A Piece of My Heart (33 page)

The boat, with the old man's increasing gyrations to perturb it, began to waffle precariously and send lap waves heaving under the jugs, causing them to strain against their string anchors, and making him get a grip on the gunwales and begin inspecting the timber for a place to cling when the boat eventually swamped. Waves were licking up into the trees and rising under the deadfall where the turtles were sitting silently, staring back at the boat. He felt now he should do something to save them.

All at once Mr. Lamb stopped cranking, his ears grown scarlet, and sweat thickening the collar of his flannel shirt. The old man turned and gave him a defiant look, then grabbed for the wires in his other hand as if someone else were holding them out to him and had placed them just an inch out of his reach, so that by some miscalculation he grabbed onto both spiky ends at once and discharged the entire stored-up quotient of telephonic electricity directly into his body.

“Oops,” the old man said in an obvious surprise, and threw up both his hands, dropping the cords into the water and pitching straight over backward into the middle of the boat, making a loud whumping sound on the chinky curvature of his spine, his eyes wide open as if he were about to instigate another imitation of Landrieu but had somehow gotten sidetracked. He did not hit his head. The rocker effect of his spinal curve mediated the blow so that his head only lightly touched the slatted bottom of the boat the way an acrobat's head passingly touches the mat at the start of a somersault. His skinny ankles stayed draped over the front of the forward seat on either side of the box, and his arms flailed out to the sides partially over the gunwales. He stared at the old man for a moment, his paddle still laddered over his thighs, expecting him to jump up and start cursing. But once down, the old man didn't move again.

He crouched forward on his knees, losing the paddle, and sending the boat into even greater flailing gyrations. He pressed
both his hands against the old man's cheeks, which were warm and sentient, though his eyes were open and unblinking and his chest was relaxed. He stared into the old man's face, welled in between his thighs, and yelled at him so that a tiny flower of spittle sprouted on the old man's cheek and began to slide toward his ear.

“Mr. Lamb!” he yelled, his voice careening through the rank woods and disappearing. “Mr. Lamb!” he shouted, as if the old man were at the opposite end of the lake and could not hear him.

The old man's blurry eyes turned pale and glaucous and his face became famished, the color of the sky. He sat back and stared at the face, shaded in the thick well of his thighs, until the adroitness of the old man's death refrigerated his own insides and left him with a very businesslike feeling of needing to act efficiently and without excess of energy, and to become as unquestioningly useful as he could to anyone within a hundred miles. He pressed his hands again onto the old man's cheeks and found that they were warm, but less warm than before, which seemed to him more or less correct. The idea crept into his thinking that perhaps in the fraction of a second between the time the old man had completed the circuit of the telephone and the time his eyes had frozen open staring straight up at the sky, his face becoming white as sugar, then gray,
he
could have done something, could have sealed his mouth over Mr. Lamb's and blown for all he was worth and inflated his cavernous old lungs and started his heart to thumping by the simple gale force of all his own lung power concentrated inside the old man. But then, he felt assuredly, there simply hadn't been the time. A year ago he had sat in Beebe's apartment on Astor Place and watched a football player die of heart failure, draped over the thirty-five-yard line, and later the announcers declared the player was dead before he hit the ground, maybe even in the locker room hours before. If this was so, he supposed, the boat still teetering under him causing the old man's face to wag back and forth against his knees, then this old man was dead before he even got in the boat, since nothing could've worked such a devastation on him in so short a time, unless it had gotten
started some time earlier. And without divine prescience of whatever it was starting, he had been helpless to assist the old man at all.

His back began to tighten and his knees began to strain against the ribs of the boat. He sat back and rubbed the furrow in his forehead for a long time and gauged his own breathing. The old man looked thin as paper, his temples sunken considerably, and absolutely ridiculous lying in the floor with the mallards flying off his collar and his yellow suspenders gapped above his shoulders as if they had been made for a much taller man. He reached down between his legs and mashed his eyelids down and noticed how simple and unspectacular a matter it was to do that, since the lids closed willingly and stayed shut without the slightest effort, as if there were no difference in being closed and open. Though the old man looked unmistakably dead now, and the businesslike impulse rose in him again, and he reached for the stob where Landrieu had impaled the white jug, threw the jug off, and pulled the boat over to where the paddle had floated. With the paddle he piloted the boat over to a patch of quavery ground, got out and towed the boat up partially, took off his shirt and draped it over the old man's face. He scanned the cluttered end of the lake and saw nothing. The turtles had departed the deadfall, and the lake was empty and somnolent. The sun was forty-five degrees off the top of the woods, shining out from behind a long peninsula of crusted clouds. There was the smell of rain mingled with the rank scent of the water, and with his shirt off he felt the breeze slide against his stomach, causing his flesh to run up into the hollow of his ribs, and he rubbed himself and turned toward the sun and tried to let it warm him, but it wouldn't.

He pulled the old man's arms off the gunwales and fixed them at his sides. He lifted his skinny ankles off the bow seat, folded his legs in such a fashion that his knees listed against the sides, and put the black box by his feet for support. He grabbed the bow handle of the boat and pushed off back into the lake, letting the boat scrape through the shallow grasses, perched on the narrow bow on his knees, poling the boat farther and farther into the lake
until he could no longer touch the marly bottom with the blade and until the boat, with the old man down in the broad flat end, rose out of the water like a gondola cruising some still and rancid waterway, and he the fat and efficient and shirtless gondolier.

