A Piece of My Heart (30 page)

“I'm forgetting all about that,” he said, and got up and stood around to the front of the jeep, feeling ready to go back.

“Life ain't
that
difficult.” Robard took a match from behind his ear and scratched it off his zipper.

“I just have to adopt a plainer view of things,” he said.

“That's me.” Robard puffed luxuriously.

“I had all these ideas I couldn't make sense of.” He came and slid over onto the back bench of the jeep and let his feet dangle. “People's names, a lot of things at random.”

“But ain't that just your memory?” Robard said.

“Yeah, but it started giving me the creeps! I couldn't remember anything else, except what had happened the day before, and some little bits of law school. Didn't that ever happen to you?”

“No,” Robard said, touching the ash with the nail of his little finger. “I ain't been to law school.”

He frowned at Robard, who was admiring his cigarette. “Anyway, goddamn it, I got obsessed with what the hell I knew, and all I knew was just those things—bits of time, pictures of people in my mind, little places, my old man. You can't attach yourself to a bunch of crap like that. I sat in my apartment a solid month trying to stitch it together into some reasonable train of thought, and none of it worked.”

“How come?” Robard said, turning around as if he really wanted to know the answer.

“I don't know.”

“How come you to leave in the first place?” Robard twisted his legs so they stretched out across the seat next to him. The air off the lake turned a vaguely fishy smell that seemed to come from the boat camp.

“It was boring as shit in Mississippi. I would've stayed otherwise.”

“Wasn't your mother there?”

“I didn't think about that,” he said, and stared off. “She died one day. That's the only time I've been there.”

Robard sighed as if he were looking at everything philosophically. “All right,” he said.

“I was just going nuts up there trying to figure out if that jumble amounted to enough to say I ought to go back and pick it up again.”

“You like Chicago better now, do you?”

“I don't care,” he said.

“You come all the way down here and you're going back without having done nothin?”

He tapped his heels, watching the dust settle on the grass. “I figured one thing out,” he said.

“And who's that—me?” Robard said.

“I don't give a shit anymore,” he said precisely, listening to the air wash up through the willows. “The old man cares more than I do. It's right up in his face all the time “

“And he's got both feet in the grave,” Robard said, and let his chin rest on his knuckles. A strippet of the wind raised his hair against the part. “What did you think you was doing down here in the first place?” His eyes seemed to get wider.

“It feels like I remember the South being,” he said. “It seemed like a good place.”

“But ain't you the same up there as you are right here?”

“Yeah, but I was at the end of the fuckin rope with it.” He felt morose. “I thought if I could come down here and be part of something happening, not something I remembered, that would help.”

Robard stared at him as if he had crossed over a line beyond sanity. “What'd you have in mind?”

“Anything! Shit! I thought the old man would tell me something, except he's crazy. I thought I might know if I could just get it all into the world.”

“And what happened?” Robard said.

“I'm sick of it,” he said gloomily. “And I'm getting the hell out. Every day I think of something new that's exactly the same. If I could fly across that water right now, I would.”

Robard cleared his throat as if he were beginning to speak, then looked at the lake.

“I thought you might be in the same kind of fix,” he said.

Robard rocked his head slowly side to side. “I ain't in no kind of fix at all,” he said slowly, “though if I was to try to pin together my past and make something intelligent out of it I'd damn sure be in one then. I'd either get bored to tears or scared to death.” He looked up significantly, as if he considered he'd said something worth repeating. He pinched his mouth. “Except as far as I'm concerned, things just happen. One minute don't learn the next one nothin.”

“I don't like that,” he said, beginning to be sulky.

“Shit! If the only thing you can bear is just coming back to this little cut-off tit of nothing, somebody ought to tell you something, then.” Robard raised his eyebrows to signify he was going to be the one to do it. “If you
did
really want to come down here to live, somewhere, you wouldn't choose this place, cause everything's trapped right here, and I'm positive you wouldn't recognize nothin else. Down in Jackson there ain't nothing but a bunch of empty lots and people flying around in Piper Comanches looking for some way to make theirselves rich. It wouldn't feel like nothin at all anymore, to
you.
Just cause you think up some question don't mean there's an answer.”

