Mr. Tall (13 page)

“I was looking for something,” she says.

“Well,” Harris says. “I found you something.” He drops the rivet from an overall bib into her hand.

Lula wets her finger and rubs the tarnished piece of brass. Will was always bad about popping the rivets on his overalls. It had bothered her at the time, how, unlike buttons, she couldn't sew the rivets back on. But now, as she closes her fist around it, she feels her heart streaking through space, young again, shedding years as it lights up the precincts of the past.

Late one night, the summer Ray and I finally made it back south, to Tennessee, we saw a deer standing on the traffic island at the end of our road, and a car coming up the highway. The deer fidgeted and leapt into the light.

By the time we made it over to the wreck, the old man had turned on the hazard lights and the old woman had called 911. He held on to the wheel with both hands, as if the car were still moving, as if it were still possible to drive it, and stared straight ahead through the webbed glass of the windshield. The deflated airbag lay in his lap. I leaned into the window beside him. Ray went around to the old woman. On her knee was a large drop of blood shaped like an apostrophe. It was hard not to look at it, the apostrophe; I waited for it to run down her leg, but it never did.

“Hey, folks,” Ray said, as if he had known them forever and had bumped into them at the mall.

The old woman smiled at Ray, and then at me, and said, “Oh, hello, you two.” She apparently shopped at the same mall as Ray.

I smelled the gas from the airbags and was afraid for a moment the car was going to explode. I said, “Are you all right?”

“I've been better,” the old man said. “To tell the truth about it.”

“Oh, it's only a car,” she said. She patted his hand.

“We just got married,” he said.

“This evening,” she said. “In Asheville.”

“Really?” I said. “Well, congratulations.”

“We stayed too long at the reception,” the old woman said. “Everybody was there. All the grandkids. His and mine. We didn't want to leave.”

The old man almost smiled. “Well,” he said. “We did and we didn't.”

“That's true enough,” she said. “But we had a grand time.”

“Where y'all headed?” Ray asked. He's always been a big question asker, and some days it strikes me as charming.

“Memphis,” the old woman said. “We're going to take a paddle wheel all the way down the Mississippi River to New Orleans. I've always wanted to do that. Tonight, though, we just wanted to make it as far as Monteagle.”

“That sounds exciting,” I said. “I really like New Orleans.”

“It's a good town,” Ray said. “But it gets hot.”

“We've been married for a hundred years,” the old man said.

“Just not to each other.”

“I was married forty-nine years. She was married fifty-one.”

“That makes a hundred. Isn't that something?”

Ray whistled.

“That's something,” I said.

“We were high school sweethearts,” the old man said.

“We just didn't get married.”

“Not until tonight, anyway.”

“Because of the war.”

“I was in Europe. France, mostly. North Africa, Italy, Germany, Czechoslovakia, all over.”

“That's why we didn't get married. He went overseas.”

“I got drafted and had to leave before we figured things out.”

“We didn't get anything decided,” she said.

“And when I came back, she was married. Will didn't have to go because he was deaf in one ear.”

“Oh, Hardy, you make me sound so awful. It wasn't like that. You and I just never decided anything.”

“I didn't mean it like that. I knew Will. We played softball against each other in the church league, and I used to run into him every once in a while at the feed store. He was a good man, kept a good farm.”

“And Evelyn was a good woman. I always liked her, although I never knew her very well. But we always spoke when we passed.”

“I was always faithful to Evelyn.”

“Of course you were, Hardy. Everybody knows that.”

“We were married forty-nine years and I was always faithful.”

I looked at Ray and raised my eyebrows. I felt as if they had forgotten we were there, that even if we had walked away they would have been happy telling their story to each other.

“Evelyn and Will died last year,” the old woman said.

“Within a week of each other.”

“Isn't that odd?”

“Then one day I just up and wrote to her. And she wrote me back and said she had been thinking about writing to me.”

“And I was. Isn't it funny the way things work out? Sometimes you can almost see the plan.”

“I still have her letter. It's in my suitcase. In the trunk.”

“I put his letter in my safety-deposit box.”

“Oh, Lula, it's just a letter.”

“Not to me.”

I almost teared up, imagining the letters—his on plain, white typing paper, hers on cream-colored stationery that smelled like potpourri.

“Nobody writes letters anymore,” Ray said.

“Isn't that the truth?” the old woman said. “Years from now, what's going to be left for people to read?”

The old man tapped the steering wheel once with his forefingers and looked first at Ray, then at me. He took his wife's hand. “Let me tell you two something,” he said. “I always knew this girl right here was the one. I was married forty-nine years, and I loved Evelyn, but I always knew Lula was the one.”

