A Piece of My Heart (20 page)

He had waited in the morning on the settle beside the yardmaster's house until the daylight dispatcher came and Wheeler came out in the open air, his hat in his hand and a St. Louis Cardinals cap on his head, blinking in the steely light. He stood up quickly and looked at Wheeler, who for all the hours they'd spent together watching lights blink on the dark, silent board had never once seen him, and said out loud, “How can you run that all night, in that teensy place, and not ever drive it all together?”

And Wheeler looked at him as if he had asked himself the
question a thousand times and was not amazed to hear it from somebody else. “Mind like a moon,” he said easily, taking off his Cardinals cap and stroking his fine sparse hair. “If you stare at the moon a long time, all you'll see is the moon, and all you'll want to see is the moon. I can do it.”

He sat in the truck and stared at the yardmaster's house in the mirror, a yellow light above the cramped casements, and the panel of painted glass all the way to the end. The moon had risen so that it stood up above the post office, drifting back into some gauzy smoke. Here it all was, he felt, the time when there wasn't any holding out, the one true last time, and he didn't want to do it halfway, since halfway was as good as nothing.

He throttled the truck and broke out straight down the narrow truck corridor the wrong way between the post office and the cotton broker's shed. At the end, the pavement blind-switched left directly into the rear alley of the post office. The truck barely missed taking the corner of the building and leaped on into the alley, losing purchase and fading rearward toward the back wall. He fought the wheel, surprised to have got going so fast in so short a space, then suddenly Beuna was in the headlights and he was pounding the pedals to keep from barging right out over her and carrying on into the street.

And Beuna never twitched. When the truck bucked the back corner full tilt, sliding and seizing two directions at once, she stood up unperturbed in the lights, lifted one hip an inch above the other, and smiled as though she had fallen heir to a power that pickup trucks couldn't impede.

The truck halted and he blinked at her through the fly-specked glass, his heart lunging like an engine ripped off its mounts. She was wearing tiny terry-cloth shorts that had shrunk up in her crotch and made her thighs look bigger than they could be and made him feel strangled, bound up, as if he wanted to be both in the truck and out of it someplace way away all at the same time. She had worried her hair up in little pencil curls that haloed her head and gave her face a round shape. She turned slightly in the light and smiled at him or toward wherever she thought he was
in the truck, and rounded her eyes and unbuttoned her little sleeveless blouse until it sagged open and a big quarter of her breast nosed between the parting.

He felt like there wasn't enough air to breathe, and the only movement he could school himself to make was to kick on the high beams and shoot her in a hot wash of crackling lights. Her features instantly turned inward and twisted in a mean way. Her hips contracting as if she was trying to withdraw from the light, she raised her bare arm to her eyes so that both her breasts broke out of the shirt, and with her body bent at the waist, wagged over the tops of her shorts.

“Goddamn!” she yelled, ducking lower under her arm. She writhed, trying with both arms to stop the light. He tried to move, but couldn't work his arms. “Robard!” she screamed.

He all at once stamped the light pull with his heel and sank back in the seat, hearing his name going off through the dark.

And the alley disappeared. There was a pause when he couldn't see anything, then Beuna's face popped up in the window, glaring through the dark air.

“Asshole!” she said, burying her chin on her collarbone so she could see which button matched which hole. “What piss-willy trick you call that?”

“I screwed it up,” he said, shaking his head, but keeping an eye out on the mouth of the alley to make sure somebody wasn't heading around to see what the noise was.

“You sure as
hell
screwed up,” she said, minding her buttons, but suddenly snapping her chin up at him angrily. “You just about blinded me with my attainments hung out for all the world.”

“Git in,” he said. “You're going to have the law out here.”

“I give a shit if I do, too,” she said, slapping at the buttons, flinging the door open and flouncing in.

