A Piece of My Heart

1

He parked back in the willows, folded the pistol in his handkerchief, put it under the seat, and took the Traveler over to the camp and drove in to Goodenough’s.

The two tow-headed farm boys were at the junction, resting in the shade of the Servel scathing the dirt with their heels. They gazed at him and didn’t seem to remember. He caught the one boy in the corner of his eye as he turned in the store, the tall boy with rangy arms and narrow turquoise eyes. He stopped and tried to act like a man who’d forgotten something while he watched the boy scrape his heel across the dirt as though he were covering something up. He watched the boy’s wide good-natured face move in the shade of the icebox, while his brother spoke something that made him laugh, and he wondered if they were some kin of Gaspareau’s.

“Where you at?” Beuna said, as though she’d been out searching and given up in exasperation.

“At E-laine. I got to go back,” he said secretly.

“I got all swelled up,” she said. Her voice seemed to be coming out a long strip of narrow pipe. “I thought you’d come up here today.”

“I got to work!” he said. “If the old man caught me over here he’d bust a seam.”

The store was lighted by one sallow tube bracketed to the ceiling, and the light died before it could find the floor and left the store in long rectangular shadows. Mrs. Goodenough was sweeping out back, singing in a tiny high-pitched voice.

“You better not come in here tonight,” Beuna said threateningly.

“Why is that?”

“W.W.’s gonna be here,” she said. “He works late and can’t go out cattin like he likes to, so he thinks he’s coming on in and cat with me. Cept I got news for him.”

He wondered if W. might not come home frisky, snatch her up behind, and look right at a whole Rand McNally of scratches and bites. The idea plunged him in a black mood.

“Robard?”

“What?”

“We going to Memphis, ain’t we?”

“I guess,” he said, staring at the shelf of glazed doughnuts, trying to put W. out of everything.

“What do you mean, you guess?”

“I mean I guess we are going,” he said.

“You ain’t got some whore with you, have you?”

“No,” he said, wishing it were over with.

“What’s wrong with you, then?”

“Nothing’s wrong with me that keeping him from seeing your ass won’t help.”

“Aw, shit.”

“I’m serious.”

“I got all the bruises to prove it, too.” She dropped the receiver and made the bell chime. “Look here,” she said, starting a long way off, then almost shouting at him. “Ain’t no way he’s waking up to nothin less I tell him to, and I ain’t tellin him nothin cause I been waiting on this about as long as I can.”

“I want this to go right,” he said, “without nobody getting in dutch.”

“Like who?”

“Like me,” he said.

There was silence and he could hear her drumming her finger on the mouthpiece. “Something ain’t right, I can tell it,” she said.

“Isn’t nothing the matter,” he said.

“Something don’t smell right to you, does it?” He could hear the sneer in her voice. Somehow she was managing to drum her fingers on the phone and continue to talk.

“Look now,” he said. “The only thing that wouldn’t be right is for him to find out. I don’t want him plundering into nothing and screwing the works. He stays out, I’m happy as a bird.”

There was another silence, during which his ear started to hurt.

“You ain’t ashamed of me, are you, cause you feel bad about making a fool out of W.?”

“I ain’t made a fool out of W.,” he said. “A man makes a fool out of himself. It don’t take nobody else.” He pushed the phone into the other ear until something clicked inside and made his ear feel like it was made of metal.

“Robard?”

“What?”

“When can I see you?” Her voice had become childish.

“Tomorrow evening?”

Mrs. Goodenough came in carrying a broom and gave a startled look at the corner where he was hunched up hiding the receiver. She masked one hand over her right ear and disappeared back into her quarters.

“Can’t tomorrow,” she said. “We eat at his daddy’s once a month, and Thursday’s it. His daddy wouldn’t look at me if I was a hand mirror.”

“Why?” he said, thinking that he already knew.

“He thinks I ruined W.’s playing baseball career, but W. gets more fun playing at Forrest City than he did in Tacoma, Washington. I told him so and he just looked at W. and left the table. W. keeps making me go over there, but none of them can’t hardly chew and look at me.”

