A Piece of My Heart (12 page)

The train got to Memphis early with new light hung behind the capitals of the brokerage sheds. Two people got off and scurried down into the station. He looked the length of the platform for a phone, but the one booth at the end of the shelter was in use, and he decided to make his call later.

He walked down into the vestibule, and found the bus station in the converted depot transept that had been roped off and fitted with plastic chairs. He bought a ticket to Elaine and walked past a Trailways huffing at the depot doors and down Adams Avenue toward the river. The street passed for a time under the Arkansas bridge, and he could hear trucks slapping the girders, and see, across the thick, gravy-colored water, east Arkansas profiled at the bottom of the sky.

He crossed the boulevard and walked out on the brick apron
that paved the riverbank. He went down and squatted and let his hand dangle and felt the water draw through his fingers, and it occurred to him that for all the times he had crossed the river, riding in his father's old rattling Mercuries off into the opposite delta, and out of the little levee towns, he had never felt the river, never had it in his hand and let the water comb through his fingers to find out just what it was. It seemed now like a vast and imponderable disadvantage, and made him feel like he needed to know.

He took off his coat and surveyed up the boulevard in both directions. Two men were standing by a long tar-colored barge hove to the bank a hundred yards away, talking, the river panning out in an open Y behind them. Trucks were pounding across the bridge, but no one inside was able to see except whatever was far up the open river. He sat on the bricks, took off his tennis shoes, and stripped his shirt, exposing his belly to the light. He stared at the bridge, expecting to see someone peering over the railing observing him, but there was no one, only the pigeons wheeling out of the girders along the defiles of steel struts. With his pants at knee level, he made a brief inspection of his legs. They were white and billowy and speckled with tiny sores like ant bites. He shuddered and felt unpleasant, and the sudden prospect of going to physical ruin made him agitated. He hugged himself and hunched forward in the breeze. He took a step and tied his brows, and stared at the surface, looking for a reflection of himself and seeing only his shadow frozen on the current.

He recognized that he was now, for all purposes, risking self-annihilation without even willing it so, and that by all probability armies of people in the grip of doing away with themselves thought simply that they were taking an innocent swim in the river or the bay, or had merely concluded a window ledge was the only place to find necessary peace and quiet. It is only, he thought, afterward when the realities begin to percolate. He felt his toes wiggling. He looked downriver and saw the two men standing beside the barge were no longer talking but were staring at him. Somewhere he could hear a loud honking and turned and saw the
Trailways that had been at the terminal come to a halt at the foot of Adams Street. The door swung open and the driver, a short man in a khaki uniform and a campaign cap, jumped out and yelled something that sounded like “woncha-woncha-woncha.” And he immediately dived in.

The impact took his breath away and he felt himself going uncontrolled and limp while his heart began whumping and his stomach burned like flames. He sensed he had hit the surface too severely.

The water was colder than he had expected, and below the surface an almost immediate numbing started in his feet, sending dull signals to the tips of his fingers, which were busy flittering to maintain his head above water.

Simultaneously he was confronted with two very unsettling facts. One was that in the time it had taken to get righted and regain a minimum amount of breath, he had moved a surprising distance from his clothes, which he could just see strewn in a circle twenty-five yards upstream. The other fact was that his shorts were now gone and he was floating with his privates adangle in the cold current, prey to any browsing fish.

The bargemen had begun walking up the gangplank, from all appearances in no hurry. The bus driver was standing at the curb, pointing out for the benefit of his passengers a man's head floating with the current.

Water trickled on his neck and he sensed he was becoming colder while maintaining a constant distance of ten feet from the bank, unable to touch any part of the bottom and unwilling to turn and look at the river, sensing the utter vastness would shock him and cause him to panic.

Though what surprised him was that on once claiming a breath, he felt relatively little fear while he faced the bank, and was suffering none of the gulping hysteria he feared he
might
It was not difficult to stay afloat, the current buoying him as it moved him steadily, and he felt unusually relaxed, though cold and still strange that his parts had become potential forage for the fish.

