A Piece of My Heart (11 page)

“We don't have time for this, either,” she said. “If you don't tell me, I'm leaving. I have to catch a bus at the Windermere, and catch a cab to catch the bus. It's complicated.” She stood and walked to where her overnight case sat.

“It's not important,” he said.

“You said it was more important than his dying,” she said, pushing bottles down below the rim. She got on her knees and tried to see inside.

“Only to me,” he said.

“Fine,” she said, picking her jacket off the floor and buttoning it. “Then I'm off.”

“Telling you doesn't make anything different, goddamn it,” he said. “You're one of those people who thinks if you can just
say
something, it doesn't matter anymore. That's horse shit.”

“Then I'll be marching off,” she said pleasantly.

“But it's nothing,” he said.

“So tell me,” she said softly.

He struggled up and went and stood by the radiator, his body blue in the darkness.

“I'll just sit right here,” she said, finding the bed.

He could see her silhouetted a moment in the window and then disappear. He could see sodium lights furring the walkways in the park. He tried to imagine how he would feel inside the room, in the first moment when she had gone, and he thought that it would be awful and later much worse.

“Newel,” she said patiently. “Are you going to tell me?”

“Sure.” He rubbed his chest. “I have to think how, though. It's making sense out of things that don't make much sense. My father isn't finally important. He's just adhesive for everything. I puzzle about him to have somebody to puzzle about. But I still end up thinking about just parts all the time. There's something easy about them I don't understand, and I can't hold them together well enough to figure out what it is. It's ridiculous.”

“Quit mumbling and tell me what it is you're going to tell me, for God's sake.”

He stood against the rungs and watched her shadow.

“He sold starch to wholesalers, I told you that. He'd go into Ville Platte, Louisiana, and I went with him when I was little in the summers to give my mother a rest. We'd drive to some big warehouse and he'd go inside and talk to a man and they'd drink coffee and in a little while he'd get out his order book and write up an order. Then he'd leave. Maybe he wouldn't sell anything. That was it. Then he'd go someplace else. One hundred fifty miles a day, seven states—Mississippi, Arkansas, Louisiana, Tennessee, Alabama, Florida, part of Texas. Port Arthur.” He shoved up on the radiator and let his heels dangle between the rungs. “He did that twenty-six years. He worked for a company in St. Louis that's gone bankrupt. And he had scars after all those years doing the same thing. He had piles as big as my thumb that bled in his underwear. He had those for years. He'd have them cut out, and they'd come back. He had a spring cushion, but it didn't help. He had bad circulation in his legs from having the blood cut off at his waist. And for a long time Mercury made a car with a door that was easy to catch your hand in. The most logical place to grab the door was right where you couldn't get your hand out of fast enough, and you closed your hand in the door. The company bought Mercuries for the salesmen, and they were all slamming their hands in the doors. My father closed his up three times in one year, and finally had to have the finger nubbed—lost all the feeling in it. Then he got a corn on his foot from the clutch. I don't know how he did that. It was funny, and I'd see him sitting on the commode in the hotel slicing at his corn
with a razor blade, and putting Dr. Scholl's on it. It always seemed to be funny, cause he was so goddamned big. Bigger than I am. Anyway, the corn got infected and got worse and worse, until he limped, and after a while he had to use a cane because the pain, I guess, was hideous. I think he cried sometimes. And my mother finally made him go have it removed surgically. But then he couldn't stop limping. It was as if he thought one of his legs was shorter than the other one, though it was just a corn. Does that seem at all funny?”

“No.”

“It began to seem funny again to me for a second. It's funny because he was gigantic, and all the things that pestered him were little. You'd think he wasn't smart, wouldn't you?”

“Maybe,” she said. “Aren't you tired of sitting on the radiator without your clothes on?”

“No.”

She sighed.

“He had a heart murmur that kept him out of World War II. I don't know what would've happened to him. Nothing worse, I guess.”

“I agree,” she said.

“That's the thing, though,” he said. “He loved it so much, I think, it seemed fun to him. And that wasn't the worst. The worst was sitting in all those goddamned rooms, in Hammond, Louisiana, and Tuscaloosa, with nothing at all in them, for
years
. Just come in late in the afternoon, have a drink of whiskey, go down and eat your dinner in some greasy fly-speck cafe, smoke a King Edward in the lobby, and go back to the
room
, and lie in bed listening to the plumbing fart, until it was late enough to go to sleep. And that was
all
. Five days a week, twenty-six years. Maybe he saw my mother two-sevenths of that time. They were married fifteen years before I was born, and they were friends. They loved each other. But he went off every Monday morning, smiling and whistling like Christmas, like it was fun, or he was just too ignorant to know what it
was
like.” He thought of it awhile, listening to Beebe breathe.

“How do you know he didn't have a woman?”

“Don't say that.” He moved opposite her where he could see her more precisely. “Why do you have to believe that? Why does everything come down to a fast fuck with you?”

“How do you know he didn't?” she said coolly. “Some little Choctaw up in Tupelo might've looked good, something else in Hammond, something else in Tuscaloosa? My father knew a man who worked for Gulf who was married to a woman in Mobile and had a whole other family back home. Something kept him alive. Two-sevenths just isn't enough. I don't care how much he loved her. There had to be something, even if he didn't care about it.”

“That's wrong,” he said.

“All right. What was it, then?”

He stalked back across the boards. “His pleasures somehow just got grafted on his pains. That's what happens to you if you don't look out. They grow together. That's what worries me.”

“That's ridiculous,” she said, tapping her fingernails on her overnight case. “It's just some idea you've concocted.”

“What the hell do you think anything is? How the hell are you supposed to understand a fucking thing if you don't figure it out yourself?”

“It just doesn't make sense,” she said.

