In An Arid Land (22 page)

I said, "It wasn't all bad, was it, Sherry?"

She grinned through the smoke, glanced at me, took a long drag on the Winston. "We had our moments, I guess," she said.

Sherry went into the kitchen, her arms heavy with dishes, and then her voice low, lazy, an Atlanta girl's voice came back through the swinging door: "You want coffee with your pie?"

It was about mid-morning that Saturday when Darlene called my name over the loudspeaker. A customer was waiting for me at the corral. I saw the big woman as soon as I turned the corner into the center aisle. She was standing at the counter, solemn as marble, gazing at the TVs flashing against the far wall. Then I saw her husband, strutting among the ranges and washers up front.

"When d'you want it delivered?" I said, coming up behind her. She showed me that tooth in a startled smile, but then her eyes found something on the floor that held them there and wouldn't let them rise. Embarrassment is what it was, and I thought about how brave she had to be to come back into a place where just the day before a dozen people had seen her humiliated.

"Mr. Harris," she began but I interrupted: "Call me Gene."

"Gene, then," she said. "My husband wants to talk to you."

Together we walked toward the front of the store and as the heels of my wing tips smacked the linoleum I could feel something deep within me banking up against my guts. I didn't appreciate the way he'd sent his nice wife like a servant to fetch me and I didn't like the thrown-back angle of his shoulders which revealed an attitude of the sort that told the world it owed him something he shouldn't have to pay for like the rest of us. I'm no Puritan and I know that each of us has to make his way in life as best he can, but the thought of deadbeats and bullies really boils my blood, so that by the time we reached her husband I was angry, and that's no way for a salesman to be.

"Lookie here," he said, scratching at the floor with a boot. His jaw was gray with stubble. "We need furniture. She wants some."

"Yessir," I said. "I figured as much."

"And we got to have it on credit." He made a sound through his nose like a horse, like he was disgusted.

So she threw in, "We got fifty we can give you right away, Mr. Harris, and the truck's parked just out front."

"Hush, Julie Ann," he said. "Let me handle this." She cowered again and I could feel the heat of anger moving across my belly and up my chest. He continued, "Like she said, we got fifty to give you today and we'll pay out the rest ten dollars a month. I just need some help loading it on the truck."

I laughed then, and felt good for it. I told him that wasn't how it worked, that he'd have to fill out a credit application and that the application would have to be checked for accuracy and that we'd need to know some of their history and that the manager would decide how much down payment we'd require and what the payments would be. I mentioned interest rates and the credit bureau and how we had to protect ourselves against risk as best we could, but that I was sure we could make a deal satisfactory to both parties. By the time I was finished he was so red in the face I thought he was going to start bleeding at the nose. He gave his wife that hard cold look again and then he turned on me.

He said, "Just what in hell is this, mister?"

"Mr. McCarthy, that's the way it's done."

He looked at his wife again, a mean glare, and I hated the look. "Had to push it, didn't you, Julie Ann. You really want them to know all about me? Do you?"

She tried to speak, but he raised his hand as if to smack her so that I had to say, "Here, now!" and step between them.

"He don't hit me, Mr. Harris, he just gets frazzled sometimes since the boy passed on."

"Yes, ma'am, I can see that."

"Shut up," he said to her. "L. Junior'd still be alive today if you had a lick of sense in your head." And that's when she started crying, a low rumbling noise rolling up out of her deepest gut, whimpering through her nose. He cursed then and squeezed between us, literally shoved her out of the way, and at the center aisle he looked back. "Come on, gal," he said, but he didn't wait. He was outside before she could get her body moving. The wife followed him out with her eyes, and here's the strange thing: there was a look of love in her face, of love and regret and harsh wisdom, a look that I didn't understand then.

"Ain't there no way, Mr. Harris?" the wife whimpered.

"Not without proper credit, ma'am."

She nodded her head and dug in the pocket of her house dress for a hanky or a tissue but came up empty ran a sleeve across her nose. Like a lake after a squall, she calmed quickly then.

"He's not always like this, Mr. Harris," she said. "Only since L. Junior died and he started blaming me for it. And I'm just sure as I can be that if we could fix up our place, make it into a real home, you know, everything would get back to normal."

"Yes, ma'am, I know what you mean."

"That was a fine time, Mr. Harris, a fine time. Until he. He weren't even two year old when he fell in the tank. I was hanging up wash, you see, and not paying attention." She wanted to say this to someone, someone like me, I think, who helped people settle in. "I'm sorry you had to see this," she went on. "He's a good man mostly who's had trouble in his life, that's all."

"Yes, ma'am," I said, thinking I was ready for a coffee break with Darlene. I felt like I had failed in a duty. I needed a cup, and I knew Darlene would want to hear everything these people had said. I thought about the forgiving smells of coffee and toast that would fill our noses when we walked into Randolph's Drugstore and took our seats at the end of the counter.

"You're a real nice man, Mr. Harris," she said, showing me that gold tooth. "And a good salesman too."

"Not good enough, I guess."

"Maybe we'll be back," she said and pushed open the door.

