Shiloh and Other Stories (10 page)

At the unemployment office the line is long and the building stuffy. The whole place seems wound up. A fat woman standing behind Louise says, “One time it got so hot here I passed out, and not a soul would help. They didn’t want to lose their place in line. Look at ’em. Lined up like cows at a slaughterhouse. Ever notice how cows follow along, nose to tail?”

“Elephants have a cute way of doing that,” says Louise, in high spirits. “They grab the next one’s tail with their trunk.”

“Grab,” the woman says. “That’s all people want to do. Just grab.” She reaches inside her blouse and yanks her bra strap back onto her shoulder. She has yellow hair and blue eyes. She could turn green if she doesn’t watch out, Louise thinks. The line moves slowly. No one faints.

When Louise arrives at home, Peggy’s husband is there, and
he and Peggy are piling her possessions into his van. Peggy has happy feet, like Steve Martin on TV. She is moving to Paducah with Jerry. Calmly Louise pours a glass of iced tea and watches the ice cubes crack.

“I already up and quit work,” Peggy calls to Louise from her bedroom.

“I got us a place in a big apartment complex,” says Jerry with an air of satisfaction.

“It’s got a swimming pool,” says Peggy, appearing with an armload of clothes on hangers.

“I saved twenty dollars a month by getting one without a dishwasher,” says Jerry. “I’m going to put one in myself.”

Peggy’s husband is tall and muscular, with a sparse mustache that a teenager might grow. He looks amazingly like one of the Sha Na Na, the one in the sleeveless black T-shirt. Louise notices that he can’t keep his hands off his wife. He holds on to her hips, her elbows, as she tries to pack.

“Tell what else you promised,” Peggy says.

“You mean about going to New Orleans?” Jerry says.

“Yeah.”

Louise says, “Well, don’t you go off without setting me up with that watermelon man. I was counting on you.”

“I’ll give him a call tomorrow,” says Peggy.

“Could you do it right now, before I lose track of y’all?”

Louise’s sharp tone works. Peggy pulls away from Jerry and goes to the telephone.

While she is trying to find the number, she says, “I hate to mention it, Louise, but I gave you a whole month’s rent and it’s only been a week. Do you think …?”

While Peggy is on the telephone, Louise writes a check for seventy-five dollars. She writes boldly and decisively, with enlarged numbers. Her new bank balance is twelve dollars and eleven cents. If Flathead Wilson were
her
husband, she would show him the road.

“He said come over Tuesday afternoon,” says Peggy, taking the check. “I just know he’s going to love your pictures. He sounded thrilled.”

After Peggy and Jerry leave, Louise notices the mail, which
Peggy has left on a lamp table—a circular, the water-and-light bill, and a letter from Tom, postmarked ten days before. Louise laughs with relief when she reads that Jim Yates went to Mexico City with a woman he met in Amarillo. Jim plans to work in adobe construction. “Can you imagine going to Mexico to work?” Tom writes. “Usually it’s the other way around.”

Happily Louise plays a Glen Campbell tape and washes the dishes Peggy has left. Peggy gave Louise all her cooking utensils—the cracked enamel pans and scratched Teflon. “Flathead’s going to buy me all new,” she said. Louise wishes Peggy hadn’t left before hearing the news from Tom. But she’s glad to be alone at last. While Glen Campbell sings longingly of Galveston, Louise for the first time imagines Tom doing chores on a ranch. Something like housework, no doubt, except out of doors.

She paints through the weekend, staying up late, eating TV dinners at random. It thrills her to step back from a picture and watch the sea of green turn into a watermelon. She loves the way the acrylics dry so easily; they are convenient, like Perma-Press clothing. After finishing several pictures, she discovers a trick about backgrounds: If she makes them hazier, the watermelons stand out in contrast, look less like balloons floating in space. With the new paints, she hits upon the right mix for the red interiors, and now the watermelon slices look good enough to eat.

—

On the day of Louise’s appointment with Herman Priddle, Tom suddenly walks in the door. Louise freezes. She’s standing in the center of the living room, as though she had been standing there all during his absence, waiting for his return. She can tell how time has passed by the way his jeans have faded. His hair has grown shaggy and he has a deep tan.

“Surprise!” he says with a grin. “I’m home.”

