Songs in Ordinary Time (88 page)

The sharp sliver of moon hung like a scythe blade in the black sky. When he was back on the highway he got the old station wagon up to seventy, fast as it would go without shimmying. Duvall said he had bought this car brand new, but then when Earlie found a child’s shoe wedged in the back seat, Duvall forgot and said it must belong to the man he’d bought it from in Tupelo. That child’s shoe had been a sign. He’d forgotten how nervous it had made Duvall. Earlie had been too trusting. Even that last day he still thought he could reason with a snake like Duvall. All Earlie wanted then was to get back to Laydee Dwelley.
We got the car
, the old man kept saying.

We got the car and we’re still all together. Tell him
! the old man had begged SONGS IN ORDINARY TIME / 429

Luther, but Earlie kept insisting they get their money as well. Earlie and the old man were too easy. They hadn’t lived among the evil. They didn’t know, couldn’t hear it and see it the way he did. He should have been the one to go after Duvall that day, but they knew if he did he’d kill him.

He kept thinking of the old man, how scared he’d be come morning. And where was he even going? He had no place to go. Alone, he was on the run, a fugitive again. He pulled onto the soft shoulder and turned back the way he’d just come.

The old man tried to lift his head as he came through the door.

“Here,” Luther said, sitting down and paring away the soft fuzzy skin off one of the peaches he’d just picked. “You just close your eyes now and dream on cherries.” He carved a juicy chunk from the warm peach and put it in the old man’s mouth.

In the next two days they were able to get as far north as D.C. The old man slept most of the time. When he did wake up it was only for brief snatches of confusion and wide-eyed dreams in which he thought Luther was his father, daughter, wife, and Earlie. Sometimes it was like having the whole Pease family right there in the car. At first he tried to set the old man straight, but he soon tired of shouting, “I’m Luther! It’s Luther you’re talking to,” over the engine noise and the highway roar of the open windows and the old man’s anxious chatter. So he gave in and got to know the family.

Lornilda Pease had been a saint of a wife. All she lived for was to make her Reverend husband happy, except in one regard, thus forcing him into “the wilderness for relief,” which is all it was, he kept insisting. “Just physical relief.” Luther smiled and nodded as the old man scolded his daughter for planting bush beans when it was only pole beans he’d ever had. He looked at Luther now and asked if they were almost there.

“Almost,” Luther assured him.

“Good,” the old man said. “I haven’t been to the grave, and I promised I would.”

Luther shivered with a chill. Grave, what grave? Then the old man was asleep again, his head tilted back against the door, his slender fingers twined in his lap, the untrimmed yellow nails curled and bent. If they did find that Earlie was dead, he wouldn’t let anyone tell the old man he’d lost his only living kin.

“Earlie! Help me, Earlie boy. I am in…oh…so…much…pain….” The words bubbled from deep in the old man’s chest.

He wrenched the wheel and changed lanes, pulling out so quickly that horns blared all around him. The old man stared at him as the car skidded into the breakdown lane.

“No!” Luther insisted, squeezing the unyielding bony arm. “Come on!

Come on! Come on! We almost there!”

The eyes didn’t blink or close. It didn’t take but a few minutes to cover him with a blanket and arrange him, stretched out in the back of the station wagon. He continued north, not sure of anything now but this looming 430 / MARY MCGARRY MORRIS

emptiness. Nothing to do and nowhere to go. With the magazine crew he’d been part of something. And even after that he’d had the old man.

A cruiser passed now and his foot lifted from the gas pedal. At the next rest area he pulled in and parked at the end of the strip. There were two other cars in here. As soon as they left he would get out, run through the woods, emerge farther down the highway, and start thumbing. The police would see that the old man got buried. Maybe a few people would say the kind of prayers and sing the kind of hymns a man of God deserved. The first car had left, but the woman in the second car was putting on lipstick and spraying her hair. She leaned close to the mirror and squeezed something on her chin. The police wouldn’t know the old man was a preacher.

No one would know and no one would care. He started the engine and drove onto the highway until he came to an exit.

He took the first route south he came to. He drove all that day, most of the night, then the next day into the night. He wasn’t hardly tired. In fact he could feel himself growing more alert. He was bringing the old man to his only living relative, his great-grandson, the child of Earlie and Laydee Dwelley. He was doing a good thing, and he hoped the old man knew it.

