A Piece of My Heart

1

In the morning he woke before light with rain on the shed. Newel lay like a mountain on his cot, breathing roughly, his nose against the corrugated wall. He stared awhile, drifting in and out of sleep, not able to gauge time. He rose once and stepped out in the rain and craned his head around at Landrieu’s shack and up to the house. But it was all dark. A spotlight was shining at the top of the steps and rain darted through the steamy light. He went back inside.

“Look here,” the old man had said, lowering his chin into the wattles of his neck, whiskey still in his eyes. “Blinded pigs can dig acorns.” The old man’s eyes widened as he handed over the gun.

“Yes sir,” he said.

“You know what that means?” The old man angled his head down to get a better look.

“I guess,” he said, wondering.

Mr. Lamb stood back and leveled his shoulders. “I don’t think you do,” he said, and acted as if he was about to walk away, but stopped. “It means any shitass that’s got a gun can figure out a way to shoot somebody.” The old man’s eyes rewidened as if he were searching out a weakness that would let him not have to part with the pistol. “I don’t want you shooting that gun, you understand?”

“Yes sir,” he said, putting his toe to his instep and looking away.

“By God, this here is a symbol of my authority,” the old man announced. “You’re just carrying it for me, cause I’m too damn old to boss people off my land by myself. Even if I wasn’t, though, I wouldn’t go around shooting people, you understand?”

“Yes sir,” he said. He stared at the old man’s toes swaddled in his duck trousers.

“So, Hewes,” the old man growled, “you treat this gun like it was your pecker and keep it in your pants.”

He lay on the damp sheets and listened to the rain pepper the roof. Newel spoke a word in his sleep and raised his fist in the air and clinched it as if threatening some intruder in his dream, then opened it like a flower and drew it back.

2

He woke up again in blue light, the old man flailing at the porch bell, and the dread of W.W. hanging like another big bell without a clapper. He lay still and listened to the old man curse. Newel lay under the sheet, deep in some wretched dream.

There would have to be considerable cautions taken now. He couldn’t simply drive to wherever she lived, beep the horn, and have off with her locked in the cranny of his arm without everybody in fifty miles yanking out the phone lines to tell W.W. that some swarthy man in a pickup had just collected his wife and driven her off to God knows where, with her nosing out the inside of his arm like a worm seeking drier air. He’d have to come up with something better or W. might seize on drastic measures.

The old man started punishing the bell again. He heard Landrieu’s screen slap and Landrieu’s feet on the wet steps, and the old man roaring.

Newel rolled on his back and stared at the spiderwebs, letting the cover slide off on the floor. Newel’s body was white as an aspirin, and one arm was like two of his. His own stomach was hard as a cord of wood and Newel’s was a big mass of hair and chest and belly piled on the sheet like dough.

Newel squirmed over on his side and stared at him. “You’re sure fit as a goddamned fiddle, aren’t you?” he moaned. “You should’ve been abusive to yourself like I have. We’d have something to talk about then.”

He stood and stared at Newel with nothing to say, and began putting on his pants. Newel dragged the covers up to his chin and straightened his legs and seemed to go back to sleep.

The thing would be to call her as quick as he could, arrange a rendezvous where he could sneak her in the truck and nobody notice anything else but a pickup going down the highway to nowhere anybody gave a shit about. Except time felt against him now. He looked at Newel suspiciously as if he were lying there figuring out a way to interfere.

The old man suddenly raged out onto the porch and slammed the old bell again as hard as he could. “Goddamn it, Hewes,” he fumed. “You working for me or in business for yourself, you son-of-a-bitch?” A long silence opened up, then the old man slashed the bell again and barged back inside the house, unable to stand silence another moment.

Newel sat up against the cold wall, poking at his eyes. “Tell me one thing,” he said.

“How’s that?” he said, ready to go out.

“What in the hell are you doing down here? I laid up trying to figure that out. A smart guy wouldn’t waste time doing what you’re doing if it wasn’t important.”

“Didn’t nobody say it wasn’t.’ He couldn’t quite see Newel’s face in the gloom.

“All right,” Newel said, running his finger around in his nose and sinking back on the bed. “I hope it’s not just some hot young nooky you got farmed out so you have to slip around and take your license plate off to get ahold of.”

“Why is that?” he said.

“There’s more important things in the world.”