He could see the bargemen bringing a long wooden boom from the invisible rear of the barge, dragging it in the water as if they were trying to pole against the current. He looked back up to where the bus was standing. Several children had begun running along the bank, though most of the other passengers were straggling back up to the bus.

The bargemen took up a position at the bow of the boat with the boom trailing in the water and stood watching him with idle interest. He estimated that to avoid slamming into the front of the barge and being dragged below by the current, he would need to orbit several feet out into the river, yet not orbit too far so as to be unreachable. The barge began to get larger, and he squirmed to get beyond its girth, kicking away from the bank with some vigor. He kicked until he saw where a true course would just miss the lead edge of the barge and bring him into line with the boom, and that with modest luck he could catch it as he went by. Though as he reached the forward bulwark of the barge, around which a large tuft of yellow fuzz had collected, the current eddied unnaturally and spun him out from the end of the pole which the bargemen had shoved in his direction, so that he was turned and facing the river, looking at Arkansas in the flat distance. He fished backward, and tried to relocate the pole. The barge was making a thick gurgling sound that he could feel vibrating below the surface. He breathed in a large tuft of the foam. One of the bargemen yelled something, and he felt the sawed end of the long boom scrape his back, causing him to flounce backward, grasping for whatever he could touch, and missing the pole entirely.

Panic occurred all at once. His ears felt as if someone very close by had turned up a radio on which there was nothing but loud static. He flailed in several directions. His head sank a moment, and he felt his feet enter a denser zone of cold water. His skin grabbed, and he stretched to get his nose up and have a look at the barge and the shore and the Memphis skyline before drowning. As he surged to get his head elevated, a heavy weight twisted along his neck, stopping his breath momentarily, so that he gagged and struck with his fist as if he were being assailed. He felt
the current binding it into his skin. He accepted another enormous mouthful of water and felt himself sink. The current was pulling, and he tried to raise his head to see, but the current mounted water in his face and he perceived he couldn't see without allowing gallons of water to run directly up his nose.

He could feel himself beginning to be maneuvered sidewise to the current instead of simply dragging against it, and he got rigid, eyes shut, hoping for better treatment. And then the current all but ceased. He raised his head an inch above the water line and saw that he had been hawsered into the slack behind the barge. The surface was being boiled by the barge's diesel, and the water was slimy and thick and tasted metallic, but there was no more pull to the rope.

He let himself be hauled to the bank and gave up the rope and lulled in the gurgling wake, trying to get a whole breath. He burped up a portion of water, tried to see, and found that the men who had lassoed him were down off the barge now, watching him impassively. He tried to make them out, but the sun had rotated higher in the sky and was shining almost straight in his eyes.

“No wonder he liked to drowned,” one of the men observed, “he's so fuckin big.”

The other man began coiling the rope, dragging it across his shoulder. A heavy canvas life preserver bumped his ear and skittered across the bricks toward the man's feet.

“Whyn't you grab the ring?” the first man said irritably. “I made my all-time-best chunk and you grabbed the rope.”

He belched up some gamy-tasting water.

“You like to strangled,” the man said, sounding melancholy.

He squinted up into the sun and saw that the two men were twins, and were staring at him as if he were a one-of-a-kind fish they had landed and didn't know quite what to think.

“Is there a blanket?” he said.

“Loan a towel,” the twin without the rope said, and walked back up to the barge.

He pulled himself a little farther onto the bricks. There was a big scaly burn mark on his shoulder and his ear felt like it had
grown larger. Some of the numbness was departing his feet, and he was beginning to feel more of a piece.

He wanted to say something to the man with the life preserver. But the man simply stared at him quizzically, looking disappointed to have wasted a throw in behalf of what he had pulled in.