“I heard that before,” he said, trying to prise himself out of the jeep.

“You ought to have paid better attention, then,” Robard said,
and grabbed his arm and pushed him up and out.

“The old man's granddaughter says I ought to get in bed with her and fuck everything else.” He walked a few feet down toward the lake.

“I ain't got no delusions about that myself,” Robard said, and sucked his tooth. “You might just get accustomed to it. I never did think it was so bad, though.”

“Don't you take some loss, then?”

“I don't know,” Robard said. “I agree to cull what ain't possible and take what's left.” He fingered a match out from behind his ear and, snapping off the head, gave him a quizzical look.

“So are you taking your own advice?” he said.

Robard pulled on his ear and pushed around in it with the match and threw the stump away. “I always do that,” he said, and smiled. “I got somebody to kick then when it all turns to shit on me.” Robard pushed the snake pedal and let the jeep jerk and kick over with a grunt and motioned him to crawl back in.

In the summer they were in Lake Charles, and in the lobby of the Bentley Hotel his mother took him to the fish pond and told him that in 1923 General Pershing had come and given a speech standing on the gold mosaic border of the pond, with men teeming in the lobby, smoking dark cigars. And in the street, troopers from Camp Polk had formed up in their lines to listen and be led by him back down the highway to the camp limits. The general spoke for a long time, his words being carried outside by loudspeakers, and when he walked out under the porte-cochere to assume his command, the men were mostly passed out from the heat, and some were sitting on the hot asphalt crying because they had let him down, and because they were sick to be at home.

On the sea wall at New Orleans there was a picture that his father took of him sitting with his mother on the white concrete wall, with Lake Pontchartrain behind them. And when the picture was taken his father came up, and they all sat on the wall facing the water and ate pralines. He had worn his brown tennis shoes and when he began to take them off to wade in the water, one of them fell in and went out of sight immediately. And his mother got him and held him so tight in the hot sun that he thought he would stop breathing.

When they got to the house Landrieu was just before setting foot onto the seat of an old wire-back drugstore chair planted below one of the concrete pillars that held the house up. He was clutching a spindled
Commercial Appeal
in one hand and what looked like a silver cigarette lighter in the other. Mr. Lamb was taking in the entire enterprise from a considerable distance, standing behind the hood of the little Willys, so that there was plenty of metal and space between him and whatever Landrieu was doing.

When he noticed Robard's jeep, the old man started waving his hands frantically. Robard cut it off and they got out and walked around until they could see Landrieu's face rising into the air with a look of profound uncertainty forging big clefts into the middle of his forehead. Mr. Lamb, ramparted behind the little Willys, was focusing his intensest interest on Landrieu, murmuring something unintelligible for being practically inaudible. Elinor was sitting in the seat of the Willys watching Landrieu silently.

Suddenly Landrieu achieved his full height on the chair seat, gave the lighter wheel a nervous flick, producing a large yellow flame which he aimed into the spindle of newspapers, and promptly rammed the quick-catching torch into the crux between the house and the pylon that held it up.

And all at once a great flurry of activity got centered on the area of the torch. In foisting his baton so ruthlessly into the hole, which no one could precisely see, Landrieu managed to disrupt his balance and propel himself backward off the chair, directly onto the ground, making an ugly
whump
sound like a bundle of newspapers dropped off the gate of a truck. And just as quickly the air around the joining got thick with flying insects, dropping out of various secondary holes and buzzing angrily, looking for the cause of all the heat. Mr. Lamb started yelling for Landrieu to clear out before the insects connected him with the fire and lit on him with a vengeance, but Landrieu was momentarily incapacitated. He had hit square on his tail bone and was lying with his arms stretched palms down, staring straight at the sky as if he were waiting for someone to ask him how he felt. Almost as many wasps were tumbling out of the area of the flames as were zizzing the air, and it seemed like considerable clumps were falling directly on Landrieu's stomach. One fat rust-colored wasp took a low pass by his face, but Landrieu seemed not to see him and the wasp flew back into the higher atmosphere.