“Name me one,” he said.

Newel’s flesh brightened in the light. “There isn’t any use my telling you.”

“Shit.” He caught the latch nail in his fingers. “I was hoping you were going to say ‘Another one.’”

“Another what?”

“Another piece,” he said. “That’s all I know’s more important than a piece of tail. I was hoping you’d say that, then we would have something to talk about. I’d of thought a lot more of you than I do now.”

“I bet you wished you believed that,” Newel said.

“You know I believe it,” he said, and laughed. “You better hurry and get smart, boy. You ain’t got that much time.”

3

Mr. Lamb was sitting in his place at the end of the table when he came in out of the rain. The colored man was wearing a dented chintz chef’s hat and an apron up around his armpits, and wouldn’t look at him as he went through the kitchen. The room smelled like hot oatmeal.

He sat down and took up his napkin while Mr. Lamb glared at him silently for a long time. The old man had on the same red and yellow suspenders and canvas pants he’d had on the night before, worn up over a yellow pajama shirt that was buttoned to his neck.

“If it wasn’t raining, I’d run your ass off here,” the old man said, making his eyes into tiny slits behind his spectacles.

“Why is that?” he said.

“The sun’s up,” Mr. Lamb said, and shot a look at the window to make sure everybody knew he knew it was raining. “Any bastard wanted to sneak up to this island has already done it time you get your ass out of bed. If it wasn’t raining I’d put you right in the boat.”

“If it wasn’t raining I’d let you do it,” he said calmly.

The old man frowned and thumbed the bowl of his spoon. “Bring him some oatmeal!” he shouted, and put several quick loads in his mouth and began chewing vigorously. “Where’s Newel at?” he said.

“In the bed.”

“Son-of-a-bitch,” the old man gurgled, drinking a little coffee out of his saucer and spilling some more in.

“I’ll need to go in town this evening,” he said.

The old man’s face was stricken. “Don’t you want to do any work?” he said. “You don’t arrive in here till after six o’clock, and you’re already thinking about taking off again. Shit.”

“I said I was going to have to go some,” he said.

“What the hell for?”

“Business.”

The old man looked at him resentfully for not being let in on the secret. “What kind of business?”

“We already discussed that,” he said, and washed some grounds around the bottom of his mouth.

“Have we?” the old man said loudly. “You ain’t plottin no armed robbery up there in Helena, are you?”

“No sir.” He tried to get the oatmeal to stir and found out it wouldn’t.

The old man took another big bite and eyed him up and down. “You got people in Helena?”

“They all moved off,” he said.

“I don’t know nobody in Helena,” the old man said. “I’m from Marks, Mississippi, and if it didn’t happen I had to come over across that Helena Bridge to get over to this island, I wouldn’t come over there at all. I hate it. This island resides in the state of Mississippi. I don’t have no business in Arkansas at all. There ain’t nothin but nitwits and criminals in Arkansas, like that old piss ant lives across the lake. If you want to go rob that little Bank of Dixie in Helena, go right ahead, cause I ain’t got a cent in it.”

“All right,” he said, ready to leave.

“What do you think about Newel?” the old man said aggravatedly.

“He asks a lot of questions.”

“I don’t think he’d have sense to pour piss out of tall boot, do you?” The old man grinned and his teeth subsided slowly away from his soft gums.

He thought about Newel lying in the cool, half awake and half asleep, while he had to cozy up to the old man just to beg one night off, and Newel seemed right then to have things in a good deal better hands than he did. “He’ll make a lawyer.”

“Shit,” the old man snorted. “Them bastards is crooked as corkscrews, every one. I let ’em make out my will, but that’s all, by merciful God, that I’ll have to do with them.” The old man’s face became studious. “You done made your will out?”

“I hadn’t thought about it.”

“You ought to,” the old man said, lowering his chin confidentially. “I got mine made and feel a whole lot better about everything.” He regarded his fingers as if the benefits were spelled out right there. “Ain’t no telling when you might plop over like a hoe handle. You’re married, ain’t you?”

“I guess,” he said.

“Well, then,” the old man said, and rocked back in his chair and let his lips loosen in the corners. “You know why the birdies wake up singing, don’t you?”

He let his head come up to the old man’s eye level, and tried remembering a bird singing in the wet limbs, and couldn’t remember anything but the drone of the rain and the specter of W. standing in the trees.

