Four Spirits (25 page)

She looked at the stack of books in her arm, hardcovers with stiff edges, countless pages held between.
All the King's Men
. Whatever the books might tell seemed unavailable, as though she had lost the ability to read. But she remembered—sitting beside her mother on the lime green sofa, her mother saying “All the king's horses and all the king's men / Couldn't put Humpty together again.” Two fat tears ran down Stella's cheeks. Impatiently, she brushed the tears aside.

What did all that matter? Darl and her? A couple of college kids. Unhinged. John F. Kennedy was dead.

She watched the cream roof of Darl's car receding in the distance. Another car, an old red Buick, pulled into the lane behind Darl, and he was gone. She was not in any car; if it rolled and scrambled its passengers in a wash of blood, she would not be among them this time.

 

WITH DISBELIEF, SHE LOOKED
at the sunshine. There were no trees to shade the ugly, concrete place where she waited. Here was a gas station, a metal sign proclaiming
BUS STOP
screwed to a creosote-soaked pole. She had to get to her doctor's appointment. She had to go to work. Why was everyone moving slowly?

It took an attendant many minutes—was it five? ten?—merely to walk around the front of a red Thunderbird convertible with its ragtop up. (How could a car be so fetching? So beautifully shaped and sexy?) The attendant's name was embroidered in chain stitch on his pocket:
Ryder.
He was wearing an
old black cowboy hat. He stepped so slowly that she knew Ryder would rather be riding the plains of the West, being a cowboy, out in the open, not confined to this greasy apron of concrete, bending to get an order for gasoline, what octane, how many gallons?

Ryder hadn't reached the car window yet and already he was preparing a smile, showing his ruined mouth full of bad teeth and the black dead spaces between his teeth. He was still young, not more than thirty, Stella thought, giving his life over to being a grease monkey with filthy hands. He bent his body as though he were old, as though he had already entered his future.

He has grown old, wasted his life bending and smiling. This job has broken his body and spirit.
Stella hated what life had dealt this nondescript man named Ryder, how life had cheated him, left him ignorant, fit only for this, a greasy black rag streaming from his hip pocket. Grease the color of midnight splotched his blue trousers.
Love his humanity,
she enjoined herself.

I can love him
.

And after all why not him? Not just as neighbor, fellow human being. Why not accept the card that life dealt us? Call this man not Ryder but Romeo?

When she was twelve and had played with the boy next door, she had wondered
Why not marry him?
Aren't any two human beings basically suitable for each other? If they let each other be and also try to help each other? They had played together, shooting each other with rubber suction-cup darts. He was fat, something of an outcast, but she had understood: she was different, too. She liked playing with him. Wasn't everybody off the mark of normal, she had wondered naively then. So why pick and choose? Why say to anybody:
You are not suitable
.

Mama had once said to her, “Stella, try not to go to extremes in your thinking.”

But why not? Why not follow logic to the end? Why wasn't logic as good as faith?

Only there didn't seem to be any life-logic unless it was all a matter of faith, of God's plan.

Certainly not her plan.

She watched the too-slender young attendant leaning toward the window that the driver was cranking down. Slender, not skinny, was the term she applied to herself. Poor Ryder. Poor nutrition probably. Bad diet, rotten teeth, yes, she'd seen the evidence in other such men. Ignorant, he didn't understand
the importance of taking care of his teeth. What if she gave herself to one such as Ryder? Would he feel his life was blessed?

Ryder spoke to the driver. “Would you like a flag?” How strange—arrogant—his tone. Full of swagger. “We're giving them away free today.”

He held out a windshield decal: the Stars and Bars. A Confederate flag.

“No thanks,” the driver answered.

Today! Today, he's offering a free Confederate flag! Stella felt her pity for the dirty attendant draining away.

Ignorant and poor, he was from the underclass, who served the upper class. The underclass who turned much of their hatred and bitterness toward the blacks. He proudly imagined that it was possible for him to own the car he served, to sit in the driver's seat. After all, in a free country he could drive a Thunderbird into a filling station, same as anybody.