The twin returned dangling a crusty towel with “Peabody Hotel” stenciled on it. The towel was hardened with axle grease, and it smelled like diesel. The man tossed it and stood beside his brother as if he weren't sure what he might get to see next. He draped the towel over his abdomen, and tried quickly to outline what he wanted to say in appreciation and not waste too much of anybody's time. The men were out of their thirties and dressed in oily jeans and oily boots. The twin who had retrieved the towel had on a green cowboy shirt, but his brother wore an aquamarine T-shirt with the sleeves cut off and “UCLA Tennis Team” silk-screened on the front. He lay a few moments trying to think of something to say, letting his toes dangle in the water, and looking alternately at their long immovable faces.

“I'll bring you back the towel,” he said, and stared down the stone beach. He tried to stand and felt his chest sag and his back begin to burn where the pole had gouged it. He looked at the men hopefully. The brother who had gone to get the towel smiled, but the other seemed to be scowling, holding the life buoy with one hand as if thought had abandoned him but he hadn't noticed the absence yet.

“Thanks for saving me,” he said.

“I wouldn't do it again,” the unsmiling brother said.

He tried to feel the point of the threat, then gave up and limped back across the bricks, holding the towel around his belly, the sun starting to draw on his shoulders.

Several muddy footprints were stamped into his pants, and one of his socks was kicked to the edge of the water. He scanned the beach and up the drive, where a few cars were visible. The bus was gone. A number of drivers stared at him and made inaudible remarks, and he began picking up his clothes.

A station wagon stopped at the curb, a blue Chevrolet with a plastic screen in front of the radiator. The passengers stared down at him behind sunglasses, making remarks and pointing politely. Suddenly the door swung open and a tiny girl with long red hair and a pink Sunday school dress popped out holding a tiny camera pressed against her stomach and took his picture and disappeared back inside the car. The passengers smiled and nodded, and sat a minute watching him dress, as if they were expecting some singular gesture in recognition. And when none was given they seemed satisfied and drove slowly back into the traffic.

He walked back up the hill to the bus station, feeling worn out. The ticket agent acknowledged him with a greasy smile and looked back over his shoulder at the Trailways clock and pointed to it meaningfully.

He settled his head against the back of the chair and stared at the old milk-colored skylight, trying to empty his brain. Somewhere at the train station a voice came on the loudspeaker and said something unintelligible, and in a minute he heard a train vibrate into the upstairs platform, stop for several minutes while he listened to the brake cylinders bleed off, then start again slowly and fade into the daylight sounds.

“I was in school,” Beebe said, “with a girl from Belzoni. She married a Phi Delt from Meridian. She was a precious sweet thing with her mother's complexion and lovely breasts. She married this boy whose name was Morris Spaulding. And Morris took her to Meridian and graduated to his daddy's Dodge agency, and the first thing any of us knew, he had her doing some ghastly tent show across in Alabama while he was in the audience doing who knows what to himself. All because she was such a sweet little thing and let him make all the decisions for her. I'm afraid that's a little out of my line, Newel, though maybe not for you.”

“I don't know what you're talking about,” he said. “Who asked you that—who cares?”

In 1951 in the summer, they had driven in his father's Mercury from fackson to Memphis, and on the first day he had sat with his mother in the Chief Chisca Hotel and looked out on Union Avenue and sighed, while his father went off in the heat to call on his accounts. And in the evening they went in the car as far on Union Avenue as there was a street to drive on and stopped at a white house with blue shutters where his father knew a man named Hershel Hoytt, who sold raisins. In the house, the man was there and wore golfing shorts and carried a golf club and wore thick black-rimmed glasses and had a face like a stork. They sat down at the round table in the kitchen and drank whiskey and laughed and sang and ate spaghetti with Vienna sausages, and he was shown to the bedroom, where there was a wide bed with a white chenille cover, and told that he could go to sleep. At two o'clock he was asleep with the light on in the ceiling, when the door opened and his mother and father came and stood beside the bed and looked at him and said he was pretty (though he was awake by then) and gently moved him onto the pillows and lay across the bed themselves and went to sleep. And he lay in the bed, the three of them lying crosswise in the tiny room with the fruit-salad globe in the light, still shining over them, and he smelled their breath and listened to them breathing and remembered their singing, and listened to the strange house become quiet until he began to cry, and left the house
.