“Friday, then,” he said.

“He’s going to Jonesboro, Saturday both. We can stay out all night and half the day doing it. Ain’t that cute?”

“What time?” he said coldly.

“He’s leaving at nine. Come get me at one minute after.”

“We got to get us a new place,” he said, thinking anybody that saw Beuna slipping off from in back of the post office at nine o’clock would get to the phone before they even got their mail.

“I’ll tell you,” she said, whispering. “Drive up Main at ten o’clock and keep looking right. You’ll see me.”

“You might just as well let me pick you up on first base in Jonesboro,” he said.

“No!” she said. “Pick me up. I like that. You ain’t gonna meet nobody commoner than I am anyway. You might as well pretend you ain’t never seen me before, and got a look at me standing there and decided to give me a poke.”

It didn’t sound any smarter after she’d explained it, but he felt like now was the time to stay to the good, since it was two days before he’d be to get her, and it might be smart not to give her any reason to get herself used up, and just keep her mind on whatever she had mapped out about being picked up like somebody’s whore.

“All right,” he said faintly. “Don’t make no production number out of getting in the truck. Just when you see me, get your ass in.”

He glanced through the store to see if Mrs. Goodenough was anywhere in earshot. He could see her shadow moving back and forth around behind the green bead portiere and hear her singing in her little fine voice.

“Robard?”

“What?”

“We are going to Memphis, ain’t we? You ain’t just going to carry me to Clarksdale or some little nasty punk place, are you?”

“No, hon,” he said. “I said we were going.”

“Then I can’t wait,” she said, getting giddy. “I can’t wait to see the Peabody and them shower baths.”

“Just don’t dawdle,” he said.

“I won’t do no dawdling,” she said, letting her voice fall. “Though I might do some diddling.” And she hung up.

He stepped down the aisle, his ear aching so that he couldn’t touch it, hoping all the time he could get out without seeing Mrs. Goodenough. But she appeared the moment he hung up, wiping her hands on her apron and smelling like cucumbers.

“Phone’s done got mean to your ear just lately,” she said sympathetically, as though she were embarrassed it had acted that way.

“It’ll quit,” he said, touching the doorknob.

“Do you want to buy you a postcard?” she said, smiling and making a fragile show of salesmanship.

He took a look outside and gave the knob a useless turn.

“I guess,” he said, looking out the glass.

Mrs. Goodenough skittered behind the metal cage and forced up the metal window.

“We’re in the post office here,” she said, and produced a Roi Tan box from under the counter and set it between them. She flipped the lid and tendered the box, poking a few near cards with her finger.

The cards smelled as if she had been keeping them in a well. Mrs. Goodenough frowned and the stale aroma passed off into the room.

“I can fix the wrote ones with epoxy,” she said, sorting through her end of the box, removing an occasional card and admiring it.

He flipped through, passing over a picture of President Truman and one of President Hoover, digging until his finger scratched bottom, wishing he could leave. He took a large stack and sorted through them quickly.

“There’s lot of presidents,” Mrs. Goodenough remarked, watching cards flipping by, her chin balanced on the heels of both hands. A portrait of Franklin Roosevelt seated before a fireplace holding a dog went past. Mrs. Goodenough looked perplexed. “There’s people say it wasn’t the States’ War ruined the country, it was the cripple man.”

“I don’t know what done it,” he said.

“One man never is to blame for anything,” she said committedly.

“Yes, ma’am,” he said.

A photograph passed his eye, a tired man standing in the middle of a dirt field holding a hoe and a straw sodbuster. The man was wearing muddy overalls and caked brogans. His hair was slicked and he wore a big smile on his mouth. The photograph had been tinted to look old, and along the border at the bottom were printed the words “Outstanding in His Field.” He stared at the card a long time, and took it out of the box and set it on top of a picture of the Liberty Bell.

“That’un,” he said.