Ryder straightened up, slightly turned his head. He spat onto the greasy concrete. Was it contempt, this spitting? Maybe his lungs were bad, maybe his sinuses ruined with smoking cigarettes, and he simply had to clear himself.

The driver accepted the spitting as meaningless and told how many gallons to pump.

Stella listened to the soft swish of cars in the street, passing her at dirge speeds. She saw no sign of the bus. The cars crept forward. Darl had driven on without her, and surely there was relief in that. This was the real world, standing on concrete, isolated, struggling against fatigue to hold her books, her ankle throbbing. The world was not a male cheek curtained with freckles. Not that cheek she could wet with her own tears, kiss, playfully lick, if they lay under a giant oak on the grass of Norwood Boulevard.

Surely it was taking the grease monkey more than five minutes to fill the tank. Was he dawdling on purpose? (Darl had squirmed away, laughing, when, on that humid night so oppressive you had to create jokes to endure, she'd licked inside his ear, tasted the bitter wax from deep in the canal.) The driver showed no impatience. Ever so slowly the man in the driver's seat lit a cigarette. Stella wanted to run to him, to say
Stop! This is a gas station. Don't you realize the danger?
The man had frizzy red hair, a large nose, a small chin. He wore glasses with a clear rim. The way he dragged on the cigarettes was somewhat theatrical, too slow.

Stella moved her hand to scratch her nose. She saw her own hand had been slowed down, and it occurred to her that her perception might be distorted.
The motion had not
felt
slower; it had only looked slower. John F. Kennedy was dead. Time had woven itself into the air, and now they all lived unreal in a new matrix.

There were no authentic checks or tests to distinguish dream from reality, so said Descartes.

Standing in the doorway of the classroom with his cigarette hand out in the hall, Dr. Drummer had confided to the class that
he
had thought there
were
ways to tell the difference between dream and reality. And can you distinguish memory and imagination? she had wanted to ask. Which of them is real? Dizzy with memory, her body was lying in the cemetery on the towel near the giant magnolia tree. And Darl. He had been really there, too. The professor had leaned his body out into the hall to drag on the cigarette: he was obeying the rule for faculty not to smoke
in
the classroom.

Suddenly the dark men, like ghosts, had been standing on the grass very near her and Darl. It was as though they'd come out of the ground. Nothing had ever seemed so real.

Once, Dr. Drummer had confessed, he himself had had a mental illness, hallucinations. Stella had admired the matter-of-fact way he told the class something stigmatizing and private. Once Dr. Drummer had thought he had seen electric wires running everywhere, but he had tested the perception. He had approached the wall crawling with snakelike electric wires and tried to touch one: then the black cords had disappeared. As he finished his story, he pushed his glasses, black plastic frame, more securely up his nose. Dr. Drummer explained he had used one sense to test the other. You could test reality. Descartes's “Dream Problem”—solved. She doubted it.

Ryder spoke again. “Didn't notice the out-of-state plates. Staying down here long?”

“I think so,” the man answered and fished dollar bills out of the slit of his wallet.

Ryder put his hands on his hips. “Fine day, ain't it?” he said.

She winced to think of Darl, smug behind his freckles, unaffected by murder. Probably it was someone just like this Ryder who had pulled the trigger.

The red-haired driver said nothing about the fineness of the day. “Would you mind to get the windshield?”

Maybe she was watching a contest. But usually the attendant did the windshield without any prompting. (Suppose she never married anybody.) The
driver didn't have to be trying to dominate Ryder. (“Don't come unhinged,” Darl had said to her.)

Ryder moved suddenly, like a spring uncoiling. “Sure thing.”

How could you interpret motives, when observation itself was subjective? She had not believed Dr. Drummer's proof. Because she saw that he had taken comfort in it, she'd offered no challenge: Why can't more than one sense enter into the delusion? Why can't hallucinations just come and go randomly? Didn't life? (When she'd given back the ring to Darl, she had pressed the circle hard into his palm.)