Louise manages to say, “What are you doing back here?”

“And why ain’t you at work?” Tom says.

“Laid off.”

“What’s going on here?” he asks, seeing the pictures.

Suddenly Louise is ashamed of them. She feels confused. “You picked a
fine
time to show up,” she says. She tries to explain about the paintings. Her explanation makes no sense.

For a long time Tom studies her pictures, squatting to see the ones on the floor. His jeans strain at the seams. He reaches out to touch one picture, as though for a moment he thought the watermelon might be real. Louise begins taking the paintings to her car, snatching them from under his gaze. He follows her, carrying some of the paintings.

Tom says, “I couldn’t wait to get back home.”

“You didn’t have to go off like that.”

“I’ve been thinking things over.”

“So have I.” She slams the rear hatch door of her car. “Where’s the pickup?”

“Totaled it north of Amarillo.”

“What? I thought all the roads were flat and straight out there.”

He shrugs. “I reckon they are.”

“Where’d you get that junk heap?” she asks. The car he has brought home is a rusted-out hulk.

“In Amarillo. It was the best I could do—cost me two hundred dollars. But it drives good.”

He opens the door of his car and takes out a McDonald’s sack from the front seat. “I brought you a Big Mac,” he says.

—

Later, when he insists on driving her in her car to Paducah, Louise doesn’t try to stop him. She sits still and glum beside him, like a child being escorted to a school recital. On the way, she says, “That postcard you sent of the Painted Desert was mailed in Amarillo. I thought the Painted Desert was in Arizona.”

“I didn’t mail it till I got back to Amarillo.”

“I thought maybe you hadn’t even been there.”

“Yes, I was.”

“I thought maybe you sent it just to impress me.”

“Why would I do that?”

“So I wouldn’t think the West was just dull, open spaces.”

“Well, it wasn’t. And I did go to the Painted Desert.”

“What else did you do out there?”

“Different things.”

“Look—John Wayne’s dead. Don’t think you have to be the strong, silent type just ’cause you went out West.”

Louise wants to know about the colors of the Painted Desert, but she can’t bring herself to ask Tom about them. Tom is driving the car with his forearms loosely draped over the wheel and his elbows sticking out. He drives so casually. Louise imagines him driving all the way to Texas like this, as if he had nothing better to do.

“I did a lot of driving around,” Tom says finally, after smoking a cigarette all the way down. “Just to see what there was to see.”

“Sounds fascinating.” Louise doesn’t know why she wants to give him such a hard time. She realizes that she is shaking at the thought of him wrecking his pickup, alone in some empty landscape. The ear she hit is facing her—no sign of damage. His hair is growing over it and she can’t really see where she hit him. His sideburn, shaped like the outline of Italy, juts out onto his jaw. Tom is home and she doesn’t know what that means.

—

Herman Priddle’s house has a turret, a large bay window, and a wraparound porch, which a woman is sweeping.

“Would you say that’s a mansion?” Louise asks Tom.

“Not really.”

“Peggy said it was.”

Louise makes Tom wait in the car while she walks up to the house. She thinks the woman on the porch must be Eddy Gail Moses, but she turns out to be Priddle’s niece. She has on a turquoise pants suit and wears her hair up in sculptured curls. When Louise inquires, the woman says, “Uncle Herman’s in the hospital. He had a stroke a-Sunday and he’s real bad, but they pulled him off the critical list today.”

“I brought some pictures for him to see,” says Louise nervously.

“Watermelons, I bet,” says the woman, eyeing Louise.

“He was supposed to buy my pictures.”

“Well, the thing of it
is
—what are we to do with the ones he’s got? He’ll have to be moved. He can’t stay by hisself in this big old place.” The woman opens the door. “Look at these things.”

Louise follows her into the dim room cluttered with antiques. The sight of all the watermelons in the room is stunning. The walls are filled, and other paintings are on the floor, leaning
against the wall. Louise stands and stares while the woman chatters on. There are so many approaches Louise has not thought of—close-ups, groupings, unusual perspectives, floral accompaniments. All her own pictures are so prim and tidy. The collection includes oils, drawings, watercolors, even a needlepoint chair cover and a china souvenir plate. The tapestry Peggy described is a zeppelin floating above the piano. Louise has the feeling that she is witnessing something secret and forbidden, something of historical importance. She is barely aware that Tom has entered and is talking to Herman Priddle’s niece. Louise feels foolish. In sixth grade the teacher had once pointed out to the class how well Louise could draw, and now—as if acting at last on the basis of that praise—Louise has spent two months concocting an elaborate surprise for an eccentric stranger. What could she have been thinking of?

