Songs in Ordinary Time (25 page)

“It’s nice, Uncle Renie.” She glanced up at the clock. The bus was leaving in forty-five minutes.

“Too dark?” he asked anxiously.

“No, it’s nice. It’s just I’m in kind of a hurry.”

“Oh jeez, listen to me going on.” He dropped the chip onto the pile. “I haven’t let you say a word in edgewise yet, I been yammering my head off so much.” He gestured ruefully down at the cat. “I get so used to not expecting talk back, I just get awful carried away.”

She felt bad now. She picked up one of the disks. “This yellow’s nice, Uncle Renie.” She handed it to him. “Nice and bright.”

“Yah,” he said, examining it at arm’s length. “That’s the one, all right.”

He put the disk in his shirt pocket, then looked at her and took a deep breath.

“What’s wrong, Uncle Renie?”

He shrugged. “What happened was I told your mother what the guy said, and she said you’d already brought the papers in, so I called the guy right up, and I said, ‘Jerry, the other day didn’t you come in the store and say how you needed girls, and didn’t you look at my niece’s here picture on the register and say, ‘She’s hired if she wants’? And he said, ‘Yessir, I did.’

That’s how it all got started, Alice. So I called her back. Your mother.” He threw up his hands.

He looked so stricken and confused that she couldn’t help laughing.

“Uncle Renie, I don’t know what you’re talking about!”

“The A+X. Your mother called me up and said you filled out the papers, and the guy I know said no, you didn’t fill out no papers up to his place.

He went and checked.”

“Does my mother know that?” she asked weakly, and his mournful nod SONGS IN ORDINARY TIME / 119

betrayed the magnitude of her mother’s wrath. “Can I borrow three dollars, Uncle Renie?”

He stirred a finger through the paint disks. “She said not to give you any money.” He cleared his throat. “And she said to tell you if you went to the lake, she’d come get you and drag you home.” He reached out, and she cringed with the touch of his damp hand. “Alice, don’t look at me like that!

Don’t be mad at me. I can’t help you run away. I can’t do that.”

She was crying now. “I’m not running away, Uncle Renie. I just want to go to the lake. I’m just so sick of it here. I’m just so sick of everything.”

He threw his arms around her and hugged her tight and made a sound as if he were crying, too. “But you can’t just run away,” he said. “Things are always running away from me.” His head twisted to one side and she felt him jerk as if with an enormous jolt. “Oh…oh,” he moaned. “And I ran away, too….”

The A+X manager was Mr. Coughlin. His bloodshot eyes narrowed on her chest. “Size six?” he asked, then smiled smugly when she nodded.

“Here’s one,” he said, handing her the uniform: black pants, pink-and-black-checked blouse, black vest, and peaked black cardboard cap. “Nights,” he said, sitting down behind a ketchup-splattered table that was his desk. “Four to twelve.” He widened his eyes and lowered his voice. “The lunatic shift.”

On the table was a bronze plaque with raised letters that said SCREW ME

AND YOU’RE HIRED. CHEAT ME AND YOU’RE FIRED. The cluttered back room buzzed with flies. Outside in the lot, a car was honking its horn. The sign over Coughlin’s head said YOU DON’T HAVE TO BE CRAZY TO WORK HERE, BUT IT HELPS. Stacked in the corners were cartons of cellophaned hamburg rolls. The tiny office reeked of grease and pickles.

“Gotta boyfriend?”

“No,” she said.

“Good. Because I won’t stand for the studs hanging out all night tying up the stations. Now, first off, take this menu home and study it. Spills and mistakes come outta your pay. Understand?”

She nodded.

“And second thing is, don’t try stealing food out to your buddies. It don’t work. We gotta system here of numbered checks. Got that?”

She nodded.

“And third, we got the A+X motto—GOOD FOOD WITH A SMILE.” He drew in his chin and looked around. “I got my own motto, Get ’em in and get

’em out—fast! Capeesh?”

She nodded again.

He screwed up his mouth disgustedly. “Jesus Christ! You some kinda mute?” He held out his hands. “What? What? You shy? You scared? What is it?”

“I was concentrating on what you were saying,” she said stiffly.

He looked at her. “Oh I get it.” He lit a cigarette and squinted through 120 / MARY MCGARRY MORRIS

the smoke. “I shoulda known. You’re the type that’s too good to work here, right? You think this place sucks.” He laughed. “And you think I suck, too.”

