A Piece of My Heart

1

He stood between the house and the Gin Den viewing the sky skeptically. Long purple flathead clouds were sizing up and the air had moistened and cooled and felt electric. There was the sense now, though not the sound, of thunder and it unsettled the air and made him feel that he wasn’t going to get across before it all broke down. There was silence on the island, and for a while he wandered back between the shed and the house steps, anticipating the old man and Newel, watching the sky.

He needed to get her shunted off to some motel since there wasn’t any way he could take the time to go to Memphis now. Just get in the room, he thought, with the lights off, and get her to work her trick and be done with it without ever leaving town.

And it wasn’t only that. He took a seat on the low rise of the step and watched the chalky sun being scrubbed out by the storm. The color of the sky was being altered on the minute, becoming more bruised and complicated every time he looked up. But the wind was low, and he figured the rain would hold off and come in when the wind was ready.

The real snake was two-headed. One, that any more time spent going through the motions with Beuna might be just enough to push it all over with Jackie, so that he’d arrive at an empty house without so much as a pencil pointed in the right direction — which would be ruinous, pure and simple, though he’d estimated that disaster, or thought he had, before he took the chance, and couldn’t complain if that’s what he picked.

The other head was that he didn’t feel so good about Newel claiming to see whatever he saw, though it was only a word in a million, and it might be anything, but probably was something, since he had little premonitions for it. It made him itchy.

Mrs. Lamb stepped to the edge of the steps and consulted the thermometer-barometer nailed to the porch stud. She held her glasses forward with her hand and peered up through them, then stared at the sky as if corroborating the opinion of the gauges. He looked up and saw her hair was flatted against her head and her eyes looked unrested. He stood up to walk back to the Gin Den.

“It’s smotherin,” she said, as if she had just seen the center of the turmoil and could do nothing about it.

“Yes ma’am,” he said.

“He loves smotherin days,” she said calmly. “He’ll just stay to dark if it don’t rain, if the other man don’t turn the boat over.”

He looked at his jeep as though it had just arrived, then looked down the car path to where it disappeared into the bottom. “Hope he don’t,” he said.

“Decamping?” she said.

“Yes’m.”

“And where is it you’re going again?”

“California,” he said, standing out in the grass. “My wife’s out there.”

“What are you going to do?” she said, passing time.

“Go to work,” he said. “Construction. That kind.”

“You’re not going to bring her back?”

“No’m,” he said, resting his toe against the step, watching her.

Mrs. Lamb elevated her chin as if she were catching some scent on the air and was diverted from the conversation. “Well,” she said, “come and go.”

“Yes ma’am,” he said.

She regarded him a moment majestically, then went back inside.

It occurred to him just as she was letting the door to that he could have asked her to pay him, gotten off the island while there was light and no rain, and made it to Helena before it was dark, where he’d feel better. But she closed the door and there was no chance now of reopening the conversation on the subject of wages, even though he knew she was in charge of disbursals, and once the old man arrived he would just have to go back and get it from wherever she had it squirreled away.

He walked across the yard to the Gin Den. Landrieu had limped into his house and not emerged. The puppy had sprung after the little jeep, but in a little while come back and gone to sleep under the steps. And there had been nothing since then but waiting. He took out the postcard and gave it a reappraisal. The laughing man in the sepia glimmer of daylight amused him. If he had a pencil, he thought, he’d write, “Be to home — Robard,” and stick it in the first chute he came to. And that might keep her until he got home again, some kind of promise.

The wind began to post off the lake. He could see the sock sprung out in the airfield, the funnel showing east. The clouds had blackened and were revolving fast and moving the air in different directions through the trees and under the house. Elinor woke, winded, and relocated herself behind one of the pilings.

In the woods he began to hear the sputter of the Willys, and walked out behind the Gin Den to watch for them, the wind flooding his satin shirt, making it cold down his back.

All he could see at first were Newel’s bare shoulders buckled over the wheel as if he were forcing the jeep toward the house with the strength in his arms. As they came nearer he could see Newel’s face fixed in an odd, exasperated expression he hadn’t seen before, as if Newel had left the old man in disgust and come in by himself. Though finally he could make out the old man’s feet, nylon socks rolled over his ankles, hung side by side across the gate like two sides to a stepladder. And there wasn’t any urgency. Newel drove the jeep to where he stood, gave him the same exasperated look, and slumped backward in the seat.

He looked over the sill and saw Newel’s blue shirt draped over the old man’s face. Mr. Lamb’s body seemed skinny, his wrists and ankles turned blue in the time it took to cart him back to the house. He had a keen urge to take a look, but looked up instead at the window and saw the glass was the color of swamp water and couldn’t be sure Mrs. Lamb wasn’t looking and would see the old man before she was ready.

The wind whipped under the jeep and tumbled out on the yard, making Newel grimace and get goose-pimply.

“What the hell happened to him?” he said.

“The old fart electrocuted himself,” Newel said, and rubbed his hands together under the wheel. “Monkeying with his goddamned box and the first thing I knew he’d grabbed the wires and knocked over. He said oops.”

“Said what?”

“Ooops.” Newel smiled pathetically.

He took an unhappy look at the window. “I’ll get the nigger. Get him behind the shed.”

He trotted with the wind behind him to Landrieu’s house and went straight inside. Landrieu was perched on the edge of his bed watching an enormous television set, and gave him a look of irreconcilable outrage, as if it were beyond all his comprehension anyone should tread into his one good safe place.

“Whatchyouwant?” Landrieu said, clenching the corners of the bedspread as if he wanted to pull the bed in on top of him. Over the bed was a large photograph of Landrieu, much younger, wearing a baseball uniform and smiling.

“He’s dead,” he said loudly, stepping out of the wind, getting a whiff of Landrieu’s room, which was warm and smelled like rancid bacon grease. The television was on too loud.

“Who is?” Landrieu stood erectly and tried to see past him through the door.

“Mr. Lamb,” he said over the TV, breathing the unhealthy air. “You gotta catch the old lady before she has a hissy fit.” The wind kicked the door out of his hand and slammed it against the wall.

Landrieu got very grave. His left eye closed and his cheeks thickened. “Where he at?” he said, still trying to lean toward the door.

“In the goddamn jeep.” He stepped out of the way so Landrieu could see where Newel had pulled the jeep around the Gin Den. Landrieu took a careful step to the door, looked out, saw nothing, then marched straight into the yard, stuffing his shirt down in his coveralls and sniffing. He walked across to the back of the jeep, reached in, and yanked the shirt off Mr. Lamb’s head as if he expected the old man to pop up howling and was just going to go along with the foolishness. But the moment he saw the old man’s face, his nostrils flared and he stood back and looked gray. The wind came up stiffly. Landrieu’s hair shifted to the side of his head like a hunk of sponge, and he took another step backward and almost fell over his feet.

“What done happened to him?” Landrieu smiled queerly as if still not positive it wasn’t a joke. His big television was blasting out into the yard.

“He took a collect call,” Newel said irritably, and jerked the shirt out of Landrieu’s hand and put it back on the old man’s face. “Get on inside and tell Mrs. Lamb. We’ll carry him in quick as you tell her.”

Landrieu eyed them both, then the old man and the black box, which Newel had put in the back beside him, and tried to figure out just how duties were being assigned. “Who gon’ tell her?”

“You,” he said, wishing Landrieu would just go on. “We can’t tell her.”

Landrieu glared at him, hiked up his coveralls, and started legging it toward the house without another word, limping stiffly on his right leg. Halfway up the stairs, he stopped and looked back at them, then disappeared.

Newel leaned against the jeep, crossed his arms over his bare chest, and rubbed at his eyes, his flesh rigid in the wind.

Across the airstrip it was raining, like smoke creeping out of the woods. Behind it, the greenish sunlight narrowed the gap against the curve of the earth. The air smelled strong. He wondered just how long it was going to take the rain to cross the field and reach them.

He looked at Newel, then thought a moment. “What was it you said about my eyes? Something ignorant, I remember.”

