A Piece of My Heart (2 page)

“All right,” he said, startled, a heavy sweet smell riding the darkness. “I can't see you now. Who is that?”

“It's me,” she said, letting her quilt subside and releasing the gardenia smell into the room. “I can't wait no longer.”

Her knees bent into the bedding as he was trying to climb to see her in the dark, and only saw her breasts rolling toward him and disappearing, and her arms taking him up and holding him until, when he tried to talk, he could only say, “Honey, honey.” And that was all.

In the morning she stood and kneaded her eyes and swung her arms through the dusty light, her underarms pale and dark at once. The bed smelled sour.

“Robard,” she said, stretching her fingers through her damp hair. “You wake up now.” (Though he was certainly awake.) She stared at him, her lips everted, and he strived to move his eyes, inch by inch, toward the painful sloping sunlight.

“I got a riddle,” she said.

“A what?” he said, smelling the sheets all around him.

“How come the birds wake up singing every morning?” She smiled and set her teeth edge to edge.

“What?” he said, not hearing it right.

“Cause,” she said, sticking her full belly out and smiling.
“They're happy to be alive one more day.” She laughed out loud.

And all at once her expression changed and she looked at him as if she had never seen him before and was surprised to find him lying there. And he had seen paleness in her eyes, some disappointment he couldn't calculate but could feel commencing, like some dead zone inside her had uncovered all at once. He thought that it was the print of something lost, something irretrievable, though it was all he knew, and he felt that was only part of it.

A year ago a letter came unaddressed and sat a month in general delivery before the card came warning him to pick it up. It said:

Robard:

We are in Tulare now. W. W. pitches. Come and see me please. I still love you. Your cousin. Beuna.

After a month in the mail slot, it smelled like the same gardenias, thick and rank, flagging to the onionskin so his neck prickled when he smelled it, and he decided then that he had to go, if it was just to see what was there, and could work on explanations later.

He had sat beside her in the Tulare fairgrounds in the smothering night heat and watched W.W. on the brick dust under the lights expel one spiteful pitch after another that no one could ever hit or even halfway see, the last six batters going back without bothering to swing, so that the game was over in an hour and a half.

Beuna had on a red sunsuit printed with elephants running, the halter pinching her breasts up so that he doubted if she could swallow all the way down. Her stomach had forged over her shorts and he thought then that she was much fuller now, after twelve years, but ripe like a peach orchard pear, and womanish in a way that he had never ever seen before and never even really imagined to be possible. She sat beside him and slowly pressed her bare thigh against his until he began to feel like some great whirling gyro were being turned against him. And she never once uttered a word nor made a sound, and for the hour and a half he had sat
as though some hot current were passing into his leg, turning a circuit through his body and passing out through his fingers, taking all his strength and resistance as it went.

When she released him, she set her head sideways and stared at him, holding him, like the high point on a compass.

“Robard,” she said, her voice sounding like a bubble rising up out of the cramped insides of her throat. “I love you.”

The first banquet of grandstand lights fell dim, sinking them in queer afternoon shadowlight.

“All right,” he said, looking across the dingy field for some sign of W.W., knowing he was baiting calamity by even being there.

“I'm
so
wet,” she said. “My God!” She fished her hand in his trousers and squeezed him there until he felt a noise down in his throat that wouldn't come loose. “Robard?” she breathed, bringing her mouth to an inch from his ear and squeezing as hard as she could. “Do you love me?”

“All right,” he said, unable to get his breath.

“Is that all?” she said, her eyes pinching up meanly and her grip relaxing so that he had time to feel his saliva get thick as gravy.

“You do what you can,” he said, sucking air through his nose, trying to keep his throat constricted.

“Well,” she said reproachfully, staring at her toes on the next riser down. He could hear W.W.'s voice calling out of the dark across the field. Behind him other voices were laughing. Suddenly she had him again, foisting her hand in his trousers as if she were driving a nail and until he felt like some awful vision was about to appear in front of him. The last standard of lights died off, huddling them in a wretched darkness. “Since you put it thataway,” she said slowly, “I guess it'll be fine.”

