In An Arid Land (10 page)

"This way," he said. They turned into a field and went through another gate in a chain-link fence that came only to her waist. Moving lightly, they stepped between several plain markers embedded in the thick grass, still damp with dew. There were names and dates on each of the markers, and each marker was the gray-green color of tainted copper, like the dome of the courthouse. The man paused in front of one, bending, reading, then another, and then he said, "Here it is."

The marker, shinier, cleaner than the others, said Joe Henry Johnson, 1932-1972. Just above the metal plate, standing up in the grass like a marker of its own, rose a tiny clump of wildflowers. The flowers swayed in the simple straight breeze that came and went. She imagined they were growing at about the spot where Joboy's navel was under the ground.

Ruby knelt and gripped the flowers as she would a bouquet. She remembered that Joboy had once brought her flowers, bluebonnets and Indian paintbrushes that grew like weeds along the highways. He had promised, "From now on I'm buying you something pretty every payday." She pulled the flowers out of the grass. She stood. Holding the flowers before her as a bride would, she walked away, feeling the grass tug at her shoes.

"Hold on, there," the man said. "Can I take you somewhere ?"

She said, "Yes," and hurried past him up the road toward the building. A light spring had entered her steps and her breathing came more easily, bringing in more air. The man followed a few paces behind, working to keep up, directing her to turn or unlocking a gate. They got into a car near the big building and he drove them through the high wall of the prison.

"Where to?"

"Six blocks over," she said, pointing, "and four blocks up.

When they approached the bus station Ruby told the man to keep driving.
I can't wait no more,
she thought.
Not a minute more.
She took out her handkerchief in case she needed it.
But I'll send her some money and a ticket to meet me. Yes, that's what I'll do.
They passed the businesses and the restaurants and the activity of the center of town until she could see the Interstate up ahead. She said, "Keep going straight."

Under the freeway she told him to stop.

"Here ?"

"I thank you," she said and got out.

Gripping the flowers in one hand, her purse in the other, she walked out from under the overpass and scrabbled up the steep, weedy embankment to the shoulder of the freeway.
No. I will send her half the money,
she thought.
No ticket. But half the money. It ought to be hers.
And I'll tell her. Trucks and cars pounded by on the pavement, pelting her with a dry hot wind and tiny pebbles. The mid-morning sun pressed on her shoulders. I'll tell her. She looked off down the road that passed under the Interstate in the direction of Karankawa.
I'll tell her to wait. Wait, I'll say.
She gazed for a long time at the trees along the highway and at the vanishing point where the road seemed to drop into a hole in the earth. Everything, the trees and the highway and the yellow stripes, verged on a single hazy image of what she knew was actually there.

She remembered the girl, the small weak cry, "Ruby, Ruby." She thought,
I'll tell her he was no good, a son of a bitch, a waster.
Her throat contracted against something inside it and her eyes burned. She dabbed at them with her handkerchief.
They, none of them, are any good but for pain and blood and for wasting us. I'll explain. And I'll eat, eat everything when I get there, in a nice cafe downtown. I'll be hungry by then. I ain't hungry now, but I'll be hungry then. And I'll explain it to her. I'll write it out in a note and send her the money. Wait, I'll tell her. Wait now so you don't got to wait later, like me.
She blew into the handkerchief.
Wait, I'll say, and then get away.

Leaning over the guardrail she opened her hand and let the flowers go. They sprinkled down like leaves in autumn. One landed on the hood of a car as it appeared from under the overpass. She watched the car slide in a mirage over the next hill.

Ruby turned, and an image of Houston came to her buildings, crowds, excitement. She felt strong, as though she had settled something, as though she were about to triumph over everything that had come before in her life, but the feeling made her uneasy.
Go on. Do it.
Carefully, having never tried it before, she put out her hand in the same way she'd seen the woman in the orange pants do it yesterday. She looked beseechingly into every passing windshield, though the reflected sun made them each a blank, hot, silvery mirror, revealing nothing. This was not how she had imagined it. The only faces she could see were in the grills and headlights and bumpers of the furious, speeding cars and trucks, which seemed to jeer at her, paying little attention as they thundered by, and before even a minute had gone she snatched her hand back, curling her fingers into a knot between her breasts. She stood there exhausted, paralyzed, vulnerable and conspicuous, momentarily awed by the deafening sound of the rushing tumult, as shame and humiliation crawled across her scalp, bumped in her chest.

She whispered, "Joboy!" through her teeth. "Why you do this to me?" The blast of a horn told her to get out of the way, and her whole body flinched; her hand reached out for the support of the guardrail. She screamed, "That girl ain't mine," but the howling traffic whisked away the fury of her voice. "She never been mine and will never be. She don't want me. She don't need me." A hubcap freed itself from the wheel of a car, clanged and clattered when it met the pavement, and Ruby turned, looked just in time to sidestep as it spun by within inches of her white shoes. She watched it skip along the shoulder of the freeway like a saw blade gone crazy before throwing itself over the edge of the embankment. And then she was moving, almost running.

Hurry,
she thought, sliding and stumbling as she made her way down the steep incline.
Hurry.

V

The pine trees loomed tall and peaceful in the old forest, on the old sloping and memoried hills, hanging thick and green below the rich expanse of blue spring sky, above the towns and farms and silent cemeteries, their branches twisting out over the shimmering fumes of the county highway along which she walked again, had been walking for half an hour. And from somewhere in the woods she now heard the lonely, familiar sound of cutting, the engine-powered snarl, a constant rhythm, pervasive and encompassing. Like a message in her veins, it told her what she had always known. This place is yours, Ruby Johnson, this and nothing more. Walking on, she came to a highway sign: KARANKAWA 36.
I'll get me something to eat there, and maybe do a little shopping, buy Marcene something pretty.
Turning, scuddling sideways like a crab, she extended her arm, her hand, her thumbstrong-feeling and steady though another half-hour passed before a logger in his loaded-down truck stopped to pick her up. A big, cheery man with bushy sideburns and bright round eyes, the mingled smells of sweat and sawdust in his clothes, he cajoled her to talk. He questioned her and flirted in a friendly way, and she smiled back at him in a friendly way, or nodded, or shook her head. But she said nothing beyond the necessary in answer to his questions, preferring to sit quietly with her thoughts and her purse and to wait out the trip. They went slowly.