“I forgot,” Newel said, looking away.

“No you didn’t neither,” he said. He bit up a tiny piece of his lip.

“You gettin worried?” Newel smiled at him.

“Screw yourself,” he said, and stalked inside the Gin Den and let the door spring out in the wind. He sat on the edge of the bed and watched Newel through the open door and wished he’d never seen him.

Newel walked inside the doorway and leaned against the jamb and looked out. “I said there was something grieved about you.” The wind had begun to keen in the joints, and the tin seemed to expand as if it wanted to explode. “Grieved might not be the right word,” Newel said, wagging the back of his head against the chase. “Heartbroken might be.”

“Nothin ain’t broke my heart,” he said, staring at the points of his boots, wishing Newel would disappear.

“I don’t know,” Newel said. “You know more about it than I do.” He walked off from the doorway.

“I sure as hell do,” he said loudly, trying to decipher just what there could be to break his heart.

Landrieu limped down off the porch, eyes big as buttons, arriving out of breath, hiking at his coveralls and looking up at the house nervously. “She comin,” he said, and immediately made for the other side of the jeep and established himself so he could watch the screen door and the old man’s body at the same time.

Mrs. Lamb came down into the wind wrapped in a black afghan, her hair strewn around her head and her mouth bent into a look of anger. She strode across the yard, acknowledging no one, and walked to the edge of the jeep and peered down. She looked at Mr. Lamb from one end to the other, studying him as if she wanted to be sure all his parts were there. When she wanted to look at his face she motioned to Landrieu, and he lifted the shirt off and the old lady regarded her husband even more carefully, without speaking to anyone. Her complexion seemed slowly to be losing its olive color, and the set of her mouth hardened as though interior shifts were taking place she herself didn’t know about but which had already corrected her outlook toward the rest of the world.

She stood back, girding herself in the afghan, appearing dark and immense, so he wasn’t sure if under different circumstances he could have ever identified her as a woman. She eyed both him and Newel, as if for a moment she couldn’t tell who was who, then settled her eyes on Newel, who was standing half naked in the wind.

“What has happened to Mark?” she said, a tremble in her voice that he thought sounded more like anger than anything else. The wind was blowing sticks and field debris across the yard and dislodging her hair more and more.

“I think,” Newel said, shifting off one foot to the other and keeping his bare chest covered with his arms, “he electrocuted himself.” He tilted his head faintly toward the old man’s telephone.

She regarded the box indignantly, then back at Newel. “And you were there?” she said.

“Yes ma’am,” Newel said. “In the boat, and, ah, Mr. Lamb had the box up front and he just grabbed two wire ends by accident and fell backward. I don’t think he took a breath.” Newel lowered his head and looked out the tops of his eyebrows.

Mrs. Lamb pinched her mouth and considered that awhile. “So he didn’t say a word?”

“No ma’am,” Newel said. “Wasn’t time for him to.” He snapped his fingers softly.

The trees in the belt of gumwoods where the old man had been hunting were woven together, bending toward the house. Branches were breaking off and dragging across the dooryard. The charge of rain set up in his nostrils and he could hear the thunder, like buildings falling in.

“And he said nothing at all?”

“No ma’am,” Newel said, rubbing his arms.

Landrieu secretly relaid the shirt on Mr. Lamb’s face and tucked it under his head and backed off.

“T.V.A.,” Mrs. Lamb said, glancing at him before he’d even gotten reestablished. “Bring in Mr. Lamb, go and call Rupert Knox in Helena, say Mr. Lamb has passed away suddenly, then come back to me.”

She turned aside, paused, and regarded them both, the Gin Den bracking and buckling in the wind. “You men may go along,” she said imperiously, and was gone, rebinding her shoulders in the tails of her afghan, bending her head into the gale.

Landrieu frowned at the cold remains of Mr. Lamb, then frowned at the distance between himself and the first thicket of catalpa woods he would have to cross in order to reach the lake, and set his mind to working on a way out.

Landrieu watched Mrs. Lamb into the house, then turned his attention to him and Newel. “How I supposed to get him in that house, then me across that lake with all this?” Landrieu said, his eyes roaming grievously into the storm, then back at the two of them, awaiting an answer.

“Come on,” he said, and grabbed Mr. Lamb’s heels and waited for Landrieu to take hold of his shoulders. Newel shoveled in under the old man’s back, and the three of them put him up and ran with him across the yard and up the stairs just as the first drops hit the grass and popped the Gin Den roof.

They angled the old man through the kitchen, straight to the back, where the room was dark and warm. Mrs. Lamb had set up a vigilance in a chair beside the two-poster bed and had spread the afghan on top of the covers for the old man to lie on.

When they had him situated, there was a moment in the room when they all stood still and looked at nothing but Mr. Lamb as though they were surprised to find him in that state and wished the world he would relent and get up. He felt like the three of them were filling up every available inch of the room, breathing and squeezing the boards, straining the plaster on the walls. And he wanted out.

“Landrieu,” Mrs. Lamb said, and shut her eyes.

Landrieu’s mouth gaped as if he was scandalized to be discovered anywhere near where he was. “Yes’m,” he said, casting an evil eye at him and Newel and a quick one at the old man.

“Call Rupert Knox now.”

“Yes’m,” Landrieu grunted. He took a long backward stride and was gone, Newel behind him.

“Mr. Hewes,” she said with the same lasting patience, her face back out of the light.

Mr. Lamb’s mouth came open several inches and stopped.

“Ma’am,” he said.

“Your wages are put on the supper table. Mark would’ve been grateful for your loyalty. Leave his pistol in the Gin Den.”

“Yes’m,” he whispered, and could see her face then in her own darkness. “Mrs. Lamb, I’m sorry about him,” he said. He could hear Newel and Landrieu tromping down the porch steps into the heart of the storm.

“He slept on the right end of the bed last night,” she said, bemused.

“Yes ma’am.”

“When it got spring, Mark always slept with his head to the foot. He thought it equalized his body’s pressures. And when I woke up this morning he was sleeping with his head next to mine, and I said, ‘Mark, why are you sleeping to my end?’ And he said, ’Because I went to bed thinking I was going to die, and I didn’t want to be turned around like a fool. I had a feeling my heart was going to stop.’ And I suppose it did. I’ve spent the day getting myself ready, and now I am.”

“Yes ma’am,” he said, looking around into the shadows, unable to make out the wallpaper. “I’m sorry about him,” he said.

“Not as much as I am, Mr. Hewes,” she said.

And he had to go that instant. He took a step through the dining room, grabbed up the money envelope, stapled and neatly written on in pencil, and headed out into the rain, thinking about situations that draw you in and wring you like a rag, and let you go in the rain when the use was out of you and you weren’t good for anything.

2

Landrieu limped to the Gin Den wearing his yellow raincoat, inside of which his face looked cold as the night. He poked his head in the doorway and announced he was ready to go.

He got his gun from under the seat, laid it in the middle of the bed, put on his slicker, and stood in the door while Newel dredged up an old paint tarpaulin and draped it over his shoulders, then the three of them took off in the jeep with Landrieu driving and Newel humped in the front, scowling.

When they got to the overlook, Landrieu paid the lake a menacing look. The water was swelling and the camp was invisible, and through the rain he could see only indentations of shore willows.

Landrieu untied the Traveler, and the two of them sledded it into the water. Landrieu hauled the little All State out of the brush from under an anhydrous ammonia sack, and screwed it on the transom. He then started pinching the bubble and spinning the crank, and staring at the lake as if he were watching a vision of his own calamity.

“Push ’em off,” Landrieu shouted meanly, installing himself in the bow. And they heaved until the boat rode out of the mud and came under power. Newel hulked in under his canvas at the middle of the boat, rain skating his cheeks and wetting his pants. They both faced Landrieu, who kept looking at them malignantly, as if they were undercutting his ability to pilot the boat by simply being there, and when the bow slipped clear of the timber, he whipped the rudder bar to the side and spun the boat into the wind, knocking Newel flat off onto the floor.