“And I felt the same way about Hardy. I always knew that he was the man for me.”

I glanced up at Ray and wondered if he was the right man, or if there was a better man, a better life, waiting for me out there beside some other road. And I could tell that Ray was wondering the same thing about me. Early in our marriage he had almost jumped off a bridge into the Ohio River. And those days had been so hard that sometimes I wished I had let him. But where would I have been the night the old man and the old woman ran over the deer on their honeymoon?

The old man laughed. “Honey, we should probably be more careful,” he said. “These two might be secret agents.”

“Charlene and I
are
secret agents,” Ray said, “but we're on the same side as you.” He held up his left hand. “We've got the secret decoder rings.”

The old woman winked at us in turn. “We're only telling you our secrets because we don't know you.”

“Thank you,” I said. “For telling us.”

She suddenly slapped her thighs. “But you know what? I think it's lovely that I got to love two men in one lifetime without doing anything bad. I'm not ashamed of saying it. I'm sorry, but that's just how I feel.”

“I'm just glad one of them was me,” the old man said.

When the ambulance came, Ray and I walked up the highway and looked at the deer. It had slid on its side, turning slowly, almost beautifully, maybe fifty yards up the road. A sharp piece of bone stuck out of one of its legs. The dull eye staring up at us did not seem to have ever belonged to anything alive. We stared back at the deer, and we sneaked looks at each other. We didn't talk. We could hear small living things moving beneath the leaves in the woods behind us. We could hear the katydids and the crickets and the tree frogs and the night birds calling out, all the breathing creatures looking for something in the dark.

J
ACK,
that
JACK,
the giant-killer of the stories, spent the better part of the evening squatting in the blackberry briars opposite the house of a farmer's wife who would—for four dollars, but with no particular enthusiasm—lean over her husband's plow and let a boy have a go. She was to step into her yard and fling a rock across the road when her husband went to sleep; Jack was to meet her behind the barn, money in hand. This farmer's wife was widely known to possess both a strong arm and noteworthy accuracy, and, to the rabble who frequented the briar patch, her flung invitations often seemed more punitive than hospitable. So Jack waited in the briars, the black shapes of the berries plain against the less black sky, the berries not quite ripe, on a spot in the dirt worn bare by waiting farm boys, the summer air as close and fetid as the breath of a cat. He tried not to think about the whore-flung, judgment-seeking meteorite that might at any moment drop out of the sky and render him senseless. He waited and drank odd-tasting white liquor out of an indifferently washed Mason jar until he came into a cloudy, metallic, buzzy-headed drunk.

The liquor had been a welcome, if, as it turned out, not entirely pleasant surprise. He had found it sitting upright in the middle of the road, the lid of the jar screwed on tight, as he had set out on his carnal errand. Jack had often found along the road the things he needed most in his travels, so he assumed he needed the moonshine as well. It had smelled all right enough, just a little off, overcooked maybe, and he took a drink. When he did not die or get carted off by witches he took another. Now he squatted and waited and drank, sucked on the sour berries, flinching beneath his hat every time he thought about the rock with his name on it, until both feet went to sleep and the mosquitoes found him in his unlikely lair, thinking: I'm Jack,
that
Jack, the giant-killer of the stories, and my life has come down to
this.

And still the farmer's wife did not sling her stone: her husband, the farmer, did not grow sleepy. Jack watched the man smoking on the front porch; the red eye of his homemade cigarette stared out toward the blackberry briars from which Jack stared back with increasing agitation. The farmer's shape was distinct, the outline of his work hat sad and plain, lit by that single, small flare, which—the more Jack drank—began to leave fire trails in the darkness as the farmer moved the cigarette between his mouth and the spot where he rested his hand on the arm of his chair. The farmer smoked, one cigarette after another, until the hour grew late and the night grew long, until the katydids tired of their chanting and the crickets tuned down, until all hope passed away from the world, until Jack's hooch and patience dripped away, until that, finally, was that. Jack drained the last of the liquor out of the jar, grimaced, retched, swallowed bile, bad liquor, and a gutful of green blackberries. He stood up, the briars ripping at his clothes, and with a great shout of what he meant to be a curse (but came out instead as an animal blare that made no sense at all, not even to him) he threw the empty jar across the road toward the farmhouse, where it landed in the yard without even breaking.