Mr. Lamb had begun yelling, shouting profanities and threats at Landrieu as if he thought that could devil Landrieu into recovering faster. Above him, the burning paper torch was still creviced between the house and the piling. A small feather of flame had blossomed on the wood facing, and several small curls of gray smoke began to cloud through the worm holes, making more wasps fall out.

Landrieu apparently discovered the wasps on his stomach at the very moment of partially reclaiming his senses, and scrambled up and began slapping his chest, grabbing his neck, and punching in his hair as if he had discovered stinging wasps everywhere and couldn't get in touch with any of them.

“Looka there, son,” Mr. Lamb said, removing his attention from Landrieu and pointing out the little scroll of smoke. “You done set my house afire.”

Landrieu stopped slapping himself and stared upward at the involved portion of the house, as if he knew it was impossible for the house to be burning.

Mr. Lamb, however, was satisfied. He leaned against the fender of the Willys, twiddling with the latch on the hood, taking in the progress of the fire.

Robard suddenly appeared, sprinting down the steps of the house hauling Landrieu's metal pail, slopping water in fat gouts. He rushed past, eyes intent on the smoke, arrived at the bottom of the piling, drew back the bucket, and threw it in the middle of the flames, engrossing everything in a great sizzling expenditure of green smoke. Water began trickling back immediately and raining drops off the bottom of the house, and Robard stood back and scrutinized the nexus of smoke for any flames that might survive, and for a moment everyone was held in thrall.

All at once all attention was drawn irresistibly upward from the segment of blacked siding to the square window just above it, where Mrs. Lamb stood, frowning. She watched them all a moment, her PBX set clamped to her head like a medieval caliper compass, focusing immense private displeasure squarely on Mr. Lamb, who was utterly stunned. And then she was gone, as unpredictably as she'd appeared, and the window was returned to the dull, murky green color that showed a fragile, watery reflection of the trees.

“I'll be goddamned,” Mr. Lamb observed, a childish smile broadening his face. “We almost burnt up
Mrs. Lamb.”

Robard started around the house looking disagreeable. He set the bucket on the bottom step and started to the Gin Den. Landrieu commenced dragging his chair toward his little house, walking in a broken side-thrown limp understood to be the result of the fall. Mr. Lamb stood beside the jeep, observing everything, his little hands nested on the fender, the same witless smile on his lips as though there was something funny happening but he couldn't tell what it was.

Mr. Lamb turned the little smile around, and he knew the old man was just before bringing up the fishing trip. He took a fast look at the Gin Den, but Robard had disappeared, and the old man had him trapped. He wanted to let the moment slip away. He walked over beside Elinor, seated in the passenger's seat, gave her a tap on the head, and looked up at the still-smoking facet of outside wallboard.

“Landroo, you know,” Mr. Lamb said thoughtfully, gazing at the ruined hoardings and sighing, “Landroo's the kind of man'd stand in a storm with a teaspoon to get a drink of water.”

“I don't much like wasps myself,” he said, keeping his eyes someplace else.

“Hell, no,” the old man argued. “Nobody does in their right brain. But most of us can keep from getting stung without rupturing ourselves.”

Mr. Lamb was counting Landrieu's misfortune as an incalculable pleasure, fostering a real withered admiration for Landrieu, who in all the years of slandering and threats had been tricky enough to stay put. It was a measure of his intelligence that he was still there to accept the abuse, since it wasn't so much abuse as an inverted form of sympathy, which Landrieu was savvy enough to recognize. And he himself didn't feel at all sure that he owned an intelligence half equal to it.