“No sir,” he said.

The old man’s lips twisted into a little tricky smile. “Because,” he said, “they’re happy to be alive one more day. You can’t count on that, Hewes. Them little birdies know it, too. That’s why they’re out there singing all the time. They’re trying to tell us something. Tweet, tweet, you’re alive, you ignorant asshole.’” His eyes rounded and he croaked up a rough laugh and got up on his feet. “T.V.A.”

Landrieu appeared in the doorway.

“Go out to the castle and warm up the throne.”

The colored man went off across the porch and down the steps.

“I can’t stand to sit on a cold seat,” the old man said, thumbing his supenders off his shoulders.

He looked into the sitting room to see if Mrs. Lamb was there, but the room was empty, and the house felt tranquilized. The rain had left off, and he could hear the water hitting the puddles underneath the eaves. He listened for a bird in the trees and thought about Newel in the cool bed and W. staring curiously at the hollow chamber of some air rifle wondering why he wasn’t throwing baseballs, not signing autographs, not being the toast of somebody’s town instead of doing what he was doing. And it all made him feel peculiar, like he was missing something going on close to him he couldn’t see on account of some defect. He listened for the sweet sound of the birds, but there was nothing except the water sliding off the shakes in slow irregular drops, and somewhere in the distance the sound of the spring on the privy door drawing shut.

“Get your ass out of here and go to work,” the old man shouted from the double doors. He had his zipper down, holding his pants by the empty belt loops. “If you see Mr. Newel out there somewhere, tell him he’s missed his breakfast.” The old man went hustling out.

He stepped out onto the screen porch and breathed the cold rain fragrance and listened, but heard nothing but the door to the outhouse slamming, and the great trees dripping water into the grass.

4

At five o’clock he drove the jeep across to the lake and took the boat back to Gaspareau’s. The light was fanned out in bands whitening in the haze toward Helena.

Two of Gaspareau’s hounds strolled out into the dirt and stood blinking while he fastened the boat and made his way under the hackberries. Neither one offered to bark, as if they felt someone coming off the lake was not someone to bother with, and in a moment they walked back up under the house. He waited for a sign of Gaspareau, but there wasn’t one. Mr. Lamb’s Continental sat where it had, collecting hackberries washed down by the rain. Katydids hummed in the trees up the lake, and repose hung over the camp and the bight of cabins stretched into the water. Gaspareau’s whistle bomb was holding the last direct tincture of sunlight.

He drove up the tractor lane and across the levee into the watered field. The water was still and reflecting black and white in the furrow rows, like silver arrows mirroring the crusts of the sky.

He stopped in at Goodenough’s. Mrs. Goodenough was standing behind the mail cage in a green visor, watching the sun lower into the windbreak, leaving the sky purple at the horizon.

He wedged behind the baked goods, took the paper out of his shoe, and dialed.

“It’s me,” he said, holding the receiver below his shoulder so the sound couldn’t get away.

“You bastard,” she said, her voice low down.

“What’s the matter?”

“Why didn’t you come?”

“I told you,” he whispered, and filched a look down the aisle at Mrs. Goodenough, who had gone to sorting letters, examining each one from several angles, then inserting it in a canvas bag on the counter.

“I’m on my way,” he said, keeping his mouth walled in by the receiver.

A long silence came on the line. “All right,” she said.

“Don’t you want me to?”

“Yes,” she said coldly. “I wanted you last night.”

“I’m coming tonight,” he said.

“All right.”

“Where do I get you?” he said, and flatted the receiver to his chest.

“Pick me up here,” she said nonchalantly.

“I ain’t going to last a minute if somebody sees me.”

“Then come get me back of the post office.”

“Won’t somebody see you?”

“No. And it don’t make any difference if they did. I don’t have to be good for nobody.”

“Where’s he at?”

“Where do you think? Playing baseball in Humnoke. W.’s done turned hisself into a baseball. Where you at?”

“At E-laine.”

“Ain’t nothing but snakes and mosquitoes down there, is there? Not that I’m down there too often.”

“I’m coming on,” he said.

“Not on this phone you’re not,” she said. “You told me I couldn’t, so you can’t.”