Jack cocked an ear, listened, waited for the man on the porch to curse back, to yell “Who's out there?” to fire his shotgun into the darkness, to storm down off the porch spoiling to fight the man who had come sneaking onto his property to buy a four-dollar piece of his wife. But the farmer did not make a sound, did not move, sat instead smoking on his porch, placid as a steer, shallow as a mud hole, as if strangers shouting from the briars and Mason jars falling from the sky were every-night occurrences. Jack thought about killing the man—for in the stories he had occasionally killed regular men, but those men had been robbers and millers and the like and had therefore needed killing. He had never killed a farmer, and the one parked on the porch offered Jack no real excuse to start now. He didn't stand up, didn't speak, didn't flick his cigarette into the yard, nothing.

Son of a bitch, Jack thought, he's sitting over there chewing his cud. It was more than Jack could bear. “Cud chewer!” he yelled.

“Go on home, Jack,” the farmer said from the porch.

“How do you know it's me?” Jack called. At the time he considered this a clever question.

No response came from the porch.

“How about I come over there with a silver ax and chop your head off?”

“You ain't gonna do no such a thing, Jack. Go on home and get in the bed.”

“How about I send my magic beating stick over there to beat you about the ears until you run off down the road and nobody never hears from you again? Then you'll be sorry!”

“Jack,” the farmer said patiently, “everybody knows you ain't got no magic beating stick no more. You ain't had one since I don't know when. Now, head on out.”

“I'll…” Jack said, considering as he spoke an unexpectedly depleted list of options. “I'll come over there and play a trick on you! I'm still smarter than you are!”

“Not tonight, you ain't. I'm on to you and your sneaking
that
Jack ways. There ain't gonna be no Jack tale around here tonight.”

“Ha!” Jack hollered. “There already is! And you're in it! It just ain't a very good one!”

“I'll grant you that,” said the farmer.

Jack stood quietly for a moment. “Oh come on,” he pleaded. “Just one little slice. All you have to do is go to sleep. It's late. Ain't you got milking and plowing to do in the morning? Ain't that rooster gonna flap up on the fence post and crow before you know it?”

“Jack…” the farmer chided sadly.

“What?”

“Don't beg. You used to be somebody.”

Disappointed in more ways than he could count, drunk but not pleasantly so, both legs asleep all the way up to his hipbones, Jack climbed from the briars and set out. He was not, so far as he knew, setting out to find a job of work, or a maiden to seduce, or new ground to clear. He was not even leading a cow. He did not expect that he would, at the end of this setting out—sordid though it was—encounter an imbecilic king, inexplicably enraged at the sight of Jack whistling down the road; or a giant greedily clutching a gold-shitting goose in an improbably suspended castle; or a coven of witches yowling from a derelict mill in a fury of feline estrus. He did not, to be honest, even feel like fooling with kings and giants, each of whose slayings—despite the inevitable mental and physical challenges such killings called for—still amounted to nothing more than a job of work, but thought it might be okay to taunt and kill some witches once he sobered up, especially if they were good-looking, although he could not remember the last time he had seen a witch, good-looking or not. The witches had gone off somewhere, along with the silver axes and his magic beating stick and the geese and the giants and the swaying beantrees; along with the kings and their bejeweled, creamy daughters and glittering hoards of gold. Tonight all he had was the setting out itself. So he set out.

He trudged along, intent on forgetting his lust for the doughy expanse of the farm wife's lunar bottom, his squatting in the briars like a stray dog waiting to steal a scrap, his rising black hatred of farmers and all things agricultural, until he stepped unexpectedly into a compensatory truth: he could see in the dark. In a single miraculous moment the road beneath his feet, virtually invisible the moment before, unspooled into the distance before him, silvery and faintly glowing, a still river lit by stars or the thinnest sliver of moon. Yet the sky contained neither stars nor moon, just the low black night pushing down.

“Huh,” Jack said.

He could see the tall corn on both sides of the road attentively pressing in; he could see not only the wooded ridges which bordered the fields, but also the thick summer foliage, billowed and full, blooming on the ridges' steep sides; he could see the ancient, giant-trod mountains in the distance beyond the ridges, separated from the black of the sky by faint bands of light which shimmered and held colors Jack could not name, colors that vanished if he looked at them directly—angels or ghosts or shy, pale brides undressing in darkened rooms. The light wasn't dawn, or even the idea preceding dawn, which still lay hours away, but something Jack had never seen before, something he was sure no one else had ever seen, either, something that only he could see: the world itself was lit from within. The ridges glimmered, the corn in the fields, the road, the mountains, everything he could see gave off a secret light. When he held his hand in front of his face, it, too, shimmered, and he studied it, his good right hand, a fine thing, well-shaped and strong, a hand as adept at caressing a virgin as plunging a silver sword into the disbelieving eye of a giant. All around his raised hand, wherever he looked, the world revealed itself the way Creation must have revealed itself to God, everything part of the greater light, and it was good, and he stood there dazzled and proud and happy, once again Jack the giant-killer, the best man in the world.

