A Piece of My Heart (16 page)

“I didn't think so,” the old man said crisply. “I'll tell you, though, Newel.” And he paused. “I don't care what you do. Beebe says to let you do what you want, and I will so long as you don't get me shot. Is that agreeable to you?”

“Yes sir,” he said, happy not to have to say anything else,

“Good,” the old man said. “I don't like people around here who aren't satisfied, except me, and I can be any goddamned thing I please. The bathroom's over there.” He pointed down under the house to where he alone could see the bottom few boards of the outhouse. “You'll just have to walk a little if you have to piss, or else use God's privy.” The old man leaned forward and peered up under the house. “Did you ever hear the story about the two farmers sittin on the two-holer?” the old man said, pleased with the thought of another joke.

Robard shook his head somberly and stopped what he was doing in the jeep.

The old man looked at them both cautiously. “Well,” he said,
“there's these two old farmers sittin side by side in the privy, and one old farmer stands up and starts to grab his braces and all his change falls out down the hole. And right quick he reaches down in his pocket, pulls out his wallet, and throws a twenty-dollar bill right in there after it. And the other old farmer says, ‘Why, Walter, what in the world did you do that for?' And the first old farmer says, ‘Wilbur, if you think I'm going down in that hole for thirty-five cents, you're crazy as hell.' Haw haw haw haw.” The old man bellied over so hard the puppy backed off several feet.

He did the best he could to ignite a smile, but Robard seemed to think the joke was funny and laughed.

The old man took off his glasses, wiped his eyes with his sleeve, and looked up at him thoughtfully, holding his pants loose around his waist. “You know,” the old man said, “you don't look so good. Could be you need a purgative. Mrs. Lamb's got some Black-Draught. You look like you could use a good reamin.”

“I couldn't say,” he said, feeling embarrassed to be there.

“Well,
I
could!” the old man shouted. “Just be careful you don't wake Hewes up trotting across the yard. That man's got to work tomorrow.”

He wondered if there wasn't right then some convenient way to get back over the lake before another bus ran. He looked back across the field. The olive light had completely died, and hanging up over the horizon were leaded clouds, and through the woods gloom was massing up. He tried to imagine the air at Meigs Field at that very moment. Far out on the lake, beyond the reflection, you could see the tiny pinchpoint running lights of the ore boats farther up into the darkness than you were, at some moment when the air was a sweet liquid enveloping you and making you feel like walking on the polished lakefront before coming in out of the dark. He felt raw now. And he had never thought until this very moment that he could long for it, want whatever erroneous comfort it had, making him invisible. And for a moment, in the natural order of things, he felt large and frail and brought down out of place into a painful light that made him want to hulk away back in the dark.

The old man stared at him with an odd solicitude.

“I believe we done exercised Newel,” Mr. Lamb said to Robard. “Don't get peeved, Newel. We don't take ourselves serious down here like you do up there, do we, Hewes?”

“I guess,” Robard said, looking at him a moment, then turning toward the metal shed the old man had designated.

“I've got to cap off that goddamned well before it gets pitch dark or Mrs. Lamb will step in it and break her leg. Did you hear that, Hewes? The privy queered my well. I got to sink a new one.”

“I heard it,” Robard said, starting to the tin house.

“T. V. A. Landrieu'll ring dinner in a little bit, and we'll all eat and try to cheer up old sourpuss here. Or we'll throw his fat ass in the river.”

The old man straggled up toward the house, clutching a fistful of his pants and hollering for the colored man to come after him.

From the door of the metal house, Robard watched him come down from the jeep. “You heard it,” Robard said, letting the screen wag back between his fingers.

“The old turd,” he said. “I'll go out in his asshole woods in the morning and yank a few trees up by the roots and drive every rational animal right in the lake. Let them take their chances with the gars or whatever that was out there.”

Robard looked amused and stood in the doorway watching the killed light, while he sank back on the bed. “If I see you I'll run the other way.”

“Tell me something.” He hung his feet over the cot latch.

“It ain't some more what I make my memories out of, or whatever that was you said, is it?”

“No,” he said, arranging his arms in back of his head.