“What about the old lady!” Newel shouted when he’d gotten back on the bench. The slap of the water was getting fierce, like metal tearing on the boat’s underside.

“I’d rather leave her as leave me!” he shouted, and Newel made a sour mouth and disappeared in the canvas.

When they got where the dock was visible, the boat had collected two inches of active water and was low enough in the channel that the motor scudded bottom and kicked out suddenly with a whang that shocked Landrieu and almost rocketed him off his seat. He looked puzzled a moment, then motioned Newel out of the boat to wade. Newel crouched lower, shook his head, and pointed on to the dock. Landrieu looked reviled and whipped off down the lake sixty yards and veered back in and approached the dock from upchannel, easing the boat expertly against the swell, baffling the truck tires and cutting the motor.

He got out, tied the painter, and with Landrieu limping out ahead, started toward Gaspareau’s, where there was a light in the front room.

He let Landrieu struggle on while he slid inside the truck and got a cigarette. Newel got in beside him, letting the tarpaulin stand in the rain.

“Where’re you going?” Newel said, gumming his face with his hands and wiping them on his tweed jacket.

He blew smoke at the windshield and watched it hang on the glass. “Motel,” he said.

“Going to see your sweetie?” Newel said, leering.

“Man.” He let the cigarette dangle off his lip while he wrestled his slicker off and stuffed it behind the seat. “Why don’t you turn me loose?” He felt in his pocket to be sure the card hadn’t gotten soaked, then sat back and hitched his knees against the dash.

“I’ve got a feeling you’re fucking up,” Newel said, widening his eyes to see better.

“Where’re you going?” he said.

“Chicago.”

“I ain’t going that far. I’ll carry you to the store.”

Newel nodded and looked wretched.

“You going to be one of them big-time shysters makes a lot of money?” He fished his key out and put it in the truck.

“That’s about it.”

“If I had the money I’d buy me a new truck.”

“You going to put on your license plate?” Newel said.

“One’ll hold me,” he said.

“It’s none of my business,” Newel said.

“Maybe we can get to the highway without you changin your mind.” He cranked the truck and watched the gauges climb.

“One thing,” Newel said earnestly. “You don’t really think the best way to solve a problem is just forget about it, do you?” Newel peered at him, his face shiny and smooth.

Rain hammered the truck. He turned on the wipers and cleared out a path where he could just see Gaspareau standing on the porch conversing with Landrieu, who was out in the rain in his yellows. He looked at Newel. “If you’re to where there ain’t nothing else, it is,” he said.

“Is that where I am?”

“Where?”

“At the end of my rope?”

“Sure,” he said, smiling. “I figure you were at it a long time ago.”

Newel chewed his cheek and faced forward.

He let the truck idle out from beside Mr. Lamb’s Continental, toward where Gaspareau was listening to Landrieu, jamming his finger at his disk every time he wanted to talk. When the old man saw the truck come up even with the house, he waved his cane and started out, leaving Landrieu standing in the rain.

Gaspareau stumped out to the side of his whistle bomb and poked his face in the window, obliging Newel with a sour look. He had on his hat with the green visor in the brim, and rain was loading it up and guttering off the back.

“Looky here,” Gaspareau said in a strangled voice, having a look at Landrieu before he spoke. “Feller come this afternoon, give your truck a good going over. Got in it and looked around. I told him you was over with the old man, and he had me point to where you was.”

“Must’ve wanted to buy my truck.”

“May-be,” Gaspareau said, his eyes flickering.

“What else did he say?”

“Wanted to know who you was. I told him I didn’t know who you was. I said you worked on the island and didn’t ask my permission to breathe.”

“What else?” He stared through the windshield at the rain.

“That was all. Just looked at the truck — that was before I could get around and tell him to leave it be. Me and him went out on the dock and he had me point where it was you put the boat in over there.”

“You catch his name?” It was raining on Newel’s arm.

“Didn’t say nothing about it.” The old man’s face was streaming. The rain was loud.

He gave the motor a little toe nudge. “I wouldn’t mind selling it if I could get out what I put in.”

“Why sure,” Gaspareau said, smiling widely.

“What’d you say he looked like?”

“Regular boy, long kindly arms.”

“I don’t know no regular boys,” he said, and throttled the engine loudly. “Except Newel here.”

“What do I hear about old man Lamb?” Gaspareau said, smiling as if something were funny, his ears dripping rain.

“He died. That’s funny, isn’t it?” Newel said right in Gaspareau’s face.

Gaspareau stepped back and scowled, his cheeks rising. A circlet of rain slid down his neck across the silver disk that fitted his throat, and disappeared in the hole. Newel put his hand on the window crank and looked at him, his legs getting wetter.

“Police might want to talk to you,” Gaspareau said, swaying on his cane. “Where’ll I tell them you’re at?”

“Chicago, Illinois,” Newel snapped, and raised the window halfway.

“I’ll be somewhere,” he said, letting his eyes roam. “I’ll get in cahoots with them.”

“What if that feller comes looking for you?” Gaspareau said, looking at Landrieu again, who had sheltered himself under the eave and was looking disconsolate.

“Tell him I’m sorry to miss him,” he said.

“He’ll be sorry he missed you,” Gaspareau said. He stood back, and looked at his soaked feet, loosening a stream of water that shot off the brim of his hat and covered his shoes. Gaspareau grinned as if he had done it on purpose, and he suddenly gunned the truck and left the old man grinning at nothing.

The truck rumbled down over the hound’s carcass and up the side of the levee. Beyond it the rain was fierce, and the field rows toward Helena were blurred out. Goodenough’s was half visible and both the tractor and the combine mired in the field were past their hubs in blinking water. A single crag of blue sky was just apparent where the rain had passed and left the air clean. The sun was below the plane of the fields, refracting a bright peach light behind the rain. He let the truck swagger down the side of the levee into the fields and onto the bed that was draining water off the high middle.

“Who was it looking?” Newel said.

He kept his eyes to the road. “Couldn’t tell you.”

“Don’t you wonder?”

“Not a whole lot.”

“You said you didn’t like to advertise, didn’t you?” Newel said.

“I might have said it.”

“If you don’t advertise, who was it looking? You must’ve put an ad someplace.”

“I don’t know nothin about it,” he said. He tried to make out the outline of the store in the rain, and could only see the shadow above the dumpy profile of the land. He tried to put whatever it was Newel was trying to stir up straight out of his mind and concentrate on when everything would be over with.

“Wasn’t your gal’s husband, was it?” Newel said.

He kept watching for the store. “Let me go, would you do that?” He felt himself itching, concentrating on the dark little square emerging shade by shade out of the storm.

“A man diddling another man’s wife in the state of Arkansas is fair game if he’s caught in flagrante delicto,” Newel said.

“You have to talk English to me,” he said.

“My granddad knew a man in Little Rock named Jimmy Scales, who shot his wife in bed with another man. The fellow jumped up and climbed out the window and went running all hell down the street and ran in Walgreen’s to call a cab, and when the cab came the guy walked outside in his underwear and Jimmy Scales shot him in the eye. And when he came up, the jury found him guilty of murder two for shooting the man in a fit of rage. They didn’t even press charges for the wife. The judge suspended and gave him a lecture about being quick on the trigger. That man’s a urine tester at the Hot Springs race track right now, if he hasn’t died with everybody else.”

“Is that what you’re going to do when you get to be a big-time lawyer — amuse them judges about how they practice the law in Arkansas? I think you better figure out something else to do.”

Newel folded his arms behind his head and leaned back in the seat. “I thought you might be interested.”

“Why, Newel, won’t you just let it go, goddamn it? If I want to sly around, why won’t you just let me do it?”

“Because you’re so goddamned stupid, dicking around after some fellow’s wife until you get him out hunting for you. Don’t you know that’s the one thing that’s not supposed to happen? Except if you believe the whole world just boils down to a piece of mysterious nooky, I guess that’s the one thing that’s always going to happen. I’d just hate to see anything happen to you, Robard, cause it’d take you so long to know it you’d be dead.”