Mrs. Goodenough tried to peer over the top of the card, holding her stack of favorites between her fingers.

He flashed the card. “This here,” he said.

Her smile dwindled and she offered the stack in her hand. “Those are funny ones,” she agreed, trying to retrieve the fugitives, “You might like these.”

He inspected the back of the card for the space for writing. “I like this one,” he said. “Looks like he had him a day.”

“Looks like it,” Mrs. Goodenough said stiffly. She patted her own choices affectionately. “I call them novelties,” she said.

“They are novel,” he said, and turned the card and looked at the man again, a cheerful face. The smile and the weariness were both put-ons, he figured, and the second the picture got snapped, the fellow threw down his hoe, got inside some car, and drove off with whoever owned the camera and got drunk in some bar, laughing about selling cards, once they doctored it to look genuine, like a man who knew something about what the pose was trying to put on.

“How much?” he said, fingering change in his palm.

“Fifteen for the card,” Mrs. Goodenough said glumly, gloomy about his decision. “Six if you want a stamp.”

He put a quarter on top of the box.

“Would you like a commemorative?” she said, forgetting she was disappointed and fumbling into another concealed box. “I’ve got an A & P Anniversary and a Financial Patriots.”

“Anything,” he said.

He took the A & P Anniversary she gave him and stuck it on the blank side and put the card in his shirt pocket.

“Ain’t you going to write it?” she said, returning four cents and looking disappointed again.

“I’ll write it tomorrow,” he said.

She put her hands on the smooth counter and smiled and said nothing, as if something had just ended.

He went out just as the bus with Memphis marquee went past. The driver honked, and through the windowpane he could see Mrs. Goodenough lift her hand off the counter and wave, still smiling thinly in the gloom, as the bus passed into the field.

2

The boys gave him a fishy look when he drove back up the road toward the camp, as if they had finally recognized who he was out of the haze of their past, and weren’t amused to see him still around.

The sky had resolved into a flat panel of grayish blue disappearing into Mississippi. Up behind him, heavy white clouds were sagging around the sun as if they were falling with it toward the horizon. He figured for no rain now and that maybe the weather would snap and the fields would leach dry in time to plow.

When he drove past Gaspareau’s, the old man stumped out the busted screen door in his wide-brim hat with the green visor and stood looking at him while he backed up beside Mr. Lamb’s Lincoln, got down in the boat, and started noisily back across the lake. The air on the lake was cooler than the air in the camp, and the wind came from out of the west, riffling the water in little wavelets that urged the boat more quickly in the direction he was taking it. Half across, he looked back, but Gaspareau was gone from the stoop of the house and the camp had begun to drop in the trees.

He beached the boat, set it on its top, and chain-looped it to the stump Mr. Lamb had painted red for that purpose. The old man refused to keep anything under lock, so he could motor all around in his jeep and have access to everything without having to carry a wad of keys.

He crawled up the bank to where the willows had turned the light down the path jade. At the jeep he saw Newel’s head leaned against one of the tires, his shoes kicked off. A flicker dropped out of the willows and dipped down the clearing path fifty yards, and struck the woods.

“Old man passed by,” Newel said. “I told him you’d gone on your coffee break. He said he was happy for you to knock off whenever you felt like it since you worked your fingers to the bone anyway.”

He scraped his instep across the sill of the jeep. “That’s good,” he said. He lifted the mud off the sill with his finger, and sat and looked into the willows, back of which hung the lake, still lightly perturbed by the breeze.

“You run anybody off yet?” Newel looked in the same direction, as if they’d both seen something in the water.

“Not hardly.”

“Mr. Lamb said nobody was coming,” Newel said.

“It don’t surprise me,” he said. “I ain’t seen the first turkey.” He eased himself on the sill. “I’ve made it twenty-five times around, and every once in a while I’ll stop and make a little cluck and listen, cause you can hear ’em strutting around trying to get into something. And I ain’t heard nothin yet. There ain’t no turkeys or else they’re all got smart and hid out with their voices kept down, which ain’t likely.”

