A Piece of My Heart (35 page)

“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.

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.