“You won’t,” he said, watching the store arrive finally on the roadside.

“Won’t what?”

“Won’t see nothing happen to me,” he said, “cause you’ll be on your train, and won’t be thinking about me. And I sure as hell won’t be thinking about you.” He pulled off and idled in under the awning between the gas pumps and the building. Mrs. Goodenough stood in the double doors smiling as if she had plans for both of them. He held out his hand for Newel to shake. “Now, Newel, I want you to save everybody up there, you hear?”

Newel took his hand and pinned it to the seat as if he were keeping himself from leaving. “Screw yourself,” Newel said, and yanked his hand back and jumped beyond the protection of the awning into the rain, then hurried inside the store without looking back.

He reached across and pulled the door to, took a breath, and watched Mrs. Goodenough close the door, then idled out from under the awning and made a turn back into the rain toward Helena.

3

At the first town buildings the rain was already fading. Lights were turned on under the awning of the drive-in where he’d eaten. Cars were pulled up under, their parking lights blinking slowly.

The uncertainty made him edgy now, kept him watching the streets as if something were almost ready to barge out on top of him. And if it was W.W. out scouting the country, where, he tried to figure it, would he least likely hunt, if he wasn’t going on the island, which he might after all be intending? And if that was so, then he could just forget W., since he’d end up out on the island with no explanation for being there, among a throng of people he didn’t know coming and going, undertakers, lawyers, sheriffs, deputies, and could spend the next day explaining why he showed up on private property the day old man Lamb had picked out to die, and all so close to turkey season on top of it. He could be down the road, he figured, by the time W. cleared customs.

But that was part of the uncertainty, since W.W. was never one to stay at a thing longer than it took somebody, like Gaspareau, to convince him to do something else. He might just have mooned at the island awhile, surmised there wasn’t any use going over, satisfied himself on one inspection of the truck and all its contents, getting a good enough look so he’d remember it if he ever saw it again, and gone home and stationed himself where, when he saw the same truck slip out of some alley, he could let go with whatever artillery he had to let go with.

Which brought up the prize question. Just how was it W. got caught on in the first place? It wasn’t likely anybody had been at the post office to see the goings-on, and less likely around when he brought her back, since he’d have heard about it by now from Beuna herself. And there was no reason he could figure Gaspareau to be suspicious, at least not enough to hold his own private investigation and come up with precisely the right man and bring him to the camp, then go to all the trouble to stand right up in the rain and concoct a bald-headed lie about some “stranger” he’d caught, since that would just alert him and give him the chance to get out of town. And as foul a soul as lived in Gaspareau, the bastard just wouldn’t have gone to the trouble, and he knew it.

Which only left her. Which wasn’t smart either, since it was her wanted a trip to Memphis, a shower bath in the Peabody Hotel, and a chance to show her trick. And he figured she wouldn’t ruin that just before she got to spring it, since it seemed like the climax to something everlastingly important to her whole life.

He drove up the hill to West Helena. The hill was grown up in Kudzu. The road took a short pass below the lip of the bluff before turning up onto it, and he could see back on the town, darkening, the rain glossing the dusk, little furry lights socketed into the train yards, a necklace of vapor lights draped through the heart of things. In the jade sky the rain hung out darkly over the bottoms, a smear of storm and thunderhead sweeping into Mississippi, the bridge in the distance catching the spangles of low sunlight. He made the gloomy turn into West Helena wondering if the getting would get any gooder than it was right now.

The town was only a couple of poorly lit streets. Each ran a short way in opposite directions and quit. There was a brick millinery, a drugstore, a domino room, and the Razorback Theater, which looked like it might be going. The other fronts that weren’t boarded looked empty. A John Deere was closed on the corner. He thought there had been some people with French names back along the bevel of the hill away from town, and some rows of houses on the west edge where the Negroes lived who worked in the fields toward Sappho, and who rode to work in the trucks that came up from Helena.

Two motels were set out past the shanties on the highway beyond the Kold Freez, one for colored, where there were plenty of lights and a lot of long cars with Illinois and New Jersey plates in front of some loud-colored cinder-block rooms. And a quarter mile down, four cabins were strung off the road behind a moving green neon on the shoulder showing two mallard ducks batting the air in three separate figurations of flight.

The man in the office was drunk. He appeared from behind a bead portiere with a plastic cocktail glass and went searching under the counter for a card without saying a word. He finally just shoved out a key, tried to straighten his shoulders, breathing whiskey into the room, and sauntered back through the portiere, where a television was on and a woman’s voice was talking softly.

He compared the key to the first door, and found his way to the last cabin, where the weeds were rooted in the sidewalk, and the little building was dark blue and nearly invisible. Bullbats were cutting the air after mosquitoes, croaking up in the night. He could hear their little membranous wings flutter above the burble of the motel sign, get a glimpse of them wheeling close to the ground. When he had worked for Rudolph and had lived in the shack on the sluice gate and listened to the radio at night, he had liked to walk out in the dusk with his shotgun, step across the bridge over the barrow pit, and stand on the old man’s levee and shoot bullbats against the orange twilight, where they showed up like razors, gauging shots to hit two birds crossing and spin them into the moss-trussed reservoir like elm seeds, slapping the surface with their wings until they drowned. And in the morning, he went across the pit and down the levee to close the pumps, and he would look out into the strumpy water and see nothing but black turtles stretched along the deadfalls, sunning themselves in the milky light, and hear the grasshoppers buzz in the grass, and there would be no sign of the bullbats, though they always came in the evenings in greater numbers than before.

He got in the truck and drove back to the Negro motel, where he had seen a cold-drink machine on the outside. He bought a root beer and a package of Nabs, and stood in the drink-machine light listening to music and voices sliding out of the rooms. Parked in front of each door was a dark automobile with an out-of-state plate, the rear ends weighted almost to the gravel with whatever was in the trunk. He remembered seeing heavy cars on the road to Los Angeles, full of black babies and mean-mouthed in-laws packed in the back seats, gawking at the desert as if it were all part of a long dream. And down the road two miles you’d find the cars crippled on the shoulder, one fender hoisted, the wives and in-laws and babies standing off from the roadway fanning themselves while some skinny husband wrestled with a tire, his pink shirt black with perspiration, listening to the radio as the cars whipped by. It was always a joke. They had enough credit for the car, but not enough to finance the tires. So they took a chance. And those big Buicks and Lincolns broke down all the way across the country for lack of tread rubber, which was the last thing a nigger wanted to think about when he got the notion to take off.

He ate the last cracker and bent and fingered the tread on the car nearest the truck. It was thick and warm and deep enough to lose a nickel in. He took a drink of his root beer and tapped the tire with his toe and went back.

He backed the truck up to the cabin door and let himself in. The room was damp and smelled hot like the room they had put the old man in. The ceiling fixture gave out a grainy light. He opened the bathroom, inspected the shower, and pulled up the casement to let a breeze circulate the mildew air out of the room. He washed his face, turned the light off, and stood in the window, letting his skin dry. No cars were running the road. The lot was empty. The ducks’ wings were buzzing in a soft green haze of light, and someone had turned on the red NO sign. He took off his shirt, lay on the bedspread, and let the breeze settle on his stomach and soothe his legs.