She had opened the door to go outside. He was a pig and she hated him.

“Well, you’re right! I do!” he howled. “But you need a job, doll, now don’t you?”

As she came to the front of the building, a buzzer sounded over and over again. Through the service window peered the blocky head of the cook, Anthology Carper, his eyes pink as sores, his blue-tinted flesh seeming to glow. “Ninety-two’s up!” he screeched into the microphone. “Seventy-five’s up!” His eyes caught hers and he stuck out his tongue and wiggled it at her.

“Sixty-nine’s up,” he giggled, wiggling his tongue again.

W
ith his trousers pressed and his shoes gleaming, Omar Duvall strode briskly down the street under a high blue sky, and he felt so good.

He felt better than good. He felt sure. He felt nimble. The old spring was back in his step. He bounced up and down on the curbstone now while he waited for the light to change, then laughed softly as he passed in front of the idling cars. Omar Duvall was stepping out. Yes sir, he was on his way.

No matter how low a man fell he could always get back on his feet as long as he had faith, faith in himself, and faith in life’s unlimited opportunities.

He turned the corner, and as he neared Marie’s shabby little house, he smiled, relieved to see her car waiting for him in the driveway, just as she had promised. He had an appointment this afternoon in Bennington with the Northeast distributor of Roy Gold Enterprises. He took the matchbook cover from his pocket and read it again.

PRESTO SOAP

Do you want to be safe all your life,

but stuck in the same old rut?

OR

Are you willing to take that first step
onto the ladder of success?

“Where I belong,” he whispered as he stepped into the dim back hall cluttered with winter jackets, muddy boots, mops and brooms and snow shovels. “Right on the very top rung,” he sighed, impulsively gathering up the shovels and jackets and boots, which he deposited in the garage. On his way back he spotted Marie’s laundry basket protruding from the lilac bush.

Typical, he thought. That was so much of her trouble: carelessness, a lack of organizational skills. It was sad the way she let life overtake her, leaving in its wake this yard, the chaotic house, her frantic children. The poor woman had no faith in herself. He grabbed the wicker handle, then jumped back from the dark wet growl of Klubocks’ dog crouched in the bushes. His hand shot into his pocket, but of course the knife was gone, for that had been another time, another life. Only this was real, this moment, this pang in his breast. Sweat stung his eyes.

SONGS IN ORDINARY TIME / 121

“Good morning!” chirped a voice from the trees.

Wiping his brow, he looked around, then saw Jessie Klubock’s round buttocks plumped on the second-floor sill, where she sat washing windows.

“And a good morning to you, ma’am,” he called and she waved her rag.

“Doesn’t this look like fun?” she called back, gesturing so excitedly now with both hands that he was afraid she would fall.

“Oh it certainly does,” he said, shading his eyes, dizzied by her smallness against the sunstruck glass.

“Then grab a rag and join me,” she called.

“I would, except that I am deathly afraid of heights,” he hollered up.

“I don’t believe that, a great big thing like you.” She laughed and began to scrub the windowpane with such exuberance that for a moment he couldn’t move. He gazed up with a throb of the old longing, not so much for flesh or even for his own comfort and solace as for a woman’s blind unquestioning trust; a woman in need, a woman who would believe.

The back-hall door swung open. “Mr. Duvall?” Benjy called, and Omar hurried inside with the boy at his heels. “I thought you were gone,” Benjy said nervously. “I saw you come in the hall and then you left. I didn’t know what you were doing.”

“Just trying to help your dear mother.” He put his hand on the boy’s shoulder and felt him flinch. “Which you should be doing as well, son, helping your mother in every possible way.” He squeezed the bony shoulder and saw Benjy’s face steel with resolve. “Can you do that?” he asked, and the boy nodded. “Promise me, now,” he said. “Promise you’ll do whatever it takes to make her happy.”

“I promise!” Benjy did not blink. He stared up at Duvall, who for a moment could not move or reply.

“Good enough,” he finally said in a hoarse whisper, then looked away, heart racing, cheeks flushed, not with the heat of guileful shame, but with awe at this mastery that sometimes left him weak with the burden of his own powers.

“Here’s the keys,” Benjy was saying. “And she made you a lunch, too.”

The boy handed him a limp paper bag that smelled of tuna fish.