Robard lit a cigarette and let the smoke feather through his nose and get drawn through the screen. He lifted his cheeks toward his eye sockets as if someone were shining a light in his face. “Don't you ever get tired and want to think just whatever comes in your head?”

“I've got to ask somebody besides me,” he said. “You've probably
got better answers anyway.” He watched Robard, trying to calculate the sense he was making out of it.

“I don't know shit from a shoeshine,” Robard mumbled, looking away again.

“Just tell me about your family,” he said.

Robard picked a fleck of tobacco off his tongue and looked around in the gloom as if he were considering walking outside. “My daddy's dead,” he said abruptly. “He got drowned, and my mother married an Indian in Sallisaw, Oklahoma. They live down at Anadarko. What else?” He sucked his tooth.

“Why'd she marry an Indian?”

“She's a half,” Robard said. “Her daddy was one of them oil-well Osages. Bought him a big Maxwell automobile, and they had to drive it in the woods one day clear to Arkansas to get it away from the Oklahoma creditors.”

Katydids were zuzzing out in the yard. He tried to think of something to say but couldn't.

“I got an old picture of them,” Robard said, “set up in a wagon with a mule, after they had sold the car. She stayed up in north Arkansas after that, up till the time my own father died, till I hired out on the railroad, as a matter of fact. She worked in a brassiere plant in Fort Smith. And quick as I left she married this Indian that had a dry-cleaning business in Anadarko.” Robard looked at his toes as though he could see what he was saying in the darkness separating him from the ground.

“Your father wasn't Indian, was he?”

“He was a German,” Robard said, letting his heels grind the cigarette butt. “In fact, they wanted to stick him in prison up in Cane Hill during the war, put him with a bunch of Japs they had at Fort Chaffee.”

“And don't you keep in touch with your mother at all?”

“I'll tell you,” Robard said, looking at his heels awhile. He had become a silhouette in the open screen. “She had her little piece of business to attend to, and I had my little bit. She's sweet.” He smacked his lips. “I think it would make her nervous if I showed up, cause I couldn't fit in nothin. It might make me unhappy, and
I don't need that. I like to keep my business manageable.” Robard turned around and walked back into the shed. “How come I get to answer the questions?”

“So we can start off even,” he said. “I'm the only person who'll take me seriously.

“You'd think that'd teach you something,” Robard said quietly. “Though I'm afraid nobody ever took me serious in their life.”

Mr. Lamb sat brooding at the head of a short deal table, scowling at Landrieu through the kitchen door and fingering a glass of whiskey. The screen porch gave directly into a small dark kitchen that smelled like crowder peas boiled in molasses. The colored man was inside frowning at various flickering portholes on a large wood cook stove, exchanging pots and skillets rapidly and keeping an eye on Mr. Lamb, who sat lowering over his whiskey. Farther on the length of the house through a pair of open clear-paned gallery doors was a large pine-floor sitting room with a high hearth fireplace, beside which Mrs. Lamb was seated manipulating the knobs on a big silver radio, staring at the lighted dials as though she were seeing the horizon of a faraway country behind each tiny window.

Mr. Lamb's eyes snapped up and a smile cracked on his face. He had put on a red flannel shirt with sleeves that came down over his hands and a hand-painted picture of a mallard duck about to land on each collar point. He had buttoned on a pair of red and yellow striped suspenders and combed his straggly hair wet against his head, so that he looked like the guest of honor at a birthday party.

The instant impression the old man gave was that he had shrunk to half the size he had seemed an hour before. His face was sunken at the temples and his eyes looked fragile and sallow.

“Sit down, for God's sake,” the old man said loudly toward the kitchen. “Bring two more glasses in here, T.V.A.”

Mrs. Lamb frowned up from her radio knobs and gave them both a disapproving look. She was a big woman with scarlet hair, a large expandable mouth, and dusky skin she accentuated with dark lipstick, which made her look Latin and obstinate. He tried to smile at her through the gallery door, Mrs. Lamb was listening to Eddie Arnold sing “Cattle Call,” and a large queenly smile froze over her big mouth as if she were reliving a moment when the tune had expressed some unexpressible felicity. He wondered vaguely if she wasn't some old doxy Mr. Lamb had corralled someplace and kept out on the island to amuse him, and for whom he had provided the gigantic radio to help her maintain audio contact with the rest of the world.