In his “Third Meditation,” Descartes had had the honesty to say there was no proof, only faith. His faith was that a universe bleared with illusion would be a cruel joke on humankind, and his faith was that God was no Jokester. But Descartes had not questioned the faith that other civilizations might have in other gods, and those gods not burdened with the attributes of omniscience, omnipotence, and kindness might have a different nature, some of them certainly pranksters to be appeased. (She was not going to marry Darl.)

“Now, would you check the air pressure,” the driver said.

And Stella felt certain he was pushing Ryder.

“All the way from New York, huh?” Ryder said. And his voice purposely conveyed suspicion. “My line won't reach. You'll have to move back some.” Menace in his tone, a warning: back up, back off.

“I think it'll reach,” the driver said smoothly. “Would you mind trying?”

For a moment neither of them moved. The driver drew on his cigarette.

Suddenly Ryder spat again, but he walked around, pulled out the air hose and gauge, and checked the pressure.

Stella saw her bus in the distance, just the front of it. By faith, she assumed the unperceived body of the bus followed behind its face. About Darl, she had assumed too much. He had dropped the ring into the open slit of his madras plaid shirt pocket.

“Tires is normal,” Ryder said to the driver. He sounded little and tired, the starch gone out of him.

Again Stella felt a rush of sympathy for Ryder. She wondered if he even owned his own car. What did the Thunderbird driver know about struggle? He looked nothing like a cowboy.
If he spins out,
Stella decided,
I'll hate him
.

The Thunderbird driver reached to his panel, flipped on the radio, and classical music poured out. He drove away carefully. She saw the Empire State on
his car tag. Maybe he didn't know the southern language of contempt, how to lay down rubber at the feet of your opponent. Instead, Chopin's “Revolutionary” etude was billowing out.

That would be Rubinstein at the keyboard.
Rubinstein, Horowitz
—her mother seemed to love even their names.

Ryder took the rejected flag sticker out of his shirt pocket. He peeled off the backing and affixed the Stars and Bars of Dixie to the metal side of the gasoline pump.

Stella turned from him and watched the front of the bus gradually loom larger. It seemed enveloped in mystic vapors, as though it were a hot day, not November 22.

 

WHEN SHE BOARDED
the bus, Stella saw Ellie sitting by herself, and she slid in beside her. Yes, this was a day for strange recurrences.
Maybe Darl will put the Chevy in reverse. Traffic will run backward, and he'll roll trunk-first back into my life.

“I came after you,” Ellie said, and she smiled her wide-eyed, open-faced half-smile. “You were flying down the hill. Then you got in a car.”

“Did I?” How could she have been flying? Her ankle hurt. She imagined herself gliding, like a robin with outspread wings, at low altitude over the curve of the hill. Maybe time would roll backward, and the assassin's bullet would fly backward into the barrel of his gun.
Kennedy!
Her heart groaned.

“I always feel like an egg entering its place in the carton,” Ellie said, “when I sit down on a bus.”

Yes. Stella pictured the configuration inside a bus, the leather seats and chromelike holders for the fleshy vulnerability of passengers. The president was a broken shell, the yoke of him spilled out yellow and liquid. She muttered, “Humpty-Dumpty sat on a wall….”

“Are you all right?” Ellie asked.

“I think so.”

Outside the bus window, a preadolescent girl with her mother yelled to a friend who was with her mother, “The wicked witch is dead!”
Could she be referring to Kennedy?
The friends hurried together. They were all in stylish fall clothes. One mother said, “It's like the hand of God.” Their faces glowed with excitement. Or was that glee?

“I saw you getting into a car,” Ellie repeated. What did Ellie's face say to
her?
You can tell me or not tell me, Stella.
The fabric of their skirts overlapped—Ellie's brown tweed flecked with orange, Stella's skirt a medium bright blue loose basket weave. For a moment Stella just stared out the bus window. Maybe the bus was stationary and someone was reeling the scenery past, like in an old movie. Beaming businessmen strutted on the sidewalk. Rejoicing. Making
V
for victory signs with their outstretched fingers.

“It was Darl in his new car.” Then Stella held up her left hand, spread her ring-empty fingers so Ellie would understand.