She wore the same sweet flower smell he had waked up in the night at Bishop and smelled on everything, some little fragrance off the desert he couldn't keep from giving himself to, imagining her somewhere miles away from where he was at that moment. He touched the finish of her blouse where he could feel the
weight of her breast, and she slapped his hand and crossed her arms.

“Leave them alone!” she said.

“I done come three thousand miles for them,” he said in amazement. “You want me to turn 'em loose?”

“That's right,” she said. “I ain't going to have you pawing me.”

“Shit,” he said, trying to see her in the dark. “How come you stand out there wagging them around like a puppy show?”

“My business,” she said, setting her chin so the soft flesh on the underside disappeared.

“Well, I'm making it mine,” he said, grabbing her by the elbow, waggling his hand inside her blouse and popping off one button after another.

“Robard?” she said, her legs stiff as stones.

“What,” he said, roaming over her breast.

“I want you to tear me up,” she said, her little blue eyes flat as pebbles.

“I will,” he said, his breath all gone.

“I don't want there to be nothin left when you get finished.”

“There won't be,” he said.

“Robard?”

“What?”

“I want to do it in the back of the truck in the dirt and the rocks and the filthiness.”

He dislodged his hand and felt suddenly like a man in a tornado. “We will, hon,” he said, “we will.”

He drove up the rise to Main and turned out of town toward Memphis. He passed a drive-in theater, the fluorescent lights shining in the glass office, then two motels, the long fenced-in limits of the BB-gun factory, and a beer bar at the limits of the fields. Then the town disappeared, and the road took west and north into the delta.

Beuna arranged herself under his arm and stared at the highway, hugging her knees. “You know what I did when I was in high school?” she said, looking up at him as if she were apologizing in advance.

“I couldn't guess,” he said.

She stared back at the highway. “Well,” she said, pulling at her ear lobe. “We had this teacher in school named Mr. Fisher. M. B. Fisher. He was just a little puny thing, had headaches all the time that liked to killed him. I used to go over to his house on the pre-tense of working on the school newspaper, and he'd get out his little Polaroid and I'd get on the rug naked and spread out, and he'd take pictures.” She looked at him to gauge how he was liking it. “And we'd get them pictures back in a minute or two and sit on the floor and laugh and laugh. I used to say to him, ‘Mr. Fisher, I thought them cameras was only supposed to take pictures of land.' And he'd laugh and laugh. We had us a good time.” She let her eyes wander on the highway.

“How come you and him never got past the picture-taking stage?”

“We did,” she said. “But that wasn't as funny.”

“I guess not,” he said, thinking about a motel.

“I don't see nothing funny about fuckin,” she said seriously. “Do you?”

“I guess not.”

“Where're we going?” she said.

“Get us a room.”

“I don't want it!” she said.

He looked at her to see if she had gotten mad without his knowing it. “Why not?”

“It's like every day,” she said, turning her head away and sitting straight up in the seat. “Get in the bed, turn on the TV, fuck, then go back to watching and hope you ain't missed nothin.”

“We don't have to turn on no TV,” he said.

“I done told you, Robard,” she said. “I want to roll in the dirt and the sand and the whatever you got back there and fuck you till you're blue. You understand that?” She thrust her hand in his trousers and got a fierce grip on him.

“All right,” he said. “What about Memphis?”

“That's a exception. I want to go up there and have me and you get in one of them showers and get my little bag out. I'm dying to.”

“What's that about?” he said.

“I'm not telling,” she said. “If I did you might decide you didn't want to. But if I can get you up there in one of them ritzy twenty-dollar rooms with them shower baths and get ahold of you, you'll do any damn thing I tell you to.” She squeezed to let him know she could do it. “It chills you, don't it?”

All his blood was headed down, leaving everything else afloat. He slid onto the shoulder and down onto a macadam road perpendicular to the highway. Beuna started grappling his belt as soon as the headlights illuminated the road.

“What'd you tell Jackie you was doing?” she said.

