A Piece of My Heart (26 page)

“Not hardly.”

“Mr. Lamb said nobody was coming,” Newel said.

“It don't surprise me,” he said. “I ain't seen the first turkey.” He eased himself on the sill. “I've made it twenty-five times around, and every once in a while I'll stop and make a little cluck and listen, cause you can hear 'em strutting around trying to get into something. And I ain't heard nothin yet. There
ain't
no turkeys or else they're all got smart and hid out with their voices kept down, which ain't likely.”

“That's too bad,” Newel said. “If he thinks he's got turkeys and there aren't any.”

“Can't nobody poach what you ain't got,” he said, smiling. “You can't have fun with a coon that's gone.”

Newel stared awhile at the lake and worried his forehead into a little ruck. “I want you to tell me something,” he said, and sighed.

He could hear the flicker
kee-ooing
out in the shumards. “What would that be?” he said.

Newel drew himself up a little closer. “If you like things so goddamned manageable, just what're you doing down here?”

The bird kept up its racket. He could hear its wings fluttering in the high leafy branches. “If I'da wanted you to know, I'da done told you, don't you s'pose?”

Newel's eyes looked like they had grown smaller. “There's something not right, though,” he said, “or you wouldn't be back down here. You'd be back there with your wife in California, or wherever you live, managing everything. Instead you look like somebody going to a funeral for a fellow you didn't know.”

It made him irritated. He squirmed to the edge of the fender so ha was looking straight down at Newel. “Maybe I wouldn't look that way if you weren't aggravating me.” He grabbed onto the chamfer and gave it a good squeeze.

Newel got up, dusted his pants, and stepped a ways off to look at the lake, as if he were expecting to see something rise off the surface. The sun was barely visible past the boat camp, an orangy liquid, shapeless at the tip of the levee.

“I don't see why I have to waste my time with you when I could be having me a big time driving circles around this island.” He climbed off the fender and sat in the driver's seat.

“You got some woman you're fucking up there in Helena or wherever it is that's running you crazy,” Newel said loudly, turning around and staring. “You look like a criminal every time I see you, so it just must be something cheap-ass.”

He drummed his fingers on the steering wheel, took a breath, and let it go out slowly, staring at his feet as if he were looking in a well of fast-flourishing disasters. “All right,” he said, and laid his hands in his lap and let his elbows tap his ribs. “It don't prove nothing. I'd bet you nine out of ten things a man does outside of the ordinary would trace to some woman he's got hid out, or like to have hid.”

“That doesn't matter,” Newel said, and looked off as if he might be angry. “If you just wanted to cadge a little pussy you didn't have to drive three thousand miles. You could just go
home
, or down the road, or next door. You didn't have to come where
you don't even like it. And if you're just scared of getting caught with your dick out you wouldn't look like you
do
look, like somebody grieved about something.”

“You done got me tired now, Newel,” he said.

“Just so you know it, though,” Newel said angrily, looking at the lake one more time and turning back.

He started the jeep, got his pistol out from under the seat, and put it down in his belt wrapped in the handkerchief. The woods were at the moment of turning brown. “How come you even care about it?” he said softly, to nothing.

“I don't,” Newel said, and climbed in the jeep, rubbing his arms as if a cold had penetrated into his bones. “I just want you to know I'm not full of shit.”

“I guess I'll have to hold off on that,” he said, and drove away.

Mr. Lamb sat dumped behind the end of the table, frowning over an assemblage of patent medicines, peering out between the vials and tins as if they were a city whose streets he didn't know. Landrieu was huffing through the kitchen, consigning pots to and from stove plates, frowning sternly at whoever came in the house.

The old man looked up at them curiously. Mrs. Lamb was in the sitting room listening to the radio through her headphones. He sat down quietly across from Newel and tried to cause as little disturbance as he could while the old man, from all looks in a poisonous temper, menaced the array of bottles crowded in front of him on the tabletop.