N
orm raised the hood and fiddled with the carburetor. It had finally happened. He had run out of tricks. The engine was dead. He was already late for work, and soon his mother would be, too. She was behind the wheel, frantically pumping the accelerator. She told him to go inside and get Duvall.

“My mother said to wake you up.” He poked Duvall’s arm, amazed at his energy just seconds after sleep. He jumped out of bed and followed him outside, zipping his pants and buttoning his shirt. He would give them a ride to work.

“It’s the alternator, that’s where the trouble is,” Norm grumbled, climbing into the back seat of Duvall’s car. He sat behind his mother.

“The trouble is, it’s junk,” she said, the lilt in her voice surprising him.

Duvall smiled at her as he turned the key and his own car started right up. “It’s all in the maintenance,” he said, lecturing Norm through the rearview mirror. “Oil, plugs, filters. Simple as that. Just a little extra time and attention now saves a whole lot of money later.”

“Words to live by,” Norm muttered as he stared out the side window.

Duvall’s lecture continued, with his mother smiling at him. With the soap shipment due next week she seemed impervious to every setback. The disaster with Alice had only made his mother more determined. She had called the bursar’s office at UVM and they agreed to extend the first-semester payment until the end of the month. The bank was sending threatening letters, which she tore up and threw away. When his father called to say Helen had spent the money in his trust and there was nothing he could do about it, all she said was, “For God’s sake, Sam, when the hell are you going to stand up on your own two feet?”

Hope was around the corner, bright as a new penny just waiting to be SONGS IN ORDINARY TIME / 431

found. Every night this week she’d had Norm and Benjy combing the phone book for names of people to send letters to and pamphlets describing Presto Soap. She’d insisted that Alice come downstairs and help, but every time Alice heard a familiar name she’d start to cry. At first Marie tried to ignore it, but then she got mad. She said Alice had to snap out of it and get on with life. It was time to get back to her job and start getting her things ready for college. Alice just sat there shaking her head, crying, until Marie relented and let her go back to hide in her room.

His mother had been typing the letters for the soap promotion at work, using Mr. Briscoe’s envelopes and stamps.

“Believe me,” Duvall had assured her last night at the table as they licked the stamps and sealed the envelopes, “it’s the way things are done in business.”

She pointed now, and Omar stopped at the mailbox in front of Marco’s Pharmacy. She was afraid if she took the letters to the post office Mr. Briscoe would somehow find out. She kept looking around now as she passed the bundled letters through the window to Norm. He dropped them into the mailbox a few at a time, as she instructed. When he started back she told him to check the mailbox to make sure none had gotten stuck. He checked.

None had. Was he sure? Yes! Getting back in, he saw Duvall roll his eyes at him. Asshole, he thought; they would never be on the same side.

“One thing you can’t ever do enough of and that’s promotion,” Duvall mused as they drove along.

“But it’s starting to add up so,” she said.

“Yah, Benjy counted a hundred and ten letters last night,” he called from the back seat.

“And ninety-seven the day before.” She sighed and shook her head.

“Every time I look at Mr. Briscoe I feel so guilty.”

“Well, don’t,” Duvall said.

“It’s almost the same as stealing,” she said.

“Yah,” Norm called up to her. “I read that. It’s called white-collar crime.”

“No, no, no!” Duvall insisted. “It’s all factored into the cost of doing business. The percentage of expectable loss, it’s called. POEL.” He kept glancing over at her. “In business you start with that, the poe-el is how you say it. It’s a given. Mistakes, damage, shop-lifting…”

“Petty theft!” Norm interrupted, then scratched his head. “Or is that larceny?” His eyes scored Duvall’s in the mirror. “What’s grand larceny? Is that the same as embezzling? What’s the difference?”

“I don’t know, Norm,” Duvall said.

“Really? I’m surprised.”

His mother’s head shot around. “And what’s that supposed to mean?

Why did you say that?”

“Ignore it, Marie. I intend to.”

“No. I’m sick of his mouth! I’m sick of the way he talks to you!”

“Forget it, Marie, I got a very thick skin, ’case you haven’t noticed.”