He looked at Mrs. Goodenough, who had taken to staring at the sunset again. He could see the sympathetic line of brow beneath her visor, silhouetted against the window glass. He felt in a frenzy, and she seemed locked away in a solace nothing would ever disturb. She turned her head and looked at him and smiled.

“Where we going?” Beuna said noisily.

“Where there ain’t nobody,” he said, trying to keep from looking at Mrs. Goodenough.

“We going to get a motel?”

“You go on to the post office,” he said.

And she hung up.

He walked to the door feeling upset. Mrs. Goodenough smiled and twisted a frond of her hair back beneath the band of her visor. “Going to town?” she said.

“Hope so,” he said. “If I haven’t slipped up someplace.”

She looked at him sympathetically as if she knew exactly what he meant. “Oh, well”—she smiled—“we make mistakes, but we’re still here.”

There was no other sound in the store but their breathing, separated by odd cadences. They waited for her words to catch someplace or drift away.

“Yes, ma’am,” he said. “I just hope I’m here tomorrow.”

She picked up a letter and examined it carelessly, and he stepped out into the evening, looking up the straight River Road toward Helena, whose lights were a shabby taint to the sky.

5

The post office was a buff brick structure across the train yards. He drove up the unpaved part of the street that bounded the yards, by where Beuna’s father’s house had been, and found that the house was gone and the lot had been turned into a depot for fireplugs. The plugs were sitting by themselves inside a cyclone enclosure, tilted every way they could be, in a cone-shaped pile at the back corner of the fence, behind which were some chinaberry trees he remembered. The town was back of the lot, facing the highway, so that the post office was on the dark farm edge of town, almost in the bean rows.

He switched across the rails by the yardmaster’s house, a light burning behind the shade. He could feel diesel on his lips and on the air. He turned back parallel toward the post office, and felt little fingers itching inside his stomach.

He stopped on the shoulder and tried to think. He wanted to draw himself together now so that at the moment of setting eyes on her he would have reduced to such a compact item that he could completely command himself, so that no limbs or parts were out of control.

He got still and stared down into the yards, watching the hard little red and green foot lanterns and the flatcars loaded with pine timber, listening to the engines heave in the darkness, regulating his breath, setting his mind on one thing and nothing else.

In the yardmaster’s house, where the yardmaster sat and read the Memphis paper, there was a tiny dark inner office with painted windows and a great black banquet of red and yellow and green lights, darting and flashing before a man in a straw hat and perforated cotton shirt, who pressed buttons and flipped toggles and talked to trains out on the line, using a slow drawling voice over a two-way radio. He sat in the room undisturbed for seven-hour stretches and ruled every train and every crew in and out of the rails between Memphis and Lake Village, everything dependent on him to keep from spilling into one another, and keeping the one passenger train that used the line from shooting off into dead spurs at seventy miles an hour and collapsing like a string of garbage cans. Late at night he had slipped in the room and watched the man, whose name was Wheeler, studied him, his white shirt pink and chartreuse in the tiny reflected lights, puzzling at how when the lights started snapping and flashing and trains started heading toward one another at awful speeds, and conductors were howling threats on the two-way, Wheeler could always speak to them in the same mild country voice, adjusting the brim of his hat and flipping a switch to open a rail that was a green light on the banquet, and never making a remark to whoever was sitting behind him, since there was always somebody there watching in total amazement, always keeping his business to himself. He had sat a long time, and despaired over sitting alone in the dark with all the trains and all the switches and the engineers and the conductors and the passengers facing you through one tiny light after another, until the pressure was too great, and you’d fall to the temptation, one night, of letting it all run together, of opening every switch and watching lights converge in a slow series of blinks and snaps, until they all were together and there was nothing left to dispatch.

He had waited in the morning on the settle beside the yardmaster’s house until the daylight dispatcher came and Wheeler came out in the open air, his hat in his hand and a St. Louis Cardinals cap on his head, blinking in the steely light. He stood up quickly and looked at Wheeler, who for all the hours they’d spent together watching lights blink on the dark, silent board had never once seen him, and said out loud, “How can you run that all night, in that teensy place, and not ever drive it all together?”

And Wheeler looked at him as if he had asked himself the question a thousand times and was not amazed to hear it from somebody else. “Mind like a moon,” he said easily, taking off his Cardinals cap and stroking his fine sparse hair. “If you stare at the moon a long time, all you’ll see is the moon, and all you’ll want to see is the moon. I can do it.”

