A Piece of My Heart (34 page)

The wind began to post off the lake. He could see the sock sprung out in the airfield, the funnel showing east. The clouds had blackened and were revolving fast and moving the air in different directions through the trees and under the house. Elinor woke, winded, and relocated herself behind one of the pilings.

In the woods he began to hear the sputter of the Willys, and walked out behind the Gin Den to watch for them, the wind flooding his satin shirt, making it cold down his back.

All he could see at first were Newel's bare shoulders buckled over the wheel as if he were forcing the jeep toward the house with the strength in his arms. As they came nearer he could see Newel's face fixed in an odd, exasperated expression he hadn't seen before, as if Newel had left the old man in disgust and come in by himself. Though finally he could make out the old man's feet, nylon socks rolled over his ankles, hung side by side across the gate like two sides to a stepladder. And there wasn't any urgency. Newel drove the jeep to where he stood, gave him the same exasperated look, and slumped backward in the seat.

He looked over the sill and saw Newel's blue shirt draped over
the old man's face. Mr. Lamb's body seemed skinny, his wrists and ankles turned blue in the time it took to cart him back to the house. He had a keen urge to take a look, but looked up instead at the window and saw the glass was the color of swamp water and couldn't be sure Mrs. Lamb wasn't looking and would see the old man before she was ready.

The wind whipped under the jeep and tumbled out on the yard, making Newel grimace and get goose-pimply.

“What the hell happened to him?” he said.

“The old fart electrocuted himself,” Newel said, and rubbed his hands together under the wheel. “Monkeying with his goddamned box and the first thing I knew he'd grabbed the wires and knocked over. He said oops.”

“Said what?”

“Ooops.” Newel smiled pathetically.

He took an unhappy look at the window. “I'll get the nigger. Get him behind the shed.”

He trotted with the wind behind him to Landrieu's house and went straight inside. Landrieu was perched on the edge of his bed watching an enormous television set, and gave him a look of irreconcilable outrage, as if it were beyond all his comprehension anyone should tread into his one good safe place.

“Whatchyouwant?” Landrieu said, clenching the corners of the bedspread as if he wanted to pull the bed in on top of him. Over the bed was a large photograph of Landrieu, much younger, wearing a baseball uniform and smiling.

“He's dead,” he said loudly, stepping out of the wind, getting a whiff of Landrieu's room, which was warm and smelled like rancid bacon grease. The television was on too loud.

“Who is?” Landrieu stood erectly and tried to see past him through the door.

“Mr. Lamb,” he said over the TV, breathing the unhealthy air. “You gotta catch the old lady before she has a hissy fit.” The wind kicked the door out of his hand and slammed it against the wall.

Landrieu got very grave. His left eye closed and his cheeks thickened. “Where he at?” he said, still trying to lean toward the door.

“In the goddamn jeep.” He stepped out of the way so Landrieu could see where Newel had pulled the jeep around the Gin Den. Landrieu took a careful step to the door, looked out, saw nothing, then marched straight into the yard, stuffing his shirt down in his coveralls and sniffing. He walked across to the back of the jeep, reached in, and yanked the shirt off Mr. Lamb's head as if he expected the old man to pop up howling and was just going to go along with the foolishness. But the moment he saw the old man's face, his nostrils flared and he stood back and looked gray. The wind came up stiffly. Landrieu's hair shifted to the side of his head like a hunk of sponge, and he took another step backward and almost fell over his feet.

“What done happened to him?” Landrieu smiled queerly as if still not positive it wasn't a joke. His big television was blasting out into the yard.

“He took a collect call,” Newel said irritably, and jerked the shirt out of Landrieu's hand and put it back on the old man's face. “Get on inside and tell Mrs. Lamb. We'll carry him in quick as you tell her.”

Landrieu eyed them both, then the old man and the black box, which Newel had put in the back beside him, and tried to figure out just how duties were being assigned.
“Who gon'
tell her?”

“You,” he said, wishing Landrieu would just go on. “
We
can't tell her.”

Landrieu glared at him, hiked up his coveralls, and started legging it toward the house without another word, limping stiffly on his right leg. Halfway up the stairs, he stopped and looked back at them, then disappeared.