The old man had assembled a big chalk-blue bottle of Phillips, a tiny vial of liver pills, a bottle of Hadacol in which the liquid had separated into amber and black strata, a black bottle of hemorrhoid pills, a tin of headache powders, a bottle of Black-Draught laxative, two different-shaped bottles of calamine lotion, each with a druggist's paper label, a clear bottle of brown liquid
with a handwritten label that said Gordona Specific, and in back of everything a small paper box of d-Con.

Mr. Lamb gave Newel an unfriendly look, then turned his eye around back onto him so that his face felt cold and hot all at once.

The old man drew up on one of his skinny elbows and started looking at several directions simultaneously. “You threatening my life, Hewes?” he said.

He gave a quick look down at the d-Con and tried to tell if the old man had somehow roped his name in with the roach poison. “No,” he said, and gave Newel a queer look.

“You sure?” the old man said, and leaned out over the tiny sea of bottles until all the ruckles stretched out of his neck.

“Yessir,” he said, nervous.

“How come you come to dinner carrying a pistol, then?” the old man croaked.

He looked down and saw the black rubber butt of the old man's revolver still wrapped in the handkerchief and stuck out the top of his pants like a snake gone half in its hole. The old man glowered, his eyes flashing as if he wanted to keep both face and gun butt trapped in the same field of vision so he wouldn't miss anything that happened to each.

He grabbed at the handkerchief, groped the gun instead, and jerked it out of his pants, the handkerchief a-cling. He stood up and flourished the gun in front of him.

“Look out, Newel,” the old man shrieked, and lurched backward in his chair, a grimace fixing on his face, his hands thrown at the ceiling. “He's gonna blast us.”

Newel's face got caught in an odd smile and he appeared to be completely paralyzed.

“Good Jesus,” the old man gurgled, and pursed his lips as if he were just before receiving a terrible blow. Mr. Lamb suddenly whipped his face about and looked forlornly at Mrs. Lamb, who was still intent on her radio, her back silently to the rest of the house.

He slammed back from the table, tipping his chair, barreled the muzzle toward the floor and bolted out, the gun ferried in front
of him like a dowser, down the steps and across the yard.

He got inside the Gin Den, turned on the overhead bulb, and shoved the gun under the mattress, breathing quickly, his heart squeezing the bottom of his windpipe. It seemed unaccountable, he thought, for life to transport you this way, to where you'd never thought of going nor wanted to go nor even knew to exist. It made him feel giddy and out of control. He had planned it for Friday, for slipping away afterward, but there wasn't any planning it finally. He saw it all at once. It was all right to plot it, but you had to be ready to glide in the wake of fate sooner or later, and not be surprised when things surprised you.

He turned out the light and stood in the door, watching the house gone darker than the sky behind it, the windows oranged and faintly shining. Landrieu's silhouette passed in the window like a grasshopper, a kettle hung from a bar, then in a moment, in his chef's hat, disappeared into the far room with arms full of bowls. He lit a cigarette and blew the smoke in the air and felt chilled in the dew. He thought of sitting on the porch in Cane Hill when the air was purpled and velvet before the sun completely died, watching his father's cat loll on the step, its lemon eyes drowsy, its tail switching upward and back. His father had come out and stood behind him and looked at the cat as though he could read its mind, and all at once had stood down and grabbed the cat by its back hackles and spun it so that everything was reverse, and the cat's fat tail switched off the other end of the step in the vervains. And his father stood up again and looked at the cat strangely as if he couldn't read its mind anymore. And the cat never missed a heartbeat, its eyes falling the way they had, its paws grasping out toward invisible creatures in its dream.

“Ain't it queer,” his father said, and whipped a handkerchief out of his pocket and wiped his nose vigorously and snorted. “I turned old Mine cattywumpus and he never so much as blinked.”

“I don't think Mine cares,” he said.

And his father looked at him as if somehow he were part of the cat they were both wondering about, and stuffed his handkerchief in his pocket and went back inside.

He watched the house take better shape in the night and felt satisfied with his old man's memory, since his father was a planner and a conniver and thought the way he set the world up was the way it should go, even though it was wrong. The porch light was still off, and the night was sweet then and like velvet. He felt in his pocket and took out the card he'd bought in the afternoon and tried to make it out in the skimpy moon's light and couldn't and went back inside the Gin Den to sleep.