In Jackson, Mississippi, in 1953, his father brought him downtown and left him in the lobby of the King Edward Hotel while he went away to the mezzanine to talk to a man about selling starch in Alabama. His mother was home in bed and too sick to watch him, so he sat in the lobby and watched the men standing against the fat pillars smoking cigars and shaking hands for minutes at a time. In a little while a midget came into the lobby wearing cowboy boots and a Texas hat, and attracted everyone's attention as he signed his name to the register and gave the bellboy a tip before he ever touched a bag. When he was ready to go to his room, the midget turned and looked around the pillared lobby into the alcoves and foyers as if he were looking for someone to meet him. And when he saw the boy sitting on the long couch, he came across in his midget—s gait that made him look as if he were wearing diapers, and told the boy that his name was Tex Arkana, and that he was in the movies and had been the midget in
Samson and Delilah
and had been one of the Philistines that Samson had killed with the jawbone of a mule. He said he had seen the movie and remembered the midget fairly well. The midget said that in his bags he had all his movie photos and a long scrapbook with his newspaper clippings which he would be glad to show him if he cared to see. Most of the men in the lobby were watching the two of them sitting on the couch talking, and the midget kept watching them and talking faster. When the boy said he would care to see the scrapbook and the photos, too, the midget got up and the two of them got on the elevator with the bellboy and went to the midget's new room, which faced the street When the bellboy had left, the
midget took off his shirt and sat on the floor in his undershirt and opened the suitcase and went jerking through the clothes looking for the book while the hoy sat on the chair and watched. In a little while the midget found the broad wooden-sided book and jumped on the bed, his cowboy boots dangling against the skirts, and showed the boy pictures of himself in
Samson and Delilah
and in
Never Too Soon
and in a movie with John Garfield and Fred Astaire. There were pictures of the midget in the circus riding elephants and sitting on top of tigers and standing beside tall men under tents and in the laps of several different fat women who were all laughing. When they had looked at all the pictures and all the clippings, the midget said that he was sleepy after a long plane ride from the west coast and that the boy would have to go so he could go to sleep. The boy shook hands with the midget and the midget gave him an autographed picture of himself standing on a jeweled chariot with a long whip, being pulled by a team of normal-sized men. And the boy left.

When he came back to the lobby his father was waiting for him, smoking a cigar, and he showed him the picture of the midget in the chariot, and his father became upset and tore up the picture, and went to the glassed-in office beside the front desk and had a long talk with the manager while the boy waited outside. In a while his father came out and the two of them went home where his mother was sick. And late in the night he could hear his mother and father talking about the picture and about the midget with the cowboy boots on, and he heard his father say that the manager had refused to have the midget thrown out of the hotel, and in a little while he could hear his mother crying.

He stood between the house and the Gin Den viewing the sky skeptically. Long purple flathead clouds were sizing up and the air had moistened and cooled and felt electric. There was the sense now, though not the sound, of thunder and it unsettled the air and made him feel that he wasn't going to get across before it all broke down. There was silence on the island, and for a while he wandered back between the shed and the house steps, anticipating the old man and Newel, watching the sky.

He needed to get her shunted off to some motel since there wasn't any way he could take the time to go to Memphis now. Just get in the room, he thought, with the lights off, and get her to work her trick and be done with it without ever leaving town.

And it wasn't only that. He took a seat on the low rise of the step and watched the chalky sun being scrubbed out by the storm. The color of the sky was being altered on the minute, becoming more bruised and complicated every time he looked up. But the wind was low, and he figured the rain would hold off and come in when the wind was ready.

The real snake was two-headed. One, that any more time spent going through the motions with Beuna might be just enough to push it all over with Jackie, so that he'd arrive at an empty house without so much as a pencil pointed in the right direction—which
would be ruinous, pure and simple, though he'd estimated that disaster, or thought he had, before he took the chance, and couldn't complain if that's what he picked.

The other head was that he didn't feel so good about Newel claiming to see whatever he saw, though it was only a word in a million, and it might be anything, but probably was something, since he had little premonitions for it. It made him itchy.

Mrs. Lamb stepped to the edge of the steps and consulted the thermometer-barometer nailed to the porch stud. She held her glasses forward with her hand and peered up through them, then stared at the sky as if corroborating the opinion of the gauges. He looked up and saw her hair was flatted against her head and her eyes looked unrested. He stood up to walk back to the Gin Den.

“It's smotherin,” she said, as if she had just seen the center of the turmoil and could do nothing about it.

“Yes ma'am,” he said.

“He loves smotherin days,” she said calmly. “He'll just stay to dark if it don't rain, if the other man don't turn the boat over.”

He looked at his jeep as though it had just arrived, then looked down the car path to where it disappeared into the bottom. “Hope he don't,” he said.

“Decamping?” she said.

“Yes'm.”

“And where is it you're going again?”

“California,” he said, standing out in the grass. “My wife's out there.”

“What are you going to do?” she said, passing time.

“Go to work,” he said. “Construction. That kind.”

“You're not going to bring her back?”

“No'm,” he said, resting his toe against the step, watching her.

Mrs. Lamb elevated her chin as if she were catching some scent on the air and was diverted from the conversation. “Well,” she said, “come and go.”

“Yes ma'am,” he said.

She regarded him a moment majestically, then went back inside.

It occurred to him just as she was letting the door to that he could have asked her to pay him, gotten off the island while there was light and no rain, and made it to Helena before it was dark, where he'd feel better. But she closed the door and there was no chance now of reopening the conversation on the subject of wages, even though he knew she was in charge of disbursals, and once the old man arrived he would just have to go back and get it from wherever she had it squirreled away.

He walked across the yard to the Gin Den. Landrieu had limped into his house and not emerged. The puppy had sprung after the little jeep, but in a little while come back and gone to sleep under the steps. And there had been nothing since then but waiting. He took out the postcard and gave it a reappraisal. The laughing man in the sepia glimmer of daylight amused him. If he had a pencil, he thought, he'd write, “Be to home—Robard,” and stick it in the first chute he came to. And that might keep her until he got home again, some kind of promise.