“Nobody gets laid, that's what's the matter. He didn't know what the hell was going on. It was just something that happened. Who knows what might've happened to his brain otherwise. When I was little we had a flat tire right on the bridge at Vicksburg, and my mother grabbed me and held me so tight I couldn't breathe, until he had fixed the tire. She said she was afraid of something happening.”

“She thought he was already crazy, right?”

“She already knew about those rooms.”

“She was afraid he might decide to kill you all?”

“I don't think she knew it. But it's possible to decide some things are just that awful and not be crazy at all. She just knew the limits to things. He never found out because he adapted.”

“That's very romantic, but what does it have to do with you?”

“It frightens the shit out of me.” He tried to make out a look on her face but couldn't. “I don't
want
everything the same. Your past is supposed to give you some way of judging things. So it has to do with me because I say it does.”

“There's no need answering you,” she said.

“Shouldn't I have
something
besides the assurance that everything will eventually be the same? I ought to marry you, then, or kill myself like your old man. I'd get rid of a lot of worries either way.”

“So?” she said, flipping the handle of her overnight case.

“I'm lonely, that's what's so.”

“And what are you doing?”

“What do you mean, what am I doing?”

“To find out what you need to find out, whatever it might be. If it's so important, I'd think you'd do something about it.”

“I'm worrying about it.”

She lay back, her elbows against the sash, looking at the soft haloing lights. He could hear her breathing, the mist of breath on the pane, tiny circlets widening and withering. He felt his body sag as if his torso were slowly falling toward the floor. He felt like a fixture in the immobile darkness.

She stirred over the sheets, her toes touching the floor, her figure rising into the window frame. “I don't know what you're talking about,” she said.

“It's complicated,” he said, feeling sad.

“Go to the island,” she said cheerfully, as if that had been an acceptable option all along, and she were just rehearsing it for the record.

“And do what?” he said irritably. “Run through the woods screaming while they shoot at me?”

“I don't know
what
,” she said. “But there isn't anyplace left for you to figure out whatever it is you seem jinxed into figuring out, all that dismal mess you were shrieking about. If you aren't prepared to move into a cleaner place, screw me and be pleasant—this is all I have to offer.” She smiled.

“If you can't hump it, why bother?”

“It seems to me I've bothered,” she said, “and all you've done is act insulting and indulge yourself. I'm tired of arguing with you.”

She got up. He stared at her out of the shadows.

“What would I do?” he said.

“It's a very good place to go to compose yourself, or do whatever you'd like. It's Mississippi in its most baronial and ridiculous. You can go tonight if you want to; all I have to do is make a call to the boat camp.” She set her case on the bed and snapped the clasps to search for the number.

“Stay off the phone!”

“Are you expecting a call?” she said, bothering through her case.

“Some asshole calls me all the time and asks me if I know where my wife is, then hangs up.”

“I'll call tomorrow, then. I'll be back by then. I'll tell Popo you're coming but he shouldn't expect you until he sees you. That'll be nice.”

“Nice for whom? Why don't you just say I'm presently in an institution for the morally unsure and won't be released for some time?”

She closed her case again and refastened the clasps. “You should call Mr. P. H. Gaspareau, in Elaine, Arkansas, and tell him who you are and that you would like him to tell Mr. Lamb you're coming at my invitation.”

“Then what happens?”

She smiled, letting her case swing down.

“What the fuck do I do down there?” he said.

“Strive to come back in a better humor,” she said. “You'll have to tell the bus driver to stop at Elaine, otherwise he'll go right by.”

“Wait a minute!”

“Did you know,” she said, looking abstracted, “in 1911, some poor people went to sleep in Arkansas and woke up in Mississippi. The river changed course at 3 A.M. and everyone was forced to make some adjustments. Popo's colored man insists he was in the
river in a wood boat at the moment of the change, but I don't believe it.”

“They won't know who the fuck I am.”

“Of course not. But you should have a nice long talk with Popo and tell him who you are and go for several walks with him in the woods, and they'll both like you fine.”

She came toward where he was standing and kissed him softly on the cheek. “I'm not trying to get you to screw me this time.” She smiled. “I'm relying on other resources. I think they're not as good as my others, but I like to believe I'm adaptable. I would never have thought you would grow up to be so serious when we were children. Nothing is that serious. You should learn that, sooner or later, then everything will be wonderful.”

“How do you know?” he said.

“Because,” she said, confidently. “Everything is always splendid for me.”

“What's the purpose of all this, if you don't mind my asking?”

“To bring a little frivolousness into your life. It's too gloomy in there now. Look at this room—it's awfully morbid in here.”

“I like it,” he said.

“Fine, but you must go to the island and act frivolously. Though I think sometimes, Sam, that if you were any more frivolous you'd be lost.”

“To whom?”

“To me, of course,” she said. “Who else is there?”

“Nobody.”

“There's the answer,” she said sweetly. “There's the answer right there.”

The train shot through a country station, rattling the doors, and passing the vacant red flasher where there were no cars waiting. He tried, peering down into the lighted streets, to get a reading on the place, estimate if they were out of Kentucky now and into Tennessee, or only leaving Illinois with the hill country yet to go before daylight. But it was no use.

In Thibodaux there had been a man named Gallitoix who owned a wholesale warehouse for food. And his mother had parked the Mercury in the sun while his father walked up on the loading platform, his back bent, and into the man's office to sell a boxcar of starch. In the car he sat with his mother and watched the tractor trailers pull away from the high dock in the heat. The seat covers were blue and white and felt and smelled like old straw. She opened the windows and there was no cool breeze, except for the sweet smell of feed riding the hot air out of the warehouse and over the tiny bleached sea shells that covered the lot like gravel so that everything was white. His mother drew a pencil diagram of where the gears were on the steering column, and there, while they were suffocating, he learned to drive
.