He sat in the truck and stared at the yardmaster’s house in the mirror, a yellow light above the cramped casements, and the panel of painted glass all the way to the end. The moon had risen so that it stood up above the post office, drifting back into some gauzy smoke. Here it all was, he felt, the time when there wasn’t any holding out, the one true last time, and he didn’t want to do it halfway, since halfway was as good as nothing.

He throttled the truck and broke out straight down the narrow truck corridor the wrong way between the post office and the cotton broker’s shed. At the end, the pavement blind-switched left directly into the rear alley of the post office. The truck barely missed taking the corner of the building and leaped on into the alley, losing purchase and fading rearward toward the back wall. He fought the wheel, surprised to have got going so fast in so short a space, then suddenly Beuna was in the headlights and he was pounding the pedals to keep from barging right out over her and carrying on into the street.

And Beuna never twitched. When the truck bucked the back corner full tilt, sliding and seizing two directions at once, she stood up unperturbed in the lights, lifted one hip an inch above the other, and smiled as though she had fallen heir to a power that pickup trucks couldn’t impede.

The truck halted and he blinked at her through the fly-specked glass, his heart lunging like an engine ripped off its mounts. She was wearing tiny terry-cloth shorts that had shrunk up in her crotch and made her thighs look bigger than they could be and made him feel strangled, bound up, as if he wanted to be both in the truck and out of it someplace way away all at the same time. She had worried her hair up in little pencil curls that haloed her head and gave her face a round shape. She turned slightly in the light and smiled at him or toward wherever she thought he was in the truck, and rounded her eyes and unbuttoned her little sleeveless blouse until it sagged open and a big quarter of her breast nosed between the parting.

He felt like there wasn’t enough air to breathe, and the only movement he could school himself to make was to kick on the high beams and shoot her in a hot wash of crackling lights. Her features instantly turned inward and twisted in a mean way. Her hips contracting as if she was trying to withdraw from the light, she raised her bare arm to her eyes so that both her breasts broke out of the shirt, and with her body bent at the waist, wagged over the tops of her shorts.

“Goddamn!” she yelled, ducking lower under her arm. She writhed, trying with both arms to stop the light. He tried to move, but couldn’t work his arms. “Robard!” she screamed.

He all at once stamped the light pull with his heel and sank back in the seat, hearing his name going off through the dark.

And the alley disappeared. There was a pause when he couldn’t see anything, then Beuna’s face popped up in the window, glaring through the dark air.

“Asshole!” she said, burying her chin on her collarbone so she could see which button matched which hole. “What piss-willy trick you call that?”

“I screwed it up,” he said, shaking his head, but keeping an eye out on the mouth of the alley to make sure somebody wasn’t heading around to see what the noise was.

“You sure as hell screwed up,” she said, minding her buttons, but suddenly snapping her chin up at him angrily. “You just about blinded me with my attainments hung out for all the world.”

“Git in,” he said. “You’re going to have the law out here.”

“I give a shit if I do, too,” she said, slapping at the buttons, flinging the door open and flouncing in.

She wore the same sweet flower smell he had waked up in the night at Bishop and smelled on everything, some little fragrance off the desert he couldn’t keep from giving himself to, imagining her somewhere miles away from where he was at that moment. He touched the finish of her blouse where he could feel the weight of her breast, and she slapped his hand and crossed her arms.

“Leave them alone!” she said.

“I done come three thousand miles for them,” he said in amazement. “You want me to turn ’em loose?”

“That’s right,” she said. “I ain’t going to have you pawing me.”

“Shit,” he said, trying to see her in the dark. “How come you stand out there wagging them around like a puppy show?”

“My business,” she said, setting her chin so the soft flesh on the underside disappeared.

“Well, I’m making it mine,” he said, grabbing her by the elbow, waggling his hand inside her blouse and popping off one button after another.

“Robard?” she said, her legs stiff as stones.

“What,” he said, roaming over her breast.

“I want you to tear me up,” she said, her little blue eyes flat as pebbles.

“I will,” he said, his breath all gone.

“I don’t want there to be nothin left when you get finished.”

“There won’t be,” he said.

“Robard?”

“What?”

“I want to do it in the back of the truck in the dirt and the rocks and the filthiness.”