He could rent a big Pontiac, he thought. He could get a big room at Manhattan Beach, have a swim and see the movies, and come back while she was excited and love her like he hadn’t been off, make her forget it, say how everything comes down to choice. One day you think you never even made a choice and then you have to make one, even a wrong one, just so you’re sure you’re still able. And once that’s over, you can go back and be happy again with what you were before you started worrying. Though she’d say it wasn’t like that at all, he thought, since women tied themselves to men like men wanted to tie themselves to the world. But if he could make her see that, he could still make her happy, on account of choosing her after he had already had her when there wasn’t any reason to have her now except he wanted to. He lit a cigarette and smudged it and blew the smoke up and watched it sag off in the breeze. He could hear the duck sign buzzing outside. There was some mystery to Beuna still, some force that drew him, made him want to find her out, like a man plundering a place he knows he shouldn’t be but can’t help but be for the one important thing he might find. Something pulled him, over the squeezing and weltering that he thought he could just as easily dispense with now and would if there were some other way to get that close to her. Except that that was all she allowed and cared about and would just as soon for her own pleasures dispense with all that he wanted to save. W.W. came in his mind with the idea that she wanted to punish him and punish herself with one more thing she couldn’t have. Then he forgot it. His eyes closed and he slid backward in the breeze, and heard one fast car hiss through his mind and disappear down the road, and then he let it all go.

4

The radiator began to tick and whomp at three o’clock, and when he woke up it was daylight and his head was cottony as though the heat were a drug he’d taken to sleep. He put on his shirt and walked out in the lot. Clouds had pushed out ahead of the wind, and the sky was plush, delving over into itself creating a stiff wool of low mist. He thought it would rain.

He walked to the office to ask the time. The clerk’s face looked withered. His hair was stood up in back, and he had to close one eye as if he couldn’t focus them both but still needed to be able to see. He told the clerk he was leaving for a while and coming back and would be another night. The office smelled like hot coffee.

“If it had come up cool last night, you would’ve been hollerin for that heat,” the man said, fingering a styrofoam cup and looking sad.

“Don’t matter,” he said.

“If you like the weather this time a year, you just wait ten minutes,” the man said, and displayed a wound that had enlarged one side of his mouth and made it gap wide open when he smiled. “It’s gonna rain on us today,” he said, as if he understood it hadn’t rained in weeks.

He wished he had some coffee.

“What part of California you from?” the man said, sniffing. His shirt was unbuttoned to his belly and a little bleached-out Indian chief was tattooed into the flabby portion of his chest.

“Bishop.”

“I went out December ’47, in the Navy,” the clerk said, gravely staring down at his cup. “Stayed till”—he stopped to count it up—“four years ago. Come back and bought this.” He looked around the little office, admiring it. The man bent over the counter farther and cradled his cup in both hands. “I ain’t getting rich and I ain’t kissin ass.” He raised his eyebrows significantly. “Had me a putt-putt up in Oceanside. But she never liked it in San Diego cause of the spics.”

He tried to steal a look behind the portiere to see the man’s wife, who might, he figured, know Beuna, and be somebody who practiced recognizing the backs of people’s heads just as they disappeared through motel room doors, and grabbed the phone the second she saw something the least bit interesting. “How’s she like it?” he said, trying to get a good look in through the beads.

The man ran his hand through his slick hair. “She’s gone to Little Rock to visit her sister,” he said, and concocted a wry little smile on his ruined mouth and let his eyes roam the ceiling. “I’m ex-Navy.” The left corner of his mouth looked red and embarrassing.

“Yeah,” he said. He pulled out his postcard, laid it on top of the glass, beneath which were a lot of other postcards, picked up the motel’s plastic pen and scratched a note that said: “Be to home Tuesday.”

The man opened a drawer, tore off a stamp, and pushed it across the counter. “I stuck all them under there from people who’s stayed here,” he said proudly. “They come in and spend the night, a couple of weeks later I get a card from Delray Beach, saying how nice it was in the Two Ducks.” He finished his coffee and wiggled his cup in his hand and looked up in a comradely way. “I’m made hopeful,” he said.

“Yeah,” he said. He stuck the extra postage to the card, thinking it would get there before he could get there himself, and stuffed it in his pocket. “What time you got?”

The man consulted his wrist watch. “Four to.” He smiled and the corner of his mouth flapped down like the entrance to a bad place.

He drove off the hill and onto the little gravel streets of white mill houses with board-step porches and pink hydrangeas to hide the water meters. The street was bothered a distance by some young failing mimosas, but across the business spur the trees had been hacked down and a Red Ball store put up, and after that it was business to Main Street.

He turned a block before Main and drove to the south end, to a row of feed warehouses and the Phillips County Co-op, where the street ended in a weed lot, then turned up to Main and drove back the direction he’d come.

The street made him nervous right away. He knew the townspeople had gotten the forecast and got their business over and gone home, leaving him out by himself. The sky was higher, but the town seemed sunk and gray, only thin veins of light leaking into the air. He tried not to look sideways until he saw the old man’s maroon Continental angled into a row of pickups, with Landrieu slumped in the driver’s seat trying to stay out of sight. The car was stopped in front of an old two-story glass and granite building that had “R. M. Knox” stenciled on several of the windowpanes. Just as he passed he tried to see inside, but couldn’t make out anything but a high metal desk and a secretary walking around in a skinny skirt holding a flower vase. She disappeared into where the glass was darkened, and he wondered what finalities Mrs. Lamb was making for the old man, whether she already had him moved off the island back to Mississippi, or whether there were laws against hauling bodies across the line, which was why she needed R. M. Knox. It all seemed like someplace he hadn’t ever been but knew about, something away from his life altogether now.

Two men outside the bank regarded him casually and he raised a hand, and one of them waved and smiled and went back to talking.

He started watching the other side of the block, where there was a Pure station, the Red Ball storefront, and a cotton broker. The street was almost deserted. A Negro man was stopped looking at the sky and a pregnant white girl walked inside the Red Ball pushing a stroller.

And then he saw Beuna, past the corner, standing outside a lawn mower store, one foot on the curb and one square in the mouth of the gutter, looking like a white peony blossom.

Beuna was got up in a white gauze dress with a sateen boat top that looped down on top of her breasts. The dress then belled out to make a gauze skirt with lacy flounces down to her knees. She had on a pair of red shoes and a wide red belt that almost matched, and that was cinched so he wondered if she could breathe or had simply been standing at the curb all morning with her breath inside her trying not to turn blue. The dress had tiny straps holding it up, and she was carrying a big white patent purse. Her hair was down on her shoulders and bunched under, and she was smiling a big rougy smile as if she thought somebody was standing ready to take her picture.

He let the truck creep across the intersection, checking the mirror and aiming straight down the gutter to where she had her foot. He popped the door as he got clear of the cross street, and she had to get back to miss being smacked.

She sweetened her big airport smile so he could see her teeth were frowzed with lipstick.

“How am I?” She spread her legs so he could see through the gauze and make out everything.

“Like a har-lot,” he said, feeling angry.

She licked her lips. “Don’t I look like a kid?”

“You look like a whore,” he said. He took another look at the mirror.

“Don’t I look like a young girl, Robard?”

“Goddamn it, get your ass in or I’m leaving you for them hard dicks to pick over.” He flashed at the mirror, expecting to see four or five men charging up the street.

Her head declined and she quit swinging her purse, and he could see a weal of flesh appear under her chin. She got in the truck and closed the door. “What was it you said I looked like?”

He could smell a sweet gardenia perfume over everything. “A harlot.” He nudged the truck off from the curb, catching a glimpse of the spectators in front of the bank. They seemed not to be paying attention to anything but a blue and white state police car passing along the street.

“What’s a harlot?” she said.

“A slut,” he snapped, watching the police car intently while he slipped through the next crossing.

“Oh,” she said, and slumped her purse in her lap and poked her hands through the strap. “I thought I’d look like I looked when you and me knew one another at Willard’s.”

“What come of Willard?” he said. He turned off Main in the direction of the bluff. The trooper cruised by toward Memphis. The street changed back to low-porch bungalows with old Chevies in the yard and motors hung up on chain pulleys.

“Him and her went,” she said, nibbling a fleck of lipstick and spreading it over another tooth. “He took empyzema or some such and went to Tucson.” She looked dissatisfied. “I don’t write ’em nothin. I just write you.” She pushed her lower lip out and made a face.

He started looking for a drop box on the street. He turned back to the street he had come in on, then up toward the hill. At the first corner, he aimed the truck across, slid in under the spout, and dropped the card in the slot.