“That’s too bad,” Newel said. “If he thinks he’s got turkeys and there aren’t any.”

“Can’t nobody poach what you ain’t got,” he said, smiling. “You can’t have fun with a coon that’s gone.”

Newel stared awhile at the lake and worried his forehead into a little ruck. “I want you to tell me something,” he said, and sighed.

He could hear the flicker kee-ooing out in the shumards. “What would that be?” he said.

Newel drew himself up a little closer. “If you like things so goddamned manageable, just what’re you doing down here?”

The bird kept up its racket. He could hear its wings fluttering in the high leafy branches. “If I’da wanted you to know, I’da done told you, don’t you s’pose?”

Newel’s eyes looked like they had grown smaller. “There’s something not right, though,” he said, “or you wouldn’t be back down here. You’d be back there with your wife in California, or wherever you live, managing everything. Instead you look like somebody going to a funeral for a fellow you didn’t know.”

It made him irritated. He squirmed to the edge of the fender so ha was looking straight down at Newel. “Maybe I wouldn’t look that way if you weren’t aggravating me.” He grabbed onto the chamfer and gave it a good squeeze.

Newel got up, dusted his pants, and stepped a ways off to look at the lake, as if he were expecting to see something rise off the surface. The sun was barely visible past the boat camp, an orangy liquid, shapeless at the tip of the levee.

“I don’t see why I have to waste my time with you when I could be having me a big time driving circles around this island.” He climbed off the fender and sat in the driver’s seat.

“You got some woman you’re fucking up there in Helena or wherever it is that’s running you crazy,” Newel said loudly, turning around and staring. “You look like a criminal every time I see you, so it just must be something cheap-ass.”

He drummed his fingers on the steering wheel, took a breath, and let it go out slowly, staring at his feet as if he were looking in a well of fast-flourishing disasters. “All right,” he said, and laid his hands in his lap and let his elbows tap his ribs. “It don’t prove nothing. I’d bet you nine out of ten things a man does outside of the ordinary would trace to some woman he’s got hid out, or like to have hid.”

“That doesn’t matter,” Newel said, and looked off as if he might be angry. “If you just wanted to cadge a little pussy you didn’t have to drive three thousand miles. You could just go home, or down the road, or next door. You didn’t have to come where you don’t even like it. And if you’re just scared of getting caught with your dick out you wouldn’t look like you do look, like somebody grieved about something.”

“You done got me tired now, Newel,” he said.

“Just so you know it, though,” Newel said angrily, looking at the lake one more time and turning back.

He started the jeep, got his pistol out from under the seat, and put it down in his belt wrapped in the handkerchief. The woods were at the moment of turning brown. “How come you even care about it?” he said softly, to nothing.

“I don’t,” Newel said, and climbed in the jeep, rubbing his arms as if a cold had penetrated into his bones. “I just want you to know I’m not full of shit.”

“I guess I’ll have to hold off on that,” he said, and drove away.

3

Mr. Lamb sat dumped behind the end of the table, frowning over an assemblage of patent medicines, peering out between the vials and tins as if they were a city whose streets he didn’t know. Landrieu was huffing through the kitchen, consigning pots to and from stove plates, frowning sternly at whoever came in the house.

The old man looked up at them curiously. Mrs. Lamb was in the sitting room listening to the radio through her headphones. He sat down quietly across from Newel and tried to cause as little disturbance as he could while the old man, from all looks in a poisonous temper, menaced the array of bottles crowded in front of him on the tabletop.

The old man had assembled a big chalk-blue bottle of Phillips, a tiny vial of liver pills, a bottle of Hadacol in which the liquid had separated into amber and black strata, a black bottle of hemorrhoid pills, a tin of headache powders, a bottle of Black-Draught laxative, two different-shaped bottles of calamine lotion, each with a druggist’s paper label, a clear bottle of brown liquid with a handwritten label that said Gordona Specific, and in back of everything a small paper box of d-Con.