“I didn't tell her nothin.”

“You know what I made W.W. do?”

“What's that?”

“Have a vastectopy, one of them operations,” she said.

“Why'd you do that?” he said, thinking about W. being forced into something else he didn't want to do.

“Cause that boy ought not to
have
children,” she said. “They wouldn't none of them be nothin but baseballs. I don't need no kids anyway.”

He let the truck ride to a stop in the field. He could smell Folex in the air, mingled with the sweet smell of Beuna.

“Why not?” he said.

“Cause I don't,” she said. “You think I ought to raise some kid up like me? I'll just have me a good time and let the next bunch take care of theirselves without adding to the misery.” She stared out the window and went back, cradling her knees. “Tell me something,” she said.

He inspected the mirror for some sign of headlights back up on the highway, a mile off. “All right.”

“What kind of tube is your Fallopian tube?” She sharpened her eyes to warn against making a joke.

“It's inside you,” he said, and rubbed at his stomach. “That's where your eggs get hatched.”

“I thought it was one of them little tubes in your ear.”

“Something the matter with yours?” he said.

“I was reading about it in a birth control magazine they give W. It said I could of got mine tied instead of him getting his cut, but I would of had to go in the hospital, and all he had to do was come in the doctor's office without eating nothing, go to bed early
one
night, and keep from using his thing for two weeks. He never did know what the thing was for anyway.”

“That's too bad,” he said, shoving down in the seat and getting his face in her breasts.

“You like my attainments, don't you?” she said, opening her blouse and pushing her chin up in the darkness so her breasts got firmed.

“You'da thought I never seen any before,” he said, tasting the salty bottoms of them and pushing in between them.

“Let's get in the back,” she said.

He elbowed the door open and held her hand while she climbed out. The road had turned into moist clay and grass that smelled like dust. On the highway headlights were leading north toward Memphis, the cars hissing away in the night. An odor of rotting plants rose on the breeze and held back the smell all over Beuna. He tried to see out in the moonlight to where the water was standing, but could see nothing but the sallow glow of Helena on the sky.

She climbed up in the truck and stood in the bed and took off her blouse and stretched her arms, her body bulky and pale. She faced across the fields with the light to her back, and he could see the failing whorl of hair along her backbone.

“Robard?” she said.

“What?”

“I told W. if I hadn't of married him I would've married you.” She looked at him gravely. “Now I want you to get up on here,” she said, releasing the snap on her shorts and wiggling them out of her crotch and looking at the little curlicues of hair on her belly as if she thought they might not be there this time.

He looked at her and thought maybe the best thing to do was to get back in the truck and out of there right then, and not waste another minute. Except that whatever it was she had, badness or
disappointment or meanness, was the thing that was indispensable now, and he wanted to draw in to her and glide off in infinitude and just let loose of everything.

He sat on the side panel and unbuttoned his pants and let the letter fall out of his shoe without caring. She got him quick between her thumb and her first finger like a string on a bow and held his neck and pulled him off the side of the truck. She chivvied him, the corners of her mouth frozen, her breasts clutching his ribs, straining her jaw, pressing his feet with hers, gouging as if she were trying to wear away the bone. Sweat came all at once and he got his pulse in his throat and couldn't get a breath. He took a hold up on her thighs and felt his body winding up and spread his feet trying to get purchase somewhere. There was a soughing sound, and his back got quavery and the air across his neck chilled, and she began to rock him with her legs, and he could feel her throat vibrating against his lips, the sound out of his ear slipping into the air. He let her rock him, her feet standing his like stirrups, with each traction sliding on her knees as if a gravity were drawing him backward and a new contraction would trickle up his spine until she drew him again and supported him again in the fork of her legs. And in a while she let him fall off on the bed, and went limp, let her feet splay and raised her arms behind her and fingered the post of the jack below the window and made a little humming sound and got quiet, breathing almost not at all, her arms cool and dry.