Newel leaned against the jeep, crossed his arms over his bare chest, and rubbed at his eyes, his flesh rigid in the wind.

Across the airstrip it was raining, like smoke creeping out of the woods. Behind it, the greenish sunlight narrowed the gap against the curve of the earth. The air smelled strong. He wondered just how long it was going to take the rain to cross the field and reach them.

He looked at Newel, then thought a moment. “What was it you said about my eyes? Something ignorant, I remember.”

“I forgot,” Newel said, looking away.

“No you didn't neither,” he said. He bit up a tiny piece of his lip.

“You gettin worried?” Newel smiled at him.

“Screw yourself,” he said, and stalked inside the Gin Den and let the door spring out in the wind. He sat on the edge of the bed and watched Newel through the open door and wished he'd never seen him.

Newel walked inside the doorway and leaned against the jamb and looked out. “I said there was something grieved about you.” The wind had begun to keen in the joints, and the tin seemed to expand as if it wanted to explode. “Grieved might not be the right word,” Newel said, wagging the back of his head against the chase. “Heartbroken might be.”

“Nothin ain't broke my heart,” he said, staring at the points of his boots, wishing Newel would disappear.

“I don't know,” Newel said. “You know more about it than I do.” He walked off from the doorway.

“I sure as hell do,” he said loudly, trying to decipher just what there could be to break his heart.

Landrieu limped down off the porch, eyes big as buttons, arriving out of breath, hiking at his coveralls and looking up at the house nervously. “She comin,” he said, and immediately made for the other side of the jeep and established himself so he could watch the screen door and the old man's body at the same time.

Mrs. Lamb came down into the wind wrapped in a black afghan, her hair strewn around her head and her mouth bent into a look of anger. She strode across the yard, acknowledging no one, and walked to the edge of the jeep and peered down. She looked at Mr. Lamb from one end to the other, studying him as if she wanted to be sure all his parts were there. When she wanted to look at his face she motioned to Landrieu, and he lifted the shirt off and the old lady regarded her husband even more carefully, without speaking to anyone. Her complexion seemed slowly to be losing its olive color, and the set of her mouth hardened as though
interior shifts were taking place she herself didn't know about but which had already corrected her outlook toward the rest of the world.

She stood back, girding herself in the afghan, appearing dark and immense, so he wasn't sure if under different circumstances he could have ever identified her as a woman. She eyed both him and Newel, as if for a moment she couldn't tell who was who, then settled her eyes on Newel, who was standing half naked in the wind.

“What has happened to Mark?” she said, a tremble in her voice that he thought sounded more like anger than anything else. The wind was blowing sticks and field debris across the yard and dislodging her hair more and more.

“I think,” Newel said, shifting off one foot to the other and keeping his bare chest covered with his arms, “he electrocuted himself.” He tilted his head faintly toward the old man's telephone.

She regarded the box indignantly, then back at Newel. “And you were there?” she said.

“Yes ma'am,” Newel said. “In the boat, and, ah, Mr. Lamb had the box up front and he just grabbed two wire ends by accident and fell backward. I don't think he took a breath.” Newel lowered his head and looked out the tops of his eyebrows.

Mrs. Lamb pinched her mouth and considered that awhile. “So he didn't say a word?”

“No ma'am,” Newel said. “Wasn't time for him to.” He snapped his fingers softly.

The trees in the belt of gumwoods where the old man had been hunting were woven together, bending toward the house. Branches were breaking off and dragging across the dooryard. The charge of rain set up in his nostrils and he could hear the thunder, like buildings falling in.

“And he said nothing at all?”

“No ma'am,” Newel said, rubbing his arms.

Landrieu secretly relaid the shirt on Mr. Lamb's face and tucked it under his head and backed off.

“T.V.A.,” Mrs. Lamb said, glancing at him before he'd even gotten reestablished. “Bring in Mr. Lamb, go and call Rupert Knox in Helena, say Mr. Lamb has passed away suddenly, then come back to me.”

She turned aside, paused, and regarded them both, the Gin Den bracking and buckling in the wind. “You men may go along,” she said imperiously, and was gone, rebinding her shoulders in the tails of her afghan, bending her head into the gale.