432 / MARY MCGARRY MORRIS

She hit the top of the seat. “You can’t stand seeing things get better, can you, Norm? Well, I’m sick of your sniping! I’m just sick of it!”

He’d gone too far, and now he was going to pay for the stalled car and all her guilt over Briscoe’s stamps and envelopes. They were turning the corner onto Claxton Road toward the municipal garage. His crew was just climbing onto two trucks. They looked up as the car approached, and he was pleased that they’d been waiting for him.

“You apologize to Omar! Right now!”

Duvall parked in front of the truck. Kenny Doyle, his foreman, leaned over the wheel and peered down quizzically. Duvall turned to Norm with a patronizing smile.

“Apologize!” she demanded. The silence in the car crackled. The windows were open. She’d sit out here all day if she had to, and then all night, and on and on, until she got her way.

Kenny leaned out of the cab. “You coming, kid?” he hollered.

“Apologize!” she said, loudly enough to make every man on the truck look down.

“I gotta go.” He jumped out and started toward the truck. “Sorry I’m late,” he called up to Kenny, who looked past him. A car door slammed shut and from the corner of his eye he saw a tornadic blur.

“You get back here right now!” his mother called as she stormed toward him.

“Mom!” He couldn’t believe she’d do this. Not with all the guys in the truck watching, guys he’d spent the whole summer getting to respect him.

“Don’t you dare walk away from me! Ever!” She squeezed his arm, and for the first time he realized how small this woman was, skinny, almost fragile. “Do you hear me?” she demanded in the shadow of the big truck with the leathery-skinned, broad-shouldered men looming over them.

“Mom, please,” he said in a low voice. “They’re waiting for me.”

“They can wait!”

“Mom, they can hear you.”

“Good! And they’re going to hear more if you don’t get back there and apologize,” she said even louder.

Not a sound came from either truck as he followed her back to the car and mumbled an apology to Duvall, who offered his hand. He hesitated.

“Norm,” she warned.

He shook Duvall’s hand.

“Apology accepted,” Duvall said with a somber nod. He started the car and they drove off.

Norm’s eyes burned as he walked back to the truck. A buzz of conversation began among the men, as if they hadn’t heard or seen a thing. Both trucks started up. He had climbed halfway up the side when his foot skidded off the ridge and he slid back down. His right elbow was scraped. He braced his foot and started to pull himself up, and again his footing was off. This time he banged his knee. It would be a relief if the truck backed up right now and ran over him.

SONGS IN ORDINARY TIME / 433

“Need a hand, kid?” Bob Hersey pulled him the rest of the way up into the gritty back of the rumbling truck. Hersey had barely spoken to him since his mother’s angry call about the car. Shovels, rakes, and picks rattled in their clamps on the back of the cab. Hersey tapped his Camels on his fist and offered Norm one. He lit up with a long, painful drag, grateful for the burning in his chest that masked all the other pain, his elbow and knee, his pride.

“Your mother and me used to go to the same school,” Hersey said, leaning over the side of the truck as they came through town. “Her father worked for the pigman, like mine did.” He glanced over at Norm. “We come a long way since then.” He paused. “And it ain’t always been easy, lemme tell you,” he said with a nudge and a wink. “I remember she used to come to school with wet socks. The tops’d be so wet and out of shape, you know, they’d hang down on her ankles.” He looked at Norm. “That come from only having the one pair that never did get dry some nights.”

I
n spite of the tattered eviction notice tacked to the post, Joey Seldon set up a hot plate to steam frankfurts. He’d beat the Hotdog Bus at their own game. The next day Chief Stoner pulled up to the stand. He spoke to Joey from the cruiser.

“I got a complaint here, Joey.” The Chief looked wan.

“What is it now?” Joey sighed, and Sonny told him what he already knew.

He had no license to cook. The owner of the Hotdog Bus had complained, as had residents around the park.

“You’re not even supposed to be here, so don’t push this thing, okay, Joey? I don’t have the stomach for it right now.” Sonny sat staring over the wheel.

At Mrs. Stoner’s funeral, Joey had heard that Eunice had a new boyfriend, a young fellow from Tarrytown who sold toasters.

“Look, Chief, don’t worry about a thing. I’m on my way downtown, so I’ll go to town hall and see what I need.”