“What the hell was that about?” she said.

“Jackie.”

“Saying what about?”

“I was coming.”

“Huh,” she snorted.

He pulled back onto the road.

“You and me’s going to Memphis, Tennessee, tonight, buster,” she said. “I got me some plans that’ll keep you out of circulation tonight.” She looked cagey.

“We’ll see,” he said.

“What do you mean, ‘We’ll see’?” she said. “I’m going to be in the Peabody Ho-tel tonight looking out the window at the Union Planters Bank, or by God I ain’t going to be no place at all.” She glared, hiked her skirt, and crossed her legs.

The truck went a ways along a slip fault in the bluff, and the cotton fields began to be visible, opening away to the river toward the south. From the distance it was impossible to tell the fields were flooded and gummed, and everything looked dark and tilled, ready for planting.

“I got to pick up some stuff,” he said.

She faced front, her cheeks pale as if in looking out at the river bottom she had seen something that made her unhappy.

The road made a turn over the bluff into West Helena. An old man on a ladder was changing the letters on the Razorback marquee and had put the word BLOW into place, hunting in a cardboard box for the members of some other word. The bottom line said OPEN SAT MAT.

One or two people were on the street, hurrying to and from the Skelley station. The sky made it seem like the aftermath of some public alarm.

“I hate it up here,” she said, looping her purse around her wrist and glowering out the window. He was silent. “They’s a Kold Freez up here,” she said. “Pull in, I want me one.”

He drove past the motel where the cars had been the night before, everything all gone, and the light in the soda machine was off, and the motel looked as if it had been shut up.

“That there’s the gambling joint,” she said, staring disinterestedly at the motel. “Niggers cut one another up there and pay off the sheriff.”

The Kold Freez was off on the left, in the middle of a rectangular lot that let the cars drive all the way around.

“Gimme a quarter,” she said, throwing open the door.

He fished out a quarter and she sauntered up to the window. A sign above the window said DOGS BOATS • SLUSHES. One of the girls inside shoved up the screen slide and stuck her head in the opening to see out. Beuna spoke, and the girl stood up and stared at him through both wide panes of glass, then turned around and filled a paper cup from a big silver machine and delivered it to the window-way, where Beuna was leaning, staring up the road and fanning herself with her hand. The girl stood and looked at him again, brushing back a strand of strawberry hair out of her eyes, then disappearing behind the machinery into the private rooms of the building.

Beuna shoveled down in her seat with her knees on the dashboard, drinking something out of the cup with a striped straw. “Wasn’t no change,” she said.

He drove to the motel, backed into the last cabin, and cut off the motor.

“Is this the dump you’re stayin in?” Beuna said, surveying the lot over the window sill, having another sip on her straw.

“Come on in for a minute.”

“My ass, too.” She threw the cup of ice out the window.

“I don’t want nobody to see us,” he said.

“This here’s a goddamned cathouse,” she said loudly, and shot out her lip. “Brashears don’t give a shit if you take a goddamn sheep in here. He knows. You paid for a double.”

“I ain’t paid it,” he said softly, and looked up at the office.

A truck of Negroes passed, headed for Marvell, men all standing against the side slats peering out like convicts. One of them yelled at the truckdriver and waved his hat, and he could hear the rest of them laughing, and the driver honked the horn and some of the others took up whooping.

Beuna looked through the side window, her head turned so her chin looked like part of her breasts. He grabbed her arm suddenly and pulled her over and kissed her on the mouth, but she kept her arms unbent and her neck stiff, and when he looked at her she was staring at him, a smile trying to figure on her lips. He ran his tongue behind his teeth. “What the hell’s got the matter with you?” he said. He took another grip on her arm until he could see white radiating away from his fingers.

Her eyes got big and her pupils flattened and welled up, and she started to tremble and moaned. “I don’t know you,” she said, losing her breath, tears pearling off her face, disappearing between her breasts.

“Yes you do,” he said. “You know me, sugar.”

She gulped. “I thought we was going, and we ain’t,” she said, and covered her face with her hands. “We’re just going in that room.”

He pushed his thumb up through his eyebrows and stared at the floor. “Everything didn’t work out just right.”

“Why can’t we?” she moaned.

“I can’t be running off now to no Memphis,” he said.

“I can,” she bawled, another gout of tears breaking loose, flooding her cheeks.

“I want to, sugar, but it’s just some things can’t be.”

“You little bastard,” she said. “You ruin everything for me, tearing up my hopes.”

“Come inside,” he said softly, looking back up at Brashears’ office, turning the door catch behind him.

He led her in where it was cool and green shadows. The bed was jumbled and his sack of clothes was dumped on the chair. The light in the bathroom was on and Beuna went in and shut the door.

He took off his boots and listened to her rattling things in the sink and running the toilet. He looked for a radio but there wasn’t one. He wished he had some coffee and a sandwich, and decided that after a little while they could drive out to Marvell and get groceries and bring them back. He peeked out the curtain and saw his truck alone in the cool rain breeze. The sky was smoky, and the sun had inched higher into the clouds. A black Cadillac passed toward town and disappeared beyond the two ducks.

Beuna emerged, her lips swollen from crying and her dress flapping in the back. She had left the light burning and stopped so it was behind her and he could make out the silhouettes.

“I ain’t mad at you,” she said, and sniffed. “It don’t make no difference about no Peabody. I wanted to look like a young girl to you, to take to Memphis with you. But it don’t matter.”

He watched her legs shift and twitch behind the gauze dress, and felt everything floating.

“Come here,” she said. She pulled one hand from behind her, holding a little bag in her fingers.

He came to where she was and she clenched her hands behind his head and kissed him on the mouth and forced his lips back against his teeth so that his ears whirred. He got a hand at the bottom of her spine and moved her legs and she held his head and squeezed.

“You come in,” she said, breathing in big gulps. She led him into the fluorescent bathroom light and turned on the shower and held her hand in until it was warm and steam started spreading.

“What is it?” he said, looking around at the moist plaster.

“Skin off,” she said, and let her dress slide forward off her breasts.

He unbuckled his pants and let them down while she unbuttoned his shirt and pushed it off his shoulders.

The room was full of warm steam crowding out of the tub around his chin, though the floor tiles were cold and hard. It made him feel faint. He wiped the mirror and saw sweat sprouting on his forehead, his eyes pale and unfocused, and he wished he could get outside.

Beuna stood in the tub kneeling on the porcelain, water bouncing off her head, soaking her hair and beading up around her knees.

“C’mere,” she said in a voice that reverberated on the tiles.

He took a step up to where she was holding the plastic sandwich bag and reaching out. “What is all this?” he said, trying to smile.

“. . this in my mouth,” she said, waggling the bag in the circulating water. “And I want you to go.”

“To what?” he said, straining to see her in the steam and not comprehending what it was she was getting set to do.

“You know,” she said, letting the softened bag empty of water.

He took a step back and got hold of the round of the sink to keep from falling on his back. “What’s the matter with you?” he said.

“I want to, Robard!” she shouted.

“Want to, shit!” He backed another step until his bare behind got out into the cool air circulating off the sleeping room, and almost made him turn around.

“Yes, yes, yes!” she screamed. “You have to!” She shook her hair and closed her eyes.

He got around and out the door while she began doing something he couldn’t think to watch.

5

He lay staring at the amber fruit bowl on the ceiling, thinking about getting out.

Beuna stood fitting herself back into her white dress. “I used to sit sometimes, conjure I married you instead of him,” she said, her voice straining from drawing on the zipper. “He’s so goddamned dull, you know. I thought, if I just hadn’t married him, me and Robard mighta lived no telling where. Up in Memphis maybe. Oklahoma City, someplace besides a goddamn mobile home.” She shook out her hair. “I had that wrong. I’da ended up out in some goddamn tacky desert living in some tacky little house that ain’t fit for nothin. That’s cause you ain’t nothin, Robard.” She looked at him contemptuously, got a fresh hold of the zipper, and ran it up.