The colored man, who was now wearing a white porter's tunic with “Illinois Central Railroad” stitched on the pocket and several gold hatches glorifying each cuff, appeared from the kitchen with two cut-glass tumblers, set them on the table, and removed himself out of sight back to the pantry.

Mr. Lamb picked a quart bottle of Wild Turkey off the floor and set it down decisively in front of Robard. “Mrs. Lamb makes me keep my whiskey under the sink,” he complained, smirking and ducking his head as if anticipating a lick.

“With the other abrasives,” Mrs. Lamb interjected from the opposite end of the house.

“She won't tolerate having it on the table, either,” the old man said, still smirking.

Robard poured out some whiskey in his glass and set the bottle across the table. He poured a nice line in his own glass and set the bottle on the floor beside Mr. Lamb's foot.

“That's good,” Mr. Lamb said, satisfied with everyone's glass including his own, which was half full. “I think we ought to all of us get drunk.”

The colored man snickered in the kitchen.

“That's Mark's only toast,” Mrs. Lamb said. He felt she was aiming her remark directly at him.

“Ma'am?” he said.

She smiled at him regally and turned down the radio. “‘Let's all get drunk' is the only toast Mark knows.”

Mr. Lamb's face brightened. He swiveled around in his chair and gave her the benefit, and took a generous drink of whiskey.

“Mrs. Lamb is a dear, gentle woman,” the old man said to the two of them, his face red and his little eyes humid with the whiskey. He smacked his lips distastefully as though he'd just drunk piss. “I've had her for fifty years, and we've never had an argument. I wish she'd come in here,” he said, shouting over his own voice.

“I wish you'd let me listen to my program,” she said irritably.

“I'd like you to meet these two gentlemen, Mr. Hewes and Mr. Newel. Mr. Newel is your granddaughter's spark, ain't you?” he said.

“Her friend,” he said, letting the whiskey drain through his throat.

“Friend, then. He says he's her friend. Haw. I wish you'd come to be introduced.”

She glared at her husband and almost simultaneously smiled at him and Robard and turned up her radio to hear the last straining notes of “Cattle Call.”

“I bought Mrs. Lamb that radio ten Christmases ago,” Mr. Lamb said gloomily, bracketing his hands beside his glass. “We don't have a phone, and she used to get lonesome with just men around, drinking and telling lies. So I bought her that there we're all listening to, and now I can't prise her loose. She'll start listening to the Memphis police calls in a minute. She hears the god-damnedest things. I don't know what goes on in Memphis—everybody's raping and killing and robbing everybody else. I used to know it when Crump was mayor, and
none
of that went on.”

“That's not true,” he said, his throat becoming anesthetized with the whiskey. “It was just good business to keep quiet about

“The hell it's not,” Mr. Lamb snapped. “I say it
is
.” The old man scowled at him and thickened his brows, his spectacles catching
light in directions. “What'd you say you was, a lawyer?”

“Yes sir.”

“You talk like a goddamned lawyer, don't he, Hewes?”

“I don't know nothing about lawyers,” Robard said, paring his thumb down the ridge of his jaw and staring back coolly.

“Neither does he,” Mr. Lamb said, and smirked. “He just talks like he does. I used to go to the King Cotton Hotel every October for the Ole Miss and Arkansas game, and there was never a bit of unpleasantry took place. Memphis was a
wonderful
city, and I've been in it more times than you've pissed your britches.”

“May be,” he said.

“Is he nuts?” the old man said, looking at Robard.

Robard shook his head uncomprehendingly.

“Shit,” the old man said. “I don't need nobody to tell me nothin.” He drank off the last ounce of whiskey and scrutinized the kitchen door. “What the hell, T.V.A. Have you took up your residence in our dinner?”

“I can't cook it no faster than the stove,” the Negro replied, and stuck his head around the door sill and gave the old man a hateful look.