So he whistled along, twirling his Saturday hat on his finger, hoping now for a taller tale, until he reached a good-sized creek spanned by a narrow bridge. As he stepped onto the planking he savored for a moment a breath of vestigial excitement, the anticipation he had once felt every time he crossed a bridge. Perhaps this first step would presage not only a pedestrian traveling from here to there, but a crossing over from this into that, a passing into proper story. He hoped briefly for a troll to flummox, but remembered that trolls were now extinct, save for a non-breeding pair locked up in a zoo in Romania.

Jack was halfway across the creek when a large black dog rose up out of the bridge, simply squeezed itself into being out of the bridge's black wood. Jack pulled up fast. He wasn't afraid—startled a little, maybe, at the dog's sudden appearance, but not afraid. Over the years he had learned that nothing really bad ever happened to him, that he was impervious to injury, if not embarrassment, no matter how formidable the adversary or unexpected its appearance. Learning that he didn't have to be afraid had, however, in an almost tragic irony, also robbed him of the corollary excitement. Why, the last time he had rousted out a giant—however long ago that had been—it was all he could do to make himself run.

“Grr,” said the dog.

“Howdy,” said Jack. (It was his experience that sometimes animals could talk, and sometimes they couldn't, but that it always paid to find out.) He could see the dog's white teeth as it snarled, could see its slobber-lapping, lengthy red tongue.

“Hello, Jack.” The dog had a low voice and spoke wetly, deep in its throat.

“So tell me,” Jack said, noting that the dog knew his name, but still wanting to get on with things, “why are you impeding my progress across this here bridge?”

“Because that is my solitary calling.”

“Where'd you come from?”

“I'm not sure. It was elsewhere or about, but that is all I can know.”

Jack nodded. “Limited omniscient narrator,” he said. “My point of view.”

“Don't rub it in.”

The two spent an expectant moment in silence, as if they were actors strutting and fretting, each thinking that the other had forgotten the next line. Jack finally clamped his hat on top of his head.

“Well, Skippy, or whatever your name is,” he said, “this has been interesting and all, but why don't you step to one side and let me pass so I can get along with my setting out?”

“I'm afraid I can't do that.”

A flicker of impatience flared distantly behind Jack's eyeballs. He remembered that he was still drunk, but not pleasantly so; that the farmer, simpleton though he was, had smoked him out of dipping his wick; that the summer night was still chokingly close and humid. A liquorous headache began to mold itself into something that felt like a thumb, and to jab repeatedly against the backside of his forehead bone.

“Look,” he said, pinching the bridge of his nose, “I don't know what kind of story you think this is, but I can see in the dark, and I was enjoying it, even though I'm drunk but not pleasantly so, and I don't want to fool with no talking dog.”

“You don't have any choice,” the dog said.

“What do you mean, I ain't got a choice? By God, I'm
Jack.
I've always got a choice.”

“Not tonight you don't. I'm going to bite you before you get off this bridge. That's how this story goes.”

“Shit,” said Jack. “You ain't going to bite me.”

The dog sank into a crouch. “Jack, I was put on this earth to bite you.”

“Whoa, now,” Jack said, spitting out a laugh as if it tasted bad. “You ain't supposed to
bite
me. There ain't never been nobody to
bite
me, not ever, in lo all these many years.”

“Grr,” the dog said.

“Wait a minute,” Jack said. “Just hold what you got and let me think.” His setting out had arrived at an arrival he was unprepared to ponder. He hadn't met an old man on the road to tell him he would meet a dog on a bridge and give him a silver sword or magic words with which to kill it. (Jack had always counted on the utilitarian, if narratively implausible, appearance of the old man bearing implements and instruction, but somewhere along the way the old man had disappeared, too.) He was by himself in the middle of a bridge in the middle of the night, beset with tiredness and discouragement. His mind was lightly fogged by odd-tasting liquor, and he struggled to think of a way to outsmart a talking dog. He looked around. There wasn't even a non-magical stick lying about, or a tree to climb in the corn bottoms. Still, in his younger days this problem wouldn't have given him pause. Come on, Jack, he thought, you're
Jack.
Think of something.

“This is the last Jack tale,” the dog said, inching closer. “The end of the story.”