Mr. Lamb sat reconnoitering the sea of bottles as if he had come on them unexpectedly and was perplexed as to how to get to the other side. He elevated the Hadacol so he could read the label against the light, and grunted when he had digested what the bottle had to say, and set it down and reappraised the remainders. He suddenly snaked out his arm, plucked up the box of d-Con, and brought it straight up into his skinny field of vision. He pondered the label, turned the box over, and squinted at the tiny red printing until he slowly began to frown and his entire face contracted into a scowl of grave condemnation.

“What the shit is this here?” the old man said. At that Mrs. Lamb sat back in her chair, bent her chin around to look at Mr. Lamb, and returned to her radio, the PBX wires swooping out her ear directly into the dark back panel of the box. “Somebody's trying to assassinate me,” Mr. Lamb bellowed. He shoved the box of d-Con out away from his face as if it were a hateful mirror. “What the hell does that say?” the old man said brashly, thrusting the box at him with the crucial panel already rotated. Mr. Lamb's pink mouth opened as if he planned to receive the important information orally.

He studied the box, then began to read it out loud. “Warning: Do not swallow. May be fatal if taken internally. Keep out of the
reach of children. Call a physician at once if ingested.'”

“That's enough,” the old man said peremptorily, whacking his knuckles on the table so that all the bottles moved a little sideways and the vial of liver pills rollicked and rolled off the edge. “Landroo!” he shouted.

Landrieu hooked his head around the jamb and looked in suspiciously.

Mr. Lamb's fierceness altered instantly to a tone of obsequious affability. “Are you trying to kill me, son?” He motioned to the box congenially with his thumb.

“No suh,” Landrieu said, as if it were an idea he'd simply never thought of, and disappeared out of the doorframe, his voice trailing off into the kitchen, where he seemed to be assiduously stirring something in a pan. “I ain't tried to kill you today,” he said.

Mr. Lamb kept talking to the doorway as if Landrieu's head were still in it. “Well,
somebody
put this roach powder amongst my nostrums,” he said thoughtfully, eying the box back and forth.

“I don't know nothin about d-Con,” Landrieu said, invisible to everyone.

Mr. Lamb sighed and carefully reorbited his thumbs, working them slowly until he got the proper cadence, then spinning them at a vigorous pace. “Well, it says there not to in-gest none of it, and somebody musta had a notion I was planning to in-gest one of these cures when he brought them out here to me.”

Landrieu declined an answer.

Mrs. Lamb sat forward, unjacked the headset, and let the radio lash forth a fierce voice speaking Spanish at a terrible rate. She regarded them both boldly as though to indicate she was understanding it as well as any Mexican. The man kept yelling,
“E-u-ro-pa in-cre-i'ble! E-u-ro-pa in-cre-í-ble!”
and Mrs. Lamb continued promoting it all with a triumphant smile.

“I didn't ask you to bring me no roach poison,” Mr. Lamb mumbled underneath the sound of the radio, his thumbs filing past each other at a faster and faster pace.

“I just brung what you said,” Landrieu said irritably through the open door. “Whatever's laying on the window ledge's what
you said. That's what I brung. I didn't pay no attention to no roach medicine.”

“That's two people tried to murder me inside of five minutes,” Mr. Lamb said dolefully.

“I ain't tried to murder nobody,” Landrieu mumbled.

Mrs. Lamb's radio began to sound brittle, filling every squinch in the house. The old man suddenly wheeled in his chair and fired a half-vengeful, half-supplicating look at Mrs. Lamb, who was enjoying having everyone listen at top volume. He wondered furtively if Mrs. Lamb might not be of Catalonian lineage.

“Would you turn that down, Fidelia,” Mr. Lamb said patiently, audible to no one but himself. Nevertheless, Mrs. Lamb shoved the jack back in the terminal and the sound disappeared like an invisible curtain snapped across the room, leaving a discomforting quiet. Landrieu was cooking ham in the frying pan, and the hot ham scent tainted the room with a queer nauseating sensation.