On the road back across the desert he began to try to settle things. In general, he knew, things didn't end in your life because by all sensible estimations they
ought
to. Or because people involved did things or changed places that would ordinarily make carrying on any longer a natural hardship. Because once a force got a start in you, it grew and took on dimensions and shadings and a life separate and sometimes as complete and good as your
practical, good-sense way, he would see that, and understand that nothing in his life
ever
ended. Things only changed and grew up into something else.

In three weeks a letter arrived at general delivery written on drugstore stationery. It said:

Robard:

We are not in Tulare now, but are in Tacoma, Washington. It ain't nice here and rains. He played good at Tulare and pitched at Oakland one time, but everybody got a hit, and he rode the bus up here the next day and I come by car. It is just a big ditch behind our little house and I am afraid it will flood and drownd me. I don't know what will happen to me now but something will. Smell this. I love you still more. Beuna.

He held the paper up to the light, standing in the long, airy vestibule of the post office, and smelled the paper where the writing was, and took the letter quick out to the gutter and tore it to pieces and let it flutter through the grate into the dry sewer mouth.

In two weeks a letter came postmarked Helena, Arkansas, with a message written on Holiday Inn stationery. It said:

Robard:

lam home. W. W. says he will pitch at Oakland again and is still at Tacoma playing kid games. His mind will change. I love you more. B.

He had sat on the steps of the post office thinking about W. W. set up in a strange little bungalow in Tacoma, W. W. wondering what could happen to a man's whole life in the space of one week and how he could get it all back on track and pry Beuna loose from her stepfather's house and get her back where he was so he could have a chance at Oakland again, where somebody could see him.

A week later a letter arrived that simply said:

Robard:

W. W. has seen the light I knew. . . . Beuna.

He figured she must have made a bet with herself that she could treat it all like she was the victim and he was the culprit for wanting to stay and pitch baseball, and she had won it.

And after that a letter every week from Helena pleading with him to come, always on the same rose onionback, with loud promises and whatever smells she felt were useful to what she was asking. And he had stayed and stayed and put each letter in the grate and tried to forget about it.

Though he wondered just what it was he had seen years ago and seen up in Tulare the instant he said, “All right,” when she was hoping for something richer, and what it was that made her strand W. W. out in some strange foreign country, just so he'd quit doing the
one
thing he knew to do. Twelve years ago he might have believed it was just some act of girlishness she played at, brought along by the fact that she liked mingling with her own cousin ten feet out of reach of her mother's headboard—and that
that
right there had caused enough private turmoil to make some show of remorse creditable. And the only thing like remorse that she knew then was to make herself look cast down by something mysterious she couldn't explain and that in all the commotion going on at 3 A.M. there wouldn't be time to talk about. Except that didn't work out. It had gone on too long to be just girlishness. And when he had seen her in Tulare, she had fixed on him with her pale flat eyes like a specimen she was studying, and there had been again the same forlorn miscalculation he had always seen, just as though it marked a vacancy she was beside herself wondering how to fill.

At five-thirty he had gotten up, dressed, and driven up the Sierra to Mammoth and sat in the truck while the light got darker and turned green just as the rain commenced through the fog. At six-thirty the foreman drove up in a company truck, climbed up into the bed wearing a yellow rain suit, and read off a paper that said the job was closing because the state had to make a study.
The foreman said a job was open at Keeler laying pipe for a feeder to the aqueduct, and anybody wanting to sign ought to make the noon list. Men started moving off even before he had finished, heading for their trucks, anxious to get out of the drizzle and down to Keeler before the list filled and they had to scrounge. When the foreman had finished reading the paper, he stuffed it in his pocket, climbed back in the truck and drove off.

He walked back to the truck thinking he could drive back and eat breakfast with Jackie and think about going to Keeler when he'd slept.