He lay staring at the globe, trying to keep her out.

“I told him you was here.” She pulled the strap of her shoe over her heel.

He raised off the pillow. “What was it?”

“I told him you was at E-laine,” she said absently. “I said you worked at E-laine, and I seen you, and you said hi.”

He stood up and went to the window and took a look out where he could see the truck, the first fat splots of rain just hitting the hood. He gazed at her in the low shadows. “What the shit did you do that for?”

She kept working her shoe strap up and down. “So he’d hate it,” she said, “worry I had me something he couldn’t do nothin about. I thought we was going to Memphis anyway.”

He peered out the window again, expecting to see W.W. standing in the rain. “What’d he do about it?” he said.

She walked to the edge of the fluorescent light. “Nothin,” she said, “except make me go out to that beer bar with him and get drunk and act mean. I don’t like it.”

“Get your goddamn clothes on,” he said.

“They are on.” She picked up her purse and stood beside the bathroom.

“Then come on.” He grabbed up the sack of clothes, opened the door, and stuck his head out in the rain.

Inside the truck, big gray drops were smacking the roof. He took a look up the road and around the lot on either side. He looked suspiciously in at Brashears’ office. “Is he playing ball?” he said.

She looked at her nails and brushed the crystals of water out of her hair. “Less they got rained on,” she said.

He backed the truck around and started out on the highway.

It didn’t seem right that this ought to happen, that he ought to be still worried about getting caught so close to going. It should have been a nice couple of hours and been over with. He wished there had been time to eat.

“You know what the bastard done to me last night?” Beuna said, forgetting everything.

He kept his eyes on the road, which was slick and black in the rain. The row of pink cinder-blocks shot by and he watched at the corner of the last cabin, but no one was there, and he pushed the truck a little, as the first of the dumpy buildings came closer.

Beuna pulled her skirt over her knees and crossed her legs sideways. “He made me go with him to that damned Blue Goose out there where he works, made me sit out there and drink Falstaff beer while he loused around with his nitwit friends till twelve o’clock. And you know what else?”

He couldn’t talk to her. The man on the movie marquee had given up in the rain and had left the west side blank, except for the OPEN SAT MAT in the right corner out over the street.

“What kind of car you got?”

“Shit-old Plymouth,” she said. “They give it to him when he played baseball. I wanted an Impala, but he wouldn’t say nothin.”

“What color?” The road twisted down the face of the bluff, went straight a ways, then angled south along the face of the grade. The Kudzu looked almost black in the heavy light.

“Dark green. Grunt green. Let me tell you, though, what the bastard done to me. Him and his big buddy Ronald commenced playing pool while I was sitting over in the corner minding my business pretending to drink that horse piss. And course they both got piss drunk and started missing the balls and laughing and pouring it on one another. Then all to once they seen another friend of theirs named Tooky Dyre, and he come in and sat at the bar and watched ’em like they was twin monkeys. And W. went over to where he was and whispered something in his ear. And in a little while Tooky come over where I was, and I don’t hardly even know him, cause he is a whole lot younger than me. He come up and reached in his pocket and took out a quarter and laid it on the table right in front of me, and just looked over at W. and said, ‘I’ll be next on this table.’ And they all just died, like I was a damned pool table they all played on.” She looked disgusted. “You think I’m a pool table, Robard?”

“I don’t know what you are.”

“That’s sweet,” she said. She opened her purse, took out a book, and started reading. The book had a photograph of a naked girl on the cover, swinging on a trapeze above a bunch of men in clown costumes.

He wanted just to let her out where there wouldn’t be anybody to pay attention, and get out of town as quick as he could. The hill road wound down into the same muddy streets with the little postage-stamp lots and one-step weed porches that ran all the way back to the middle of town. At every crossing he looked down the street to see if he could see W.’s Plymouth, but there wasn’t anything to see down any of them. He had his old picture of W. framed up in his mind again, inside the little pink bungalow in Tulare, wandering room to room in his white and orange uniform like he had a quince in his mouth and couldn’t get it spit out. He had left out the back screen in the middle of the night and driven back to Bishop without a minute’s sleep.

“Where’m I taking you to?”

“Turn right,” she said.

“Where we going?”

“I’ll show you,” she said, flipping a page in her book and biting off a sliver of fingernail.

He went down a block, and encountered a street exactly like the one they’d been on, low-roofed wood houses with cars in the yards, leading to town. He could see the docks at the Piggly Wiggly and didn’t see anything was unusual, except a queasy feeling in his chest like a sound he couldn’t hear setting up vibrations in various of his organs. His heart had begun to bump the wall of his ribs. He wished now he had hung on to the old man’s pistol instead of laying it in the Gin Den, since it might do him some good if things all of a sudden got hot.

In the next block the street got bad, and the old houses changed into little farms, with stumpy Bermuda lots ending in woods, and chickens and goats penned inside little square-wire fences. The rain had made the small animals go back inside the pens. A goat was standing in the rain, grazing nonchalantly, staring at nothing. The road slipped into a clump of gum trees and he could see where the first driveway opened right, though couldn’t see any more buildings for the gum trees.

“Where we going?” he said, watching the mirror and seeing nothing but pillowy clouds shielding the light.

“Home,” she said, closing the book and dropping it in her bag and giving him a big red smile.

The truck cruised to the end of a red dirt drive and he could see a trailer up amongst the stumps of the gum trees, set on cinder blocks with a propane tank at one end. W.W.’s Plymouth sat empty at the corner nearest the woods. There seemed to be a lot of sawdust on the ground from the cutting.

It made him furious. “Get the fuck out!” he shouted, reaching past her and shoving the door open, letting in the rain.

“I wasn’t going to walk in no rain,” she said, picking up the red pump she had let dangle off her toe. He raised his foot over the seat and kicked her in the shoulder and drove her straight out, sprawling onto the wet clay, her purse strewn over the seat and littering on the ground. Her red shoe was still inside, and he grabbed it and threw it out where she was just getting turned around in the mud, her hair smudged against her forehead and her gauze skirt up over her waist, showing her bare behind to the rain.

He revved the engine. She had one hand in the purse, pressing it down onto the mud, and the other fouled in several plastic sandwich bags that had spilled out. Mud clung to her eyebrows and under her chin. “You shit lick!”

“It ain’t me!” he yelled. “It’s you, goddamn it, that had to do it.” He hit the gas again.

Out the end of the trailer came W., dressed in a bright orange and blue baseball suit, his hair cropped like an onion, his long arms supporting a short little rifle that looked half the size of any gun he’d ever seen before.

He watched the rifle through the open door as W. came thrashing, trying to make out just exactly what it was, and deciding it was a BB gun. He gave W. an interested look, and pulled the truck slowly down into first. W. W. suddenly dropped to one knee, fitted the gun to his shoulder, and fired one loud round that broke in the passenger’s ventilator and went out his own window, filling the cab with a fine spray of glass, leaving both windows with ugly pucker-shaped holes and the rest of the panes intact. Beuna started shrieking, “Shoot him, shoot him,” and he let the clutch snap off his shoe and pinned down the accelerator until the floorboard began giving way under his feet, and the truck started bucking like a buffalo, and him shoveling himself in the corner ducking another shot, glass sprouting out the side of his cheek like tiny trees in a forest.

A dozen yards by the trailer the road offered one alternative to going back, and he twisted off to the left and went careening back in the direction of town. He took a fast look back and saw W.W.’s green Plymouth wallowing out the drive, exhaust furring the ground, the gun barrel stuck at an angle out the driver’s window. He could just glimpse Beuna, who had simply crawled to one side of the driveway to let the car get by, still sprawled in the wreckage of her white dress, looking as if she had dropped there out of the sky.

The roadbed ran out through another patch of gums, past a second sector of farm lots and rained-over houses that weren’t meant to be farms, with the goats and low-roofed chicken houses alone in the little scratches of stumpy acreage.