Once, and only once, in the long-ago sober days of my youth, my father took my brother and me floundering. My Uncle Lawrence came along too, and he brought with him a special friend. "My old buddy, Mr. Jack Daniel." He said this often and every time he did my dad would glance at him and they would grin over a secret.

The summer of '64 was my brother's last one at home. He had graduated from high school in the spring, an honor student, and was preparing to start college over in Austin come September, the first in our family on either side ever to do so. He and my father were going through a phase that year: Pure-Danger, fast-boiling and pernicious. A lot of walls were kicked and rarely an evening passed without a furious argument and significant glares.

To repair such damage and try to prevent more of it in the future is why Daddy decided to take us floundering. It was to be a man's outing to do a manly thing, a celebration of sorts, for he was quite proud of my brother. He talked it up for weeks: the three of us together, smelling of salt and sand and masculine sweat, cooking our own food, spearing the big ones.

Floundering, with its special dangerous gear and its dark murky challenge, was something he loved to do, though he had never convinced us of its virtues. He usually went with his best friend, Lyle Dykus, at least once a year.

Mr. Dykus owned an old trailer house on a remote stretch of beach near the little Gulf Coast town of Port O'Connor. They called it The Fish Camp and whenever they spoke of it their voices were glad-sounding and reverential all at once, the way some men speak of some women they have known. Mr. Dykus couldn't get away to go with us that summer, because of trouble in his life. Mrs. Dykus had been arrested on a shoplifting charge, if I recall, and the shock of it, the scandal, the humiliation heaped on his two daughters was keeping him close to home.

"I can't stay," he said the night he dropped off the keys to the trailer. It was late, though the sun was just setting, and he stood below our front porch looking hopeless. He was a short, bald, ready kind of man who always wore khaki pants when he wasn't dressed in a suit for work. "We had a meeting with the lawyer this evening and I better get back. She's pretty upset."

Daddy said, "Holy gosh, Lyle, can't you get away?"

"I surely wish . . ." said Mr. Dykus, but his voice trailed away and the disappointment gleamed in his eyes. In a sideways crawl like a crab he started across the lawn toward his car.

"We'll take good care of the place," my dad called to him. "And bring you back a chestful of flounder."

Daddy waved, just once in an offhand way to let him know not to worry, and then he whispered, "Poor bastard."

That's what he always called Uncle Lawrence too, who was invited to come along only after Mr. Dykus had begged off. Uncle Lawrence was not held in high esteem by the adults in our house. Oh, they loved him he was my mother's little brother after all and he had what Mother called charm and Daddy called charisma, and he had had a daughter once who died but it was the sad kind of love you offer a crippled dog.

For one thing he was between marriages at the time, his second, to Aunt Celia, and his third, to Aunt Rose, and for another he was unemployed again. Uncle Lawrence had sold paint, he had sold insurance, he had sold Bibles door to door; he had worked in importing and exporting; and he had once owned a furniture repair shop. He had done just about everything but earn a regular living and this my hard-working, mortgage-paying Methodist parents could never quite forgive.

"Fondness" is the word they used most often, for he was entertaining even if he couldn't always pay his taxes. He preferred to travel and drink tequila and sing songs. He would show up at the house on Sundays, needing a haircut, smiling like a happy stevedore, and after dinner, after a nap, he'd bring in his old battered guitar and play for us, and he told us about the places he had been. They were never the really exotic places you read about; never even very far away Nuevo Laredo, let's say, or New Orleans but he charmed us with his charisma.

Derald, my brother, loved him the best. He would sit with Lawrence for hours and listen to him sing Mexican songs in his faltering baritone and watch him strum the guitar, using all five fingers and thumping the box for emphasis. Outside they played pitch or tossed around the football and Derald crawled all over Lawrence trying to tackle him. They laughed a lot together.

Daddy and Derald seldom laughed together then. And I think now that Uncle Lawrence was partly why my father and my brother were going through their phase of anger; he was jealous of Lawrence and his hold on Derald and despised himself for being jealous of such a man, a man he loved and deep down really liked. It twisted him up, made him more severe than his true nature. I remember a number of conversations such as this one:

"Hey, Dad," Derald said once. "Lawrence says a man could do worse than taking off a year and traveling around the country. Maybe a year off before college would do me some good."

"You think so?" Daddy said, putting down the newspaper.

"Well yeah, I do."

"Well, that just goes to show what you know. And Lawrence too. Only bums travel the way Lawrence travels."

"You don't know."

"Yeah, I do. I've seen it, plenty. Now get in there and give those a books a lick and quit listening to your Uncle Lawrence."

"Lawrence isn't a bum."

"He thinks like one."

"You don't know."

"That's the end of it, Der." He picked up the paper again.

"You don't know," screamed Derald, slapping the front page before stomping off to his room. "You don't know anything."

"I know this," Daddy yelled back. "Your Uncle Lawrence is a no-good . . . ." That's as far as he got before mother gave him a sharp look and he caught himself. "The poor bastard."

Later, after I had gone to bed (mine was the upper bunk) Daddy crept in to apologize to Derald, but of course the harm was already done. The next day he announced his plans for our floundering trip to Port O'Connor: "No excuses."