Mr. Lamb gave Newel an unfriendly look, then turned his eye around back onto him so that his face felt cold and hot all at once.

The old man drew up on one of his skinny elbows and started looking at several directions simultaneously. “You threatening my life, Hewes?” he said.

He gave a quick look down at the d-Con and tried to tell if the old man had somehow roped his name in with the roach poison. “No,” he said, and gave Newel a queer look.

“You sure?” the old man said, and leaned out over the tiny sea of bottles until all the ruckles stretched out of his neck.

“Yessir,” he said, nervous.

“How come you come to dinner carrying a pistol, then?” the old man croaked.

He looked down and saw the black rubber butt of the old man’s revolver still wrapped in the handkerchief and stuck out the top of his pants like a snake gone half in its hole. The old man glowered, his eyes flashing as if he wanted to keep both face and gun butt trapped in the same field of vision so he wouldn’t miss anything that happened to each.

He grabbed at the handkerchief, groped the gun instead, and jerked it out of his pants, the handkerchief a-cling. He stood up and flourished the gun in front of him.

“Look out, Newel,” the old man shrieked, and lurched backward in his chair, a grimace fixing on his face, his hands thrown at the ceiling. “He’s gonna blast us.”

Newel’s face got caught in an odd smile and he appeared to be completely paralyzed.

“Good Jesus,” the old man gurgled, and pursed his lips as if he were just before receiving a terrible blow. Mr. Lamb suddenly whipped his face about and looked forlornly at Mrs. Lamb, who was still intent on her radio, her back silently to the rest of the house.

He slammed back from the table, tipping his chair, barreled the muzzle toward the floor and bolted out, the gun ferried in front of him like a dowser, down the steps and across the yard.

He got inside the Gin Den, turned on the overhead bulb, and shoved the gun under the mattress, breathing quickly, his heart squeezing the bottom of his windpipe. It seemed unaccountable, he thought, for life to transport you this way, to where you’d never thought of going nor wanted to go nor even knew to exist. It made him feel giddy and out of control. He had planned it for Friday, for slipping away afterward, but there wasn’t any planning it finally. He saw it all at once. It was all right to plot it, but you had to be ready to glide in the wake of fate sooner or later, and not be surprised when things surprised you.

He turned out the light and stood in the door, watching the house gone darker than the sky behind it, the windows oranged and faintly shining. Landrieu’s silhouette passed in the window like a grasshopper, a kettle hung from a bar, then in a moment, in his chef’s hat, disappeared into the far room with arms full of bowls. He lit a cigarette and blew the smoke in the air and felt chilled in the dew. He thought of sitting on the porch in Cane Hill when the air was purpled and velvet before the sun completely died, watching his father’s cat loll on the step, its lemon eyes drowsy, its tail switching upward and back. His father had come out and stood behind him and looked at the cat as though he could read its mind, and all at once had stood down and grabbed the cat by its back hackles and spun it so that everything was reverse, and the cat’s fat tail switched off the other end of the step in the vervains. And his father stood up again and looked at the cat strangely as if he couldn’t read its mind anymore. And the cat never missed a heartbeat, its eyes falling the way they had, its paws grasping out toward invisible creatures in its dream.

“Ain’t it queer,” his father said, and whipped a handkerchief out of his pocket and wiped his nose vigorously and snorted. “I turned old Mine cattywumpus and he never so much as blinked.”

“I don’t think Mine cares,” he said.

And his father looked at him as if somehow he were part of the cat they were both wondering about, and stuffed his handkerchief in his pocket and went back inside.

He watched the house take better shape in the night and felt satisfied with his old man’s memory, since his father was a planner and a conniver and thought the way he set the world up was the way it should go, even though it was wrong. The porch light was still off, and the night was sweet then and like velvet. He felt in his pocket and took out the card he’d bought in the afternoon and tried to make it out in the skimpy moon’s light and couldn’t and went back inside the Gin Den to sleep.