In the mirror, W.W. came skidding, the Plymouth flailing in the wet clay, already losing distance.

He tried to think in a clear-headed way what to do. He had an intuition the road would merge south with the River Road, and that it would be a peril to go back in town and risk getting pulled over by the sheriff and detained long enough for W. to start blazing away again at close enough range where it would be hard to miss anything not moving. The little prick wounds began to bleed down his cheek, and he raised up until he could see his face in the mirror and see where blood was popping out of several little vents along his jaw. Splinters were bristling on his neck but there wasn’t blood there yet, though there would be, he thought.

He shot down the row of scrub farms, the wind whistling between the twin bullet holes, and straight into the drizzly distance. A cab-over diesel was burning out of Helena heading for the bridge cutoff, smoke flagging in a long gray streamer.

He was disgusted for not thinking any respectable boy would keep a 30–06 behind the door on the chance some old buck might lose his bearings and decide to browse the front yard, in which case you were entitled to a shot just to protect your property from depredation. He picked a little sliver out of his cheek and pinched it through the glass pucker and took another look at the Plymouth, which was nothing but a hump in the dirt spray. Water had risen higher now than last year’s rows and just the woody plants were visible above the surface.

When he pulled up at the junction he could barely see W. barreling down the straight stretch of road a mile and a quarter in the field.

He turned right into the force of the rain and beat the accelerator and got the truck hissing back down the phone lines toward Elaine.

He knew already from the old man’s map that 185 just quit, kicked out into a rat’s nest of farm roads and hog trails that he knew nothing about and that W. stood a better chance of knowing about and using to an advantage. He figured he could go on into Mississippi, but that there was just the chance somebody would be manning the boll weevil quarantine at the other end, and he’d get tied up on account of his plates, and W. would come off the ramp shooting every direction and killing people. And then, too, if he got across, there wasn’t anyplace to go where he knew anything.

It would be best of all, he figured, if he could just open enough distance between him and W. to get back onto the island, and hold him off from the shore with the old man’s pistol, and hope in a while he’d forget about it and go on home.

He could see W. lagging back, still bracking down the farm lane in a mud fury, like a tornado dragging the tailpipe. At eighty-five the chassis began agitating, and wind funneled in the holes and stirred up more glass, and he let it back to eighty, considering the small good it would do to slide off in a ditch and have W.W. pot him like a sparrow in a birdbath. Which made him think for the first time how much serious peril there was of getting swept off exactly like his old man. And after he’d already decided he’d made it out, by staying clear of the evil Beuna wanted to get him into, as a way of convincing him that inasmuch as they were in the same bad way they might as well enjoy it. Because he’d seen the trap already. If he refused whatever included her little plastic bag, then he refused that he and she were in the same boat. And that was what had made her lead him right to W.W., a desire to end the dispute by cutting the knot. She was just determined that if she had to live with herself, she was going to let everybody else see how their lives had brought them as low. And in his case she was ready to have him see it just as he drew his last breath with her sitting in the mud shrieking.

He lit a cigarette. The blood dried on his temples and he could feel his skin crusty. When he passed the turnoff for Mississippi he couldn’t see W.W. anymore. The highway bent around the course of the old river, then wound back toward the west, obliterating his view of the road and making him feel apprehensive since he couldn’t gauge the distance and couldn’t gauge his chance of getting across before W. could start pounding away at the lake.

The road sprung back east, passed over a cypress bayou, then fell along the straight open stretch of highway toward Elaine, where he could see the store bumped in the low distance above the cotton fields.

He tossed the cigarette and got a look at the road behind him, and saw nothing in the drizzle. To the west were long latitudinal flecks of waxy light at the rear of the storm, which still grayed the sky for miles. He thought the day would turn warm and be clear by nightfall.

He turned down off by Goodenough’s and glimpsed the window where the old lady stood and watched the sky develop, but no one was there, and he aimed straight out toward the levee.

It bothered him about Newel and he wished he hadn’t remembered it, inasmuch as there wasn’t anything. At one time it might have been Beuna, though she hadn’t ever had a real hold on him and couldn’t have wormed inside enough to break his heart.

He passed the two foundered machines. A car was just out of the cypress, a pillar of rain behind it, but he couldn’t make out who it was. He wiped the glass, but couldn’t see.

He set off down the lee side of the levee, getting a little anxious about taking a boat without asking. The road flattened through the sycamores and crossed the gap. There were no lights in Gaspareau’s little house and none of the dogs was out, and the row of cabins seemed as empty as they had been. He drove up under the willows and stared quickly at the last of the cabins, where he thought he saw some motion and color behind one of the torn screens, though it didn’t materialize.

Mr. Lamb’s Traveler was hitched at the end of the dock, the All State still fastened to the transom, dipping in the rain. He put on his jacket, stashed his clothes behind the seat, and got out.

He listened for the wheeze of W.’s Plymouth, but he could hear only the sough of the rain and the pearls of water dropping off the sycamore leaves.

He went down and surveyed the bottom of the boat and decided he’d have to go without bailing. He untied the painter, stepped in, and kicked away from the dock into the water. The boat began to drift backward in the breeze, and he balanced in the back, gave the motor a jerk, and let it flood out. He looked back at the row of cabins and whipped it again, and it bawled and kicked up smoke and lake bottom and rose partway out before he could catch the throttle and push the cowling down.

He wheeled and started down the lake the way Landrieu had approached free of the shallows, admitting that much more space between him and W., if W. arrived while he was half across and decided to go ahead and start shooting right away.

He took a look, expecting to see back up through the willows to the levee top, and instead saw someone who was not W.W. and was not Gaspareau, and didn’t seem to be anyone he’d ever seen before on earth. He came clear of the shallows and piloted toward the middle of the lake and opened the throttle. The rain had started again full stream, and the boat slipped out over the tiny white wavelets that were headed toward the shore four hundred yards away.

He looked at the figure on the dock. The man was tall and built slenderly and wore only a T-shirt and pants and no provision for the weather. He held a long slender rifle he was just fitting to his shoulder with a fat bulb-ended scope bolted to the receiver. He stared at the man, wondering what he might be doing and who he was, and had it break on him it was the boy from the road sale, the boy Gaspareau had sent over for the old man’s guarding job. It seemed clear he was left to guard the camp, and was probably right now under the impression he was stealing a boat to get over, since the island was as vacant as the camp appeared to be, and open season for whoever could get across and create mayhem.

The boy stood for a long time with the gun to his shoulder, sighting in the scope as the boat slid farther and farther out onto the lake. He scowled at the boy, trying to figure out measures to take, without having to turn around and go back and risk getting cornered by W. before he could make it clear he wasn’t converting anything and get back on the water.

The boat passed the quarter way in the lake, and the size of the boy was diminishing, making him feel better. Though he could still see the boy clearly, sighting the scope, dropping the barrel periodically and looking out on the lake with just his eyes as if he were estimating the real distance to what he could actually see in the glass. He looked up the levee but couldn’t see anything, and it made him uncomfortable again.

All at once he turned the boat out sideways so that it was pointed down the long curve of the lake, cut the throttle, and offered the boy a perfect broadside of the boat. He stood up in the bottom, faced the dock, and spread his arms so the boy could see him clearly in the prism of his scope, see his face, and recognize him as the old man’s employee heading across to attend to business.

But instead the boy fired.

Somewhere between his ribs and his collarbone he felt a great upheaval, a tumult of molecules being rearranged and sloughed off in rapid succession, and in the midst of it a feeling like hitting your thumb so hard with a hammer that the pain is delayed and stays inert in your thumb for a long number of seconds before it flies up, and you have to lie down just to get yourself ready. That, until he hit the water. Then it hurt and felt cold all at one time, and the surface of the water seemed like a line bobbing in front of his eyes up and sideways and down again, like a lariat being snaked and twirled over the top of itself. And he could hear a loud and tremendous roaring and himself saying “Oh, oh,” and tried to see above the water and beyond the rocking boat nearby, but couldn’t.