“Looks like somebody’s crazy about watermelons,” Tom is saying politely.

“They won’t bring a thing at auction,” the woman replies with a laugh. In a hushed voice then, she says, “He sure had me fooled. He was here by hisself so much I didn’t know what-all was going on. Now it seems like he was always collecting these things. It suited him. Do you ever have people do you that way? You think things are one way and then they get turned around and you lose track of how they used to be?”

“I know what you mean,” says Tom, nodding with enthusiasm.

On the way home Louise is in tears. Tom, perplexed, tries to console her, telling her that her pictures are as good as any of the old man’s watermelons.

“Don’t worry about him,” he says, holding her hand. “It won’t matter that you lost your job. I thought I’d go see about getting a small-business loan to get started again. We’ll get straightened out somehow.”

Louise, crying, cannot reply. She doesn’t feel like arguing.

“I didn’t even know you could draw,” Tom says.

“I’m not going to paint any more watermelons,” she says.

“You won’t have to.”

Louise blows her nose and dries her eyes. Tom’s knuckles are
tapping a tune against the steering wheel and he seems to be driving automatically. His mind could be somewhere else, like someone in an out-of-body experience. But Louise is the one who has been off on a crazy adventure. She knows now that she painted the watermelons out of spite, as if to prove to Tom that she could do something as wild as what he was doing. She lost her head during the past weekend when she was alone, feeling the glow of independence. Gazing at the white highway line, she tries to imagine the next steps: eating supper with Tom, going to bed together, returning to old routines. Something about the conflicting impulses of men and women has gotten twisted around, she feels. She had preached the idea of staying home, but it occurs to her now that perhaps the meaning of home grows out of the fear of open spaces. In some people that fear is so intense that it is a disease, Louise has read.

—

At the house, Louise reaches the door first, and she turns to see Tom coming up the walk. His face is in shadow against the afternoon sun. His features aren’t painted in; she wouldn’t recognize him. Beyond him is a vacant lot—a field of weeds and low bushes shaped like cupcakes. Now, for the first time, Louise sees the subtle colors—amber, yellow, and deep shades of purple—leaping out of that landscape. The empty field is broad and hazy and dancing with light, but it fades away for a moment when Tom reaches the doorway and his face thrusts out from the shadow. He looks scared. But then he grins slowly. The coastline of Italy wobbles a little, retreats.

Cleo Watkins makes invisible, overlapping rings on the table with her cup as she talks.

“The kids just got off to school and I’m still in one piece,” she says. “Last night we was up till all hours watching that special and my eyes is pasted together this morning. After the weekend we’ve been through, now everybody’s going off and I’ll be so lonesome all day!”

Cleo puts her elbow on the kitchen table and switches the receiver to the other ear. Her friend Rita Jean Wiggins says she had trouble getting her car started yesterday in time for church; it flooded and she had to let it sit for a while. Rita Jean is worried sick about her cat Dexter and is going to take him to the vet again. As Cleo listens, she notices that Tom Brokaw is introducing a guest who is going to talk about men as single parents. Cleo doesn’t know whether to listen to Tom or Rita Jean. For a minute she loses the train of Rita Jean’s story.

“Just a minute, I better turn this television down.” Cleo crosses the kitchen and lowers the volume. “This house is such a mess,” says Cleo, sitting down again. “And you don’t know how embarrassing it all is—Linda’s car here all the time, the kids going in and out. She’s making an old woman out of me.”

“Did she bring much from home?” Rita Jean asks.

“Mostly things the kids needed, and a lot of her clothes,” Cleo says, watching the faces move on the television screen. “I told her wasn’t no use carrying all that over here, they’d be going back before long, but she wouldn’t listen. You can’t walk here.”

Rita Jean’s voice is sympathetic. “I’m sure she’ll get straightened out with Bob in no time.”