Landrieu frowned at the cold remains of Mr. Lamb, then frowned at the distance between himself and the first thicket of catalpa woods he would have to cross in order to reach the lake, and set his mind to working on a way out.

Landrieu watched Mrs. Lamb into the house, then turned his attention to him and Newel. “How I supposed to get him in that house, then me across that lake with all this?” Landrieu said, his eyes roaming grievously into the storm, then back at the two of them, awaiting an answer.

“Come on,” he said, and grabbed Mr. Lamb's heels and waited for Landrieu to take hold of his shoulders. Newel shoveled in under the old man's back, and the three of them put him up and ran with him across the yard and up the stairs just as the first drops hit the grass and popped the Gin Den roof.

They angled the old man through the kitchen, straight to the back, where the room was dark and warm. Mrs. Lamb had set up a vigilance in a chair beside the two-poster bed and had spread the afghan on top of the covers for the old man to lie on.

When they had him situated, there was a moment in the room when they all stood still and looked at nothing but Mr. Lamb as though they were surprised to find him in that state and wished the world he would relent and get up. He felt like the three of them were filling up every available inch of the room, breathing and squeezing the boards, straining the plaster on the walls. And he wanted out.

“Landrieu,” Mrs. Lamb said, and shut her eyes.

Landrieu's mouth gaped as if he was scandalized to be discovered
anywhere near where he was. “Yes'm,” he said, casting an evil eye at him and Newel and a quick one at the old man.

“Call Rupert Knox now.”

“Yes'm,” Landrieu grunted. He took a long backward stride and was gone, Newel behind him.

“Mr. Hewes,” she said with the same lasting patience, her face back out of the light.

Mr. Lamb's mouth came open several inches and stopped.

“Ma'am,” he said.

“Your wages are put on the supper table. Mark would've been grateful for your loyalty. Leave his pistol in the Gin Den.”

“Yes'm,” he whispered, and could see her face then in her own darkness. “Mrs. Lamb, I'm sorry about him,” he said. He could hear Newel and Landrieu tromping down the porch steps into the heart of the storm.

“He slept on the right end of the bed last night,” she said, bemused.

“Yes ma'am.”

“When it got spring, Mark always slept with his head to the foot. He thought it equalized his body's pressures. And when I woke up this morning he was sleeping with his head next to mine, and I said, ‘Mark, why are you sleeping to my end?' And he said, 'Because I went to bed thinking I was going to die, and I didn't want to be turned around like a fool. I had a feeling my heart was going to stop.' And I suppose it did. I've spent the day getting myself ready, and now I am.”

“Yes ma'am,” he said, looking around into the shadows, unable to make out the wallpaper. “I'm sorry about him,” he said.

“Not as much as I am, Mr. Hewes,” she said.

And he had to go that instant. He took a step through the dining room, grabbed up the money envelope, stapled and neatly written on in pencil, and headed out into the rain, thinking about situations that draw you in and wring you like a rag, and let you go in the rain when the use was out of you and you weren't good for anything.

Landrieu limped to the Gin Den wearing his yellow raincoat, inside of which his face looked cold as the night. He poked his head in the doorway and announced he was ready to go.

He got his gun from under the seat, laid it in the middle of the bed, put on his slicker, and stood in the door while Newel dredged up an old paint tarpaulin and draped it over his shoulders, then the three of them took off in the jeep with Landrieu driving and Newel humped in the front, scowling.

When they got to the overlook, Landrieu paid the lake a menacing look. The water was swelling and the camp was invisible, and through the rain he could see only indentations of shore willows.

Landrieu untied the Traveler, and the two of them sledded it into the water. Landrieu hauled the little All State out of the brush from under an anhydrous ammonia sack, and screwed it on the transom. He then started pinching the bubble and spinning the crank, and staring at the lake as if he were watching a vision of his own calamity.

“Push 'em off,” Landrieu shouted meanly, installing himself in the bow. And they heaved until the boat rode out of the mud and came under power. Newel hulked in under his canvas at the middle of the boat, rain skating his cheeks and wetting his pants. They both faced Landrieu, who kept looking at them malignantly, as if they were undercutting his ability to pilot the boat by simply being there, and when the bow slipped clear of the timber, he whipped the rudder bar to the side and spun the boat into the wind, knocking Newel flat off onto the floor.