He dislodged his hand and felt suddenly like a man in a tornado. “We will, hon,” he said, “we will.”

He drove up the rise to Main and turned out of town toward Memphis. He passed a drive-in theater, the fluorescent lights shining in the glass office, then two motels, the long fenced-in limits of the BB-gun factory, and a beer bar at the limits of the fields. Then the town disappeared, and the road took west and north into the delta.

Beuna arranged herself under his arm and stared at the highway, hugging her knees. “You know what I did when I was in high school?” she said, looking up at him as if she were apologizing in advance.

“I couldn’t guess,” he said.

She stared back at the highway. “Well,” she said, pulling at her ear lobe. “We had this teacher in school named Mr. Fisher. M. B. Fisher. He was just a little puny thing, had headaches all the time that liked to killed him. I used to go over to his house on the pre-tense of working on the school newspaper, and he’d get out his little Polaroid and I’d get on the rug naked and spread out, and he’d take pictures.” She looked at him to gauge how he was liking it. “And we’d get them pictures back in a minute or two and sit on the floor and laugh and laugh. I used to say to him, ‘Mr. Fisher, I thought them cameras was only supposed to take pictures of land.’ And he’d laugh and laugh. We had us a good time.” She let her eyes wander on the highway.

“How come you and him never got past the picture-taking stage?”

“We did,” she said. “But that wasn’t as funny.”

“I guess not,” he said, thinking about a motel.

“I don’t see nothing funny about fuckin,” she said seriously. “Do you?”

“I guess not.”

“Where’re we going?” she said.

“Get us a room.”

“I don’t want it!” she said.

He looked at her to see if she had gotten mad without his knowing it. “Why not?”

“It’s like every day,” she said, turning her head away and sitting straight up in the seat. “Get in the bed, turn on the TV, fuck, then go back to watching and hope you ain’t missed nothin.”

“We don’t have to turn on no TV,” he said.

“I done told you, Robard,” she said. “I want to roll in the dirt and the sand and the whatever you got back there and fuck you till you’re blue. You understand that?” She thrust her hand in his trousers and got a fierce grip on him.

“All right,” he said. “What about Memphis?”

“That’s a exception. I want to go up there and have me and you get in one of them showers and get my little bag out. I’m dying to.”

“What’s that about?” he said.

“I’m not telling,” she said. “If I did you might decide you didn’t want to. But if I can get you up there in one of them ritzy twenty-dollar rooms with them shower baths and get ahold of you, you’ll do any damn thing I tell you to.” She squeezed to let him know she could do it. “It chills you, don’t it?”

All his blood was headed down, leaving everything else afloat. He slid onto the shoulder and down onto a macadam road perpendicular to the highway. Beuna started grappling his belt as soon as the headlights illuminated the road.

“What’d you tell Jackie you was doing?” she said.

“I didn’t tell her nothin.”

“You know what I made W.W. do?”

“What’s that?”

“Have a vastectopy, one of them operations,” she said.

“Why’d you do that?” he said, thinking about W. being forced into something else he didn’t want to do.

“Cause that boy ought not to have children,” she said. “They wouldn’t none of them be nothin but baseballs. I don’t need no kids anyway.”

He let the truck ride to a stop in the field. He could smell Folex in the air, mingled with the sweet smell of Beuna.

“Why not?” he said.

“Cause I don’t,” she said. “You think I ought to raise some kid up like me? I’ll just have me a good time and let the next bunch take care of theirselves without adding to the misery.” She stared out the window and went back, cradling her knees. “Tell me something,” she said.

He inspected the mirror for some sign of headlights back up on the highway, a mile off. “All right.”

“What kind of tube is your Fallopian tube?” She sharpened her eyes to warn against making a joke.

“It’s inside you,” he said, and rubbed at his stomach. “That’s where your eggs get hatched.”

“I thought it was one of them little tubes in your ear.”

“Something the matter with yours?” he said.

“I was reading about it in a birth control magazine they give W. It said I could of got mine tied instead of him getting his cut, but I would of had to go in the hospital, and all he had to do was come in the doctor’s office without eating nothing, go to bed early one night, and keep from using his thing for two weeks. He never did know what the thing was for anyway.”

“That’s too bad,” he said, shoving down in the seat and getting his face in her breasts.