She had mentioned gas money. Hoping she had remembered, Omar looked inside. There were three one-dollar bills and a note that said:
Call
me as soon as you hear anything. Good luck. Marie
. Noticing a smudge above her name, he held the paper to the window and saw where she had erased
Love
.

He said goodbye to Benjy and was starting the car when he realized the boy was still in the doorway, watching with a troubled expression. He rolled down the window. “What is it?” he called.

Benjy’s mouth opened and closed, and then he shrugged. “Nothing,” he said through a weak smile.

He was backing down the driveway when he saw a head bob alongside his window. He hit the brake. “Damn it, boy, what’re you doing?”

122 / MARY MCGARRY MORRIS

“I was just wondering,” the boy called over the engine’s roar. Wincing, he blurted, “Are you coming back?”

“Of course I’m coming back. Of course I am!” Omar said, not only amused and flattered by the boy’s apprehension, but drawn to it, energized by that mistrust with its inexpressible longing, by the loneliness, the terrible loneliness of lights burning through the night and telephones seized at the first ping, by that pain seeping sometimes into his own sleep, the pain of all those hearts in time with his own, even though he knew there was little one man could do to set it all right, so very, very little. And so, with a sigh, he pulled out of the driveway, then stared down the narrow one-way street.

His grip tightened on the wheel and suddenly he knew exactly what the boy knew, that he was not coming back, not ever. He had a car, money in the pocket of his freshly cleaned and pressed suit, and there on the torn seat beside him, his next meal. He was free as a bird with nothing to hold him, nothing to get in his way. He could just keep on going. Why not? What was stopping him? The boy’s eyes still on him? Marie? Well, if anything, it would teach her a damn good lesson. Yes sir, a woman alone like that shouldn’t ever let a stranger into her home. Lucky for her it had been him and not some thieving, murdering pervert. Oh it was pathetic, it really was, a woman like that, so wanting, so lonely, so desperate she’d open her door to kindness no matter its guise or form.

With his arm on the window well, he cruised down the street, the breeze flapping his sleeve. One of these days, real soon, as soon as he could, he’d write her a letter telling what a fine woman she was. A woman of strength.

A woman of character. Yes sir, first chance he got, first opportunity, he’d write and say,
My dear Marie…my dear, dearest sweet Marie, I have roamed this
vast country far and wide and I have met many a fine woman, but none as good,
as lonely, as…as…as stimulating as
—

“Oh fucking, fucking Jesus!” he cried. His foot shot to the brake and the car lurched to a stop before he could turn. Parked ahead on the distant corner was his old dusty station wagon. He slumped behind the wheel and watched the driver’s door open.

Luther climbed out, then walked around to the other side of the car. He helped Reverend Pease out, then steadied him on his feet. The old man clung to the open door while Luther tugged a flimsy jacket onto his shoulders and centered the familiar porkpie hat on his head. Luther led him shuffling onto the sidewalk.

Luther looked up and seemed now to be pointing toward this very corner where Omar sat, eyes glazed with terror, as his hand slipped slowly, so slowly it would take days to pass from the wheel to the stick to shift the car into reverse. The old man shook his head and stomped his feet in the per-verse jig that meant he’d been bullied enough by the sullen Luther and now he’d have his way. He pointed toward the next street, which Omar realized must have been where they last saw Earlie. Yes, that was the very street down which Earlie had chased him. But how much did they really know?

Had the old man actually seen his grandson follow Omar into the woods?

SONGS IN ORDINARY TIME / 123

He couldn’t have, Omar reasoned, and yet that was exactly where the old man was heading.

Through the mirror, Omar stared back at those crow-infested tangled trees that loomed as the limping old man’s magnetic destination. They were the only ones who could link him to Earlie that day, and so he had no choice, no choice now but to stop them. They had forced him to this. He hunched over the wheel, playing it through with such brutal clarity that only a moment later the act would seem blurred and unreal, its commission more dream than deed: the stuck gas pedal; a dip, then a bump in the road; the huge engine accelerating out of control, hurtling the car onto the sidewalk, crushing them both.

He would stagger out as neighbors ran from their houses. “Duvall!” the old man might moan. There would be sirens. Only his eyes moved. Yes, there would be sirens, distant sirens, questions he could not answer. No, better to drive away. His foot eased to the gas pedal, then froze. If he did leave now, he’d be a hunted man whether they found Earlie in there or not.