.

“I’m trying to find a man named P. H. Gaspareau,” he said, looking off down the tractor lane toward the levee.

The tall boy smiled and leaned around the edge of the icebox and pointed. “Take this here down the other side of the levee and stay on it, and you’ll drive right straight through his house.” He snapped a look at the tick-tack-toe to warn the other boy against cheating. “You come from California to go fishin?” the boy said, wincing at something inexpressible.

He looked back at the truck and couldn’t see the license tag for the way the truck was parked against the store wall. “Where is it you fish?” he said.

The boy thumbed toward the levee. “It ain’t no good. Bout wasted a trip.”

“I’ll find something to do,” he said, looking at the tops of the shumards across the levee.

“Ain’t nothin to do,” the younger boy said without looking up. He marked a zero in one of the boxes, then blotted it out. “Bout have to go to New York City.”

“He’s ignorant,” the bigger boy said, smiling.

“He might be smart,” he said.

“I might fly to the moon tomorrow, too, but I ain’t bought my wings yet,” the older boy said.

The shorter boy whacked his brother with his twig, and the older boy scraped his foot straight through the tick-tack-toe game.

“You was winnin it, fool,” the younger boy cackled.

“You ought to buy you a whole mess of crawlers,” the older boy said, sniffing as if that was the signal to commence business.

“I ain’t fishin,” he said.

The smaller boy got up, dusted his pants, and got a big jelly glass of red liquid out of the refrigerator and took a drink. There were several white paper cartons inside the refrigerator, smudged with crumbled dirt, and a gray cardboard box marked “M-8os.”

“You one of them people goes on the island?” the tall boy said indifferently.

“Which is that?” he said.

“The other side of the lake is a big island. It ain’t even in Arkansas. It’s in Mississippi.”

“I don’t know nothin about it,” he said.

“There’s a man owns it from Mississippi. He’s old.” The boy let his tongue dawdle in and out of the space where all the teeth had been. “He’s always got some people going over there to hunt. I carried the Ole Miss football coach over there one time.”

“You ain’t done it,” the younger boy said, and gave his brother another gouge with his cotton switch, and put the glass back inside the refrigerator.

“Shut up, igmo,” his brother said, and kicked him a hard lick in the knee, which didn’t seem to bother him. “I carried ’em when Gaspareau was having his throat cut at the Veterans Hospital in Memphis.”

A Trailways bus came into sight up the road, its flasher blinking to turn.

“What’s the man’s name?” he said, having a look at the bus, then back at the boy standing in front of him.

“Lamb,” the boy said, watching in the direction of the bus. “That old scoundrel’s mean as ptomaine.”

He let the name go through his mind and decided it didn’t mean anything. The bus slowed, crossed over the highway, and grumbled under the flat eave of the store. The door shoved out and a big pale-faced man in a wool jacket and tennis shoes got down, shielding his eyes from the sun. As quick as he was out, the bus groaned back up on the highway and got lost beyond the gin. An old woman came out of the store and stood under the eave talking to the man who had gotten off.

“What come of your cotton?” he said, looking back out at the water reflecting little strips of sky all down the field rows.

“Wet,” the older boy said confidentially. “Couldn’t get no combines in in September. It ain’t going to be no more cotton if the sun don’t stay up.” The boy glared at the sun as if he had threatened it.

“Then what’ll you do?” he said.

The younger boy’s slate eyes gleamed and he started pointing with his nubby thumb toward the Oldsmobile. “We’ll git our ass in this here shit bucket and drive to New York City, and stop sitting in the dirt like a couple of fools.”

The woman stepped around to the side of the store under the “Be Sure With Pure” sign and pointed out the levee. The man bent to listen, looking like he might have an interest in what was over on the other side.

“He’s ignorant,” the older boy said, smiling pitifully. “He thinks getting in that car’ll fix everything.”

It dawned on him that the man might be somebody going after the job, and that if he had any sense he better get down the road, since it would take the other man time to get there on foot in the heat. He trapped a big drop of perspiration against his temple.

The older boy walked back authoritatively, opened the icebox, took a big drink out of the glass, and shut the door. “You don’t have to be growed up to know better’n that,” he said.

“You ain’t never going to be grown up,” his brother said. “You might as well figure you know it all already even if you don’t.”

He started back across the road without speaking to the boys. He heard the woman say something about Gaspareau, and he gave the man a suspicious look. A hawk was riding the vapors out over the fields and for a moment he watched it fall back toward the river, climbing and growing smaller every second. The man didn’t seem like somebody who wanted to guard somebody else’s property. He looked more like somebody who worked in a bank. The man walked by the truck down the road, staying to the shoulder. He had taken off his coat and had his wet shirt unbuttoned so that his belly pushed over the belt loops.

He let the truck idle into the road until he was up even with the man. He opened the window and stared suspiciously at the man, who was sweating in the dusty sunlight. “Where you going?” he said.

The man put his elbow in the window and wiped his face with his coat. “Some goddamned island,” he said.

“About that job?” he said, ready to hit the gas.

The man looked as if the sweat on his cheeks was giving him a lot of pain, and he answered by frowning. “I don’t know anything about it,” the man said, stepping back out from the window, ready to start walking again.

He tried to take a fair gauge on the man and what he might be doing out in the heat dressed like a banker, and couldn’t. “Get in,” he said shortly.

“What’s that?” the man said.

“I’ll carry you. Ain’t no need to walk in the hot.”

“You sure I’m not going to take your job?” the man said, opening the door but standing back shielding his eyes.

“No,” he said, looking off across the fields dismally. “I’ll run over you in this goddamned truck if you’re lying.”

“That’s not the worst offer I’ve had today,” he said, sliding onto the seat. “At least I know what to expect. Newel’s my name.” He stuck out his hand.

“Names don’t make a shit,” he said.

“Well, mine’s Newel,” the man said, using the same hand to wipe away more sweat, then letting it hang out the window.

“Hewes,” he said softly, wishing he didn’t have to say it. “You don’t need to remember it. It won’t mean nothin if I’ve got anything left to say about it.”