A Piece of My Heart (21 page)

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

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

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

“Somebody's soul done took flight.”

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

“A hawk,” he said.

“Doing what for?”

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

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

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

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

“What're you going to tell W.?”

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

“Whatever happened about his baseball?”

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

“You think that makes him happy?”

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

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

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

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

“How long you thinking about?”

“Turkey season. A week.”

“You done had it with Jackie?”

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

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

“What's that?” he said.

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

“What's that?”

“It don't bother me,” she said.

“How come you think it bothers me?”

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

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

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

“What's that?”

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

“What?”

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

“What else is there?” he said.

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

“Look here,” he said.

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

“When I get done working.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What the hell is that?”

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

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

“My soul,” she said.

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

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

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

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

“Who's he?” he said.

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

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

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

He heard Robard go down the steps, walk to the Gin Den, pick up the gun and the box of bullets, and leave. Somewhere back of the house Mr. Lamb started yelling for the colored man to start the other jeep, and in a few minutes he heard Robard head back up the road in a hurry.

He lay listening to drops pilch outside the shed. In a little while the other jeep went banging around the house, the old man yelling something at Landrieu which Landrieu didn't answer back. When the jeep got even with the shed the old man pulled up and sat a time in silence then finally fumed, “Goddamn it, get your fat ass out of the bed before I start Landrieu digging a grave for you.” Mr. Lamb fired the jeep and barged off toward the lake. And he lay in bed staring up in the metallic light, thinking about Robard and about nothing. In a while he heard Robard drive slowly back through the yard and go off in the other direction, the jeep hitting every third stroke. Elinor came to the door and stopped and looked in and sniffed, then passed by. And he lay silently, satisfied to collaborate with everything by sounds, lying bare in the cool without gawking into Mr. Lamb's blistered old eye sockets, justifying himself a mile a minute.

Robard had caked his blankets back on his cot as carefully as if he thought he was something else besides cash help, and the
idea that Robard miscalculated his circumstances pestered him and made him think that locked up behind Robard's stingy mouth was a little fugitive terror that wanted everything just so and couldn't keep still till he had it that way. And he couldn't stop himself from thinking Robard was going to let him down sometime on account of it, on account, he thought, of just being fastidious. Though he admired him for that very thing, for keeping a kind of life apart and private, something he himself had never been lucky enough to cultivate, so that everything he thought he ended up having to say out loud.

Landrieu suddenly appeared in the doorway and batted the tin with his spatula, squinting to see inside without actually opening the door. “You better get up,” he shouted, twisting his face into a scowl. He had on his chintz chef's hat.

“Who says?” He stayed out on the sheet just to antagonize Landrieu.

“She in there waitin,” Landrieu said, and disappeared. He could hear Landrieu pounding back up the steps.

He felt gratified at the prospect of sitting down to eat without the old man there to fence at him. He got off the bed onto the scaly concrete and stood looking out toward the trees where the morning light was waxy through the trees. He wondered about just how it would be when Robard let him down, and whether it would ever make any difference to either of them, in any way whatsoever.

He got dressed and hopped across the wet yard and up the steps into the house. Landrieu was in the kitchen overseeing four strips of bacon in an enormous skillet of grease, and refused to look up.

Mrs. Lamb was installed at the low end of the table wearing a man's red plaid shirt that disagreed with the red in her hair. She glanced up at him and took off a pair of half bifocals fastened to a piece of string around her neck. She was reading a
Farmer's Almanac
, her back to the kitchen.

“Predicts rain today,” she said smugly, as though she had found an amusing flaw in the book's accuracy. She gave off a fresh lilac scent and had an old brown sachet sack stuffed down the front of her hunting shirt.

“Can't fault it too much,” he said, smiling and trying to appear amiable.

Landrieu entered with a tulip glass of orange juice, set it in front of him and left.

“It also remarks,” she said, redeploying her glasses over her nose, “that it rained this day one hundred years ago, and that the rain caused a sinister flooding to occur in Mississippi—where this island is located—and that two hundred croppers washed out of their houses.” She pushed her glasses higher up onto her nose and peered at him over the rims, as if there were a gravity involved in what she'd said that anyone in a hundred miles should be able to grasp.

Mrs. Lamb's right eye, though the same yellowish hazel color as the left, was not, he could see, a working eye in the ordinary sense, and owned a slightly mesmerized cast.

“Do you suppose history runs to cycles?” she said, observing him with the same interest he'd seen Mr. Lamb bestow on the infected well

“No.”

“Neither do I,” she said imperiously. “Gone is gone to me. Mark Lamb has a difficult time believing it.”

“Anything you're attached to is hard to give up,” he said.

Mrs. Lamb frowned at the almanac again as if it were the bearer of faulty information.

“Where's Mr. Lamb gone?” he said.

“He's taken his Willys and gone across,” she said, her large rouged mouth turning down as though the remotest thought of Gaspareau had just awakened in her mind. “People were supposed to come this morning to hunt turkeys, but no one's arrived. Mark thinks they aren't coming. He thinks it's terribly hard to
find
the island,” she said gravely, setting her almanac down. “He worries when people don't come when they're supposed to, so he's over there calling Oxford, afraid they've all gotten lost. He conceives of Arkansas as another country where people need his special guidance to find their way.”

“I didn't think he wanted people to find it,” he said.

“No,” she said deliberately. Landrieu installed a plate of scrambled
eggs and two biscuits in front of her and an oval platter containing the bacon in the center of the table. “Mark doesn't want the
wrong
people to find it. He
does
want Coach Wright to find it, and he does want Julius Henley, your friend Beebe's uncle, to find it. He has it in his mind because it doesn't appear on the Corps of Engineers' map, it has ceased to exist for the rest of the world.”

T.V.A. entered with another plate of eggs and biscuits, put it down, and stood while Mrs. Lamb scrutinized the table for any signs of misrule, nodded, and returned him to the kitchen.

The house was quiet, and he could hear the tinkle of Mrs. Lamb's fork against her plate.

“Do you approve of it down here, Mr. Newel?” she said.

“Yes ma'am,” he said.

She picked up a biscuit and examined its sticky interior as if she expected to dislodge something hidden. She looked up thoughtfully. “What are your plans, Mr. Newel?” she said.