He drove out from Mammoth back to the highway south. Up the Sierras the rain was pulling apart, opening gaps to daylight. He was beginning to think that there were some things he hadn't understood. From the first, eight years ago, when he had left Hazen and transported himself and her across the country, and had started to pick work where he could up the Sierras, he had been as desperate as anybody, and every bit as panicked when a job shut down, and had gone off to wherever there was another one opened. And he had felt the same panic starting, listening to the foreman, the same creepiness the others had disappeared with to Keeler to patch into whatever was there. Except he couldn't go off and start opening ditches and pitching pipe without having made a choice. When the first job closed in Lone Pine eight years ago, in 130-degree heat, he had panicked. And the first thing he remembered seeing was men rushing like they were bolt out of a cannon. And he'd gone with them because he'd gotten caught up and couldn't resist. And all that rigmarole, he thought, had just given the panic something to work on, and switching jobs up and down the Inyo had come to seem like the best solution because it was
a
solution, and that was better than nothing.

Though after eight years now, he thought, he ought to wonder if it was the best solution anymore, and in fact if it had ever been. If he wanted the job he could just drive down in the morning and stand at the site until somebody goggled over in the heat, and step in without any questions.

So that what he was thinking about, of course, was Beuna. All
those years of running desperation and internal commotion getting jobs and being anxious might have been just a lot of useless barging around, like a man with his sleeve in a thresher. And that whatever she had infused in him back in Helena, twelve years ago, hadn't been dormant, given all the activity it seemed to have sponsored, but just misunderstood.

The rain had spread out into a silver sheet below the fog. The truck struck out from under the clouds to the light and started off the long grade toward the desert, where he could feel the air already hotter, two thousand feet up off the flats. The road he could see down below bent across an oval meadow demarking the edge of the Sierra and the desert. A file of poplars divided the meadow along the shoulder connecting the toenail of mountain to the outskirts of Bishop, which sat off a ways in the purplish mist halfway down the horizon.

But what happens to you, he wondered, worrying already—what happens when she manages to infect you with something dangerous, keeping it alive for years on the strength of gardenia odor and a few flourishing letters? What happens when you recognize it's important—what you did and what she did and would do, and when and how and to whom, and that it's left you with a kind of ruinous anxiety that just one thing will satisfy?

He took the long curve down into the stretch of shaded road toward town. It worried him, because he knew that things in your life didn't disappear once they were begun, and that your life just got thick with beginnings, accrued from one day to the next, until you reached an age or a temperament when you couldn't support it anymore and you had to retire from beginnings and let your life finish up on momentum. And he wasn't to that point yet! So that whatever she had fostered inside him couldn't be counted on simply to retire, but to protrude into the middle of everything indefinitely and give everybody a bad time, unless serious adjustments were made to transform her and it into something he
could
live with, in the way everybody lived with things.

He drove into town to the front of the post office and stopped, thinking, in the heat, that seeing Beuna as an impediment or as
something to be survived was only one way of looking at her, and not by any necessity the way she was. He stepped in where the air was cool and dry. The lobby was a long empty arcade with wired-up skylights that clouded the room with submerged shadows. He picked up the letter at the registry and walked back out into the sunlight, looking up the street to see if he saw anyone he knew. He thought about breakfast and decided to let it slide.

He stuck the letter under the visor and started back toward the mountains. He drove out across the meadow until he crossed the Works Progress bridge at Inyo Creek and stopped and got out and walked back to the railing. The breeze stiffened and flicked the page, and he read the words over and over, poring over them, his lips forming the words each time. And after a while he walked down in the yellow and green checkered light and stepped into the sedge and laid the envelope on the surface and watched it turn and dance away until it snuffed like a flicker of light. He puzzled for a moment at the letter, the page fluttering in his hand, and suddenly folded it into quarters and backed out of the wet grass. He climbed the bank and crammed the page down inside his instep and started back toward the truck.