“You like my attainments, don’t you?” she said, opening her blouse and pushing her chin up in the darkness so her breasts got firmed.

“You’da thought I never seen any before,” he said, tasting the salty bottoms of them and pushing in between them.

“Let’s get in the back,” she said.

He elbowed the door open and held her hand while she climbed out. The road had turned into moist clay and grass that smelled like dust. On the highway headlights were leading north toward Memphis, the cars hissing away in the night. An odor of rotting plants rose on the breeze and held back the smell all over Beuna. He tried to see out in the moonlight to where the water was standing, but could see nothing but the sallow glow of Helena on the sky.

She climbed up in the truck and stood in the bed and took off her blouse and stretched her arms, her body bulky and pale. She faced across the fields with the light to her back, and he could see the failing whorl of hair along her backbone.

“Robard?” she said.

“What?”

“I told W. if I hadn’t of married him I would’ve married you.” She looked at him gravely. “Now I want you to get up on here,” she said, releasing the snap on her shorts and wiggling them out of her crotch and looking at the little curlicues of hair on her belly as if she thought they might not be there this time.

He looked at her and thought maybe the best thing to do was to get back in the truck and out of there right then, and not waste another minute. Except that whatever it was she had, badness or disappointment or meanness, was the thing that was indispensable now, and he wanted to draw in to her and glide off in infinitude and just let loose of everything.

He sat on the side panel and unbuttoned his pants and let the letter fall out of his shoe without caring. She got him quick between her thumb and her first finger like a string on a bow and held his neck and pulled him off the side of the truck. She chivvied him, the corners of her mouth frozen, her breasts clutching his ribs, straining her jaw, pressing his feet with hers, gouging as if she were trying to wear away the bone. Sweat came all at once and he got his pulse in his throat and couldn’t get a breath. He took a hold up on her thighs and felt his body winding up and spread his feet trying to get purchase somewhere. There was a soughing sound, and his back got quavery and the air across his neck chilled, and she began to rock him with her legs, and he could feel her throat vibrating against his lips, the sound out of his ear slipping into the air. He let her rock him, her feet standing his like stirrups, with each traction sliding on her knees as if a gravity were drawing him backward and a new contraction would trickle up his spine until she drew him again and supported him again in the fork of her legs. And in a while she let him fall off on the bed, and went limp, let her feet splay and raised her arms behind her and fingered the post of the jack below the window and made a little humming sound and got quiet, breathing almost not at all, her arms cool and dry.

He moved his hands, which had been driven in the gravel, and sat on his heels and looked at her staring in the shadow of the cab, her belly moist and her breasts sunk into her rib cage. He licked his knuckles and wiped the sweat where it had gotten trapped, and let the breeze dry his forehead. He felt like he’d been pushed through a cave of flashbulbs but couldn’t see any of the pictures.

She drummed her fingers against the jack and stared at him down the length of her body. The wings of some large bird flapped up into the night as though it were using a great effort to pound its body into flight.

“What’s that?” she said, looking around over her head.

“Somebody’s soul done took flight.”

“Shit,” she snorted. “What the hell is it?”

“A hawk,” he said.

“Doing what for?”

“Flying off, I don’t know,” he said, staring at the air.

“Uooom,” she said, and crossed her arms and let her head lie back so she was staring up. “I got scratches all over me.”

“You didn’t need to have,” he said softly, wishing he were somewhere else. “We coulda got a motel in Marianna, or someplace.”

“I didn’t want none,” she said. “I wanted all them scars.”

“What’re you going to tell W.?”

“Tell him I been sleeping on a bed of nails. He wouldn’t know the difference, he’s so dick dumb.” She took a little bite at her thumbnail.

“Whatever happened about his baseball?”

“I didn’t like it,” she said. “I didn’t like all that batting around we was doing. I come back here and rented me a little trailer. And the end of August when he got done up there in Tacoma he come on back and went to work at the BB. They sent him a contract after Christmas, and I told him I wasn’t going to no Tulare, California, or to no Tacoma, Washington, and he just tore it up, that’s the last I heard about it. Some fella called him from Arizona and asked him why he wasn’t out there, two months ago, and he said he wasn’t coming. And he ain’t heard no more from them. He’s done had his baseball career. He’d been trying to get brought up six years, and flubbed his one chance he got.”