I remember that Saturday every year about now, as it just happened to be the day that Sherry received a telegram informing us that Gene Junior was Missing In Action in Vietnam. It was odd, I know, an eerie and unlikely coincidence, but the memory grabs whatever advantage comes along, lest we forget. And there was this too: for several days I'd been having this feeling that kept me awake at night and distracted during the day; it had kept my bowels disturbed and my head kind of light; and I thought it had something to do with Darlene, that I was wanting to start over somehow with her and her appealing ways. Perhaps I just wanted to be young again, not that it's possible, but we all have imaginations and memories and isn't the idea of youth just as real as youth itself? Well now I know: this was only part of it, the weariness, the distraction.

I left work early that day, soon after Sherry called to tell me the news and I had settled up a morning's worth of sales and had informed the store manager, Mr. Gentry, and Darlene of course that sorrow and the hurt of living had just struck me in a way I had never thought possible. All together it took maybe two hours, including the drive on the freeway, and when I got home the first thing I noticed after giving Sherry a hug and telling her "it'll be all right" was that she had rearranged the furniture in the living room. You can do a lot in two hours. The love seat had traded places with the club chairs. The television was in a new corner and all the tables had been moved. Our old gray sofa bed angled away from its wall, the worn spot on its arm shining up like an ugly lesion I had never really seen before.

Sherry said, "I'll need help with the couch." She looked at me then as if it were all my fault, as if she understood something that she felt free to let me know about now, and there's been a kind of distance, a quiet between us ever since.

They found Gene's body within a week and his name is now listed on government documents under Killed In Action.

As it turned out I stayed with Sherry and Darlene eventually quit her job. She married Mr. Gentry after his first wife passed away and his children moved out of the house. They seem happy and we chat whenever she stops by the store. Mrs. McCarthy never did come back, but once about a month later I saw their rusty pickup sputter by me on the freeway. In the bed of the truck was an old tattered rocking chair rolling back and forth as if a ghost were putting it to use. I chased them down, honked and waved, and she smiled, but her husband speeded up to get away from me.

I hear Sherry calling. She's out in the kitchen ready to go. This evening we're headed off to the new mall to look at a sleek new line of bedroom furniture that my store doesn't carry. I'm planning to retire next year and Sherry's feeling the weight of our ages. We're into the fourth year of what she calls our Complete Home Room by Room Renovation Plan, and her bedroom, Gene's old haunt, is the last one on her list.

How is it that life can turn on you so simply, so easily, as easily as a lizard changing colors? Such a lizard was clinging to the window screen Eveline knew him well and she had watched him change: from that brilliant green, like a child's painting, to that awful, flat, protective brown, the color of old grime and old rust. All her life she had called them chameleons, everyone had. But recently she had read in the
Chronicle
that the proper name of the species was something else. It began with an a, a foreign-sounding name. The big lizard puffed himself up and his throat bloomed like a great red flower, a tulip perhaps. She decided to plant tulips under this window, in the spring.

Eveline tamped out her Salem and resettled herself on the dinette chair. The chair had been stationed at the window like a lonely sentry since her first week in the house. Six months already. Every day she sat there for a

while and gazed out at the square, yellowing yard, watched the lazy lizards and the ridiculous blue jays, the squirrels, all of whom lived in or under or somewhere near the yard's only tree, a mature tallow in whose trunk someone long ago had hammered boards as a ladder for climbing. The boards were gray now and warped and the nails protruded.

"Mama?" It was Eveline's daughter calling from the living room. Her noisy arrival jarred and abused the little house.

"I'm in here, Nina."

Nina appeared in the doorway of the empty back room. In one arm she held her first, Toby, and in the other a diaper bag. The baby stared at his grandmother as if she were an exotic animal. So did Nina. "What are you doing in here, Mama?"

"Oh, nothing. Thinking. Hello, sweet thing."

Eveline tickled Toby's many chins and wagged her tongue at him. Toby laughed. She could tell that Nina was eyeing her closely, inspecting her face for signs of the trouble. They were both large women, tall and sturdy and heavy in bone structure, the dark-headed, dark-eyed offspring of Scotch-Irish stock who had come to Texas from Tennessee more than a hundred years ago.

"Are you all right, Mama?"

"Yes yes, I'm fine. Come on."

They took Toby into the middle room. Nina and her husband Walter, who together owned the house, had remodeled the room into a fine nursery, bright and airy with shiny mobiles hanging from the ceiling. Eveline put Toby in his crib and fussed over him.

"I'm late, Mama, and I'll be late tonight. Do you mind?"

"Whenever."

"Walter could come by. He wants to talk to you anyway."

"Whatever. Lord knows we'll be here."

On her way out, Nina paused in the short dim hall and straightened the new painting, a still life of peaches and roses that her Aunt Angela had done for her mother as a housewarming present. Nina looked at the painting and frowned they agreed there was something not quite right about it and then she frowned at her mother. Eveline anticipated the usual question.

"Yes, I'm fine," her temper said. "Quit staring at me."

Nina smiled tenderly and they kissed and then Nina left for work. From the narrow concrete porch Eveline waved at Nina's new car as it pulled away from the curb, but Nina's thoughts were already far ahead and she didn't look back to see, or to wave.