“You think that makes him happy?”

“Makes me happy,” she said. “That’s who I watch out for. Let him worry about W.W.”

A breeze picked up off the fields and dragged through the weeds and raised the flesh on his arm.

“What’re you doing at E-laine?” she said.

“Running folks off an old man’s island. It ain’t much.”

“How long you thinking about?”

“Turkey season. A week.”

“You done had it with Jackie?”

“I don’t know,” he said, thinking about it. “I don’t think so.”

“You’re just like me, Robard,” she said, smiling as though a perfect picture of something had formed in her mind.

“What’s that?” he said.

She laughed and pushed back so that her bare spine was against the wale of the truck and she could see him straight. “You want to screw who you want to screw. But there’s a difference, too.”

“What’s that?”

“It don’t bother me,” she said.

“How come you think it bothers me?”

“Cause you got a dead-dog look, like you was afraid of something,” she said, and smiled.

“I ain’t bothered about nothing,” he said, feeling aggravated.

“There’s something,” she said. “I could tell on the phone, and I’ll tell you something else, too.”

“What’s that?”

“I don’t give a shit.” Her face got taut, as though something had frozen it in stone. Though as she was frowning, it began to leach away and her lips drifted forward a little and she sighed against the breeze. “Robard,” she said in a small voice.

“What?”

“It wouldn’t take nothin else for me to be happy.”

“What else is there?” he said.

She slid on her hands and knees until her head was laid against his leg and her body curved around his feet. “Get me a divorce,” she said, lifting her eyes and smiling until she looked pretty.

“Look here,” he said.

“It don’t matter.” She reached and grabbed him and pulled. “When can we go to Memphis?”

“When I get done working.”

“All right,” she said, beginning to kiss the muscle up his thighs. “I love it, Robard, I love this so much.”

Somewhere in the air the hawk made a dipping turn toward the defile of trees at the border of the field, where the air was thicker, and cried, and Beuna looked up, as though she were hung on the fine edge of disappearing.

6

He drove back after midnight, parked the truck, and took the boat across. A long grainy strand of mist hung above the water and the boat slid smoothly into the hidden space beneath it. At the island he beached the boat, turned it on its top, and stood out on the shingle looking back through the willows into the mist. He could hear one of Gaspareau’s hounds strike a rabbit in the woods and get joined by all the others, until they were all silenced by a sharp blat sound and then quiet eased out on the long bend of water and captured everything and held it suspended.

He tried to fathom what had ruined her. It seemed like she could rule her life to the point of perfect control, which was the point of purest despair, and after that she had lost it all and suffered as if something indispensable had been grabbed away so quick she didn’t know she had had it or ever could have controlled it. And that ruined her.

He didn’t like the idea that whatever had turned her life into a hurricane had turned his the same way and made a part of his own existence sag out of control down into the sink of unmanageables. Because if nothing else was clear, he thought now, that much was. Either by diligence or intuition or just good luck he had brought his life to order. And it satisfied him that doing it hadn’t called on anything more than his own good instincts.

She had had him drive the road to Marvell, toward Little Rock, and pointed to the side of the road at a little gravel spin-out that dipped into the trees, and had him stop. At the bottom of a path leading off in the dark he could see a pine lean-to opened to the highway. She said she wanted a quarter, and got out and went down and stood up under the shelter, and he heard the coin drop inside a tin can and she materialized out of the trees.

“What was it?” he said when she got back inside.

“The Gospel Nook,” she said as if she thought he ought to know what it was.

“What the hell is that?”

“Where you go pray for whatever you want,” she said. “Whenever you want. That’s why they put it out in the open.”

“What’d you pray for?” he said, amused by the whole business. He took another look and saw the shape looked like an outside toilet.

“My soul,” she said.

“What’s wrong with it?” He pulled the truck around back onto the road and aimed it toward town.

“Nothin,” she said. “But if I got one, I want it took care of right.”

“Why didn’t you pray for Robard?” he said, feeling good and skinning his hand up the soft inside of her legs.

“I prayed for him,” she said. “I give a quarter to St. Jude.”

“Who’s he?” he said.

“The one for the lost causes,” she said. “They got a list of saints stuck to the wall. I don’t know nothin about them. What difference does it make to you?”

“It don’t make one in the world,” he said.

“That there’s why I done it,” she said.