Country Hardball (9 page)

Instead he told her about the man in the car. How he gave up just before the light turned to green.

“That movie you were talking about,” she said. “
Apocalypse Now
. We saw it in Mrs. Mitchell’s class. That boat captain. He wants to turn around and get this girl to shore and the guy won’t let him. The Martin Sheen guy shoots the girl and says keep moving.”

“Yeah.”

“So?”

“So what?” He’d turned onto the highway, heading to the hospital.

“So how do you know whether to shoot the girl and keep moving or just sit in the car and wait for the light to change?”

“I don’t know.” He took a breath. “You just know, I guess.”

“When my dad died,” she said and stopped. Opened the box. Looked inside.

“You never said what was in the box.”

“Okay.”

“Okay what?”

“Okay, I’ll tell you. See, my dad never died. That’s just what my mom said. He left. This is the box that my momma kept
her
momma’s wedding ring in. My grandma’s. In this box.”

“So your mom wants the ring.”

“I’d imagine.” Then she held the box in front of Randy, shook it so he could hear it was empty. “No ring.”

“I don’t get it.”

“When my daddy left, he took all our shit. Sold it, my momma said. Even my grandma’s wedding ring.”

“Jesus.” Randy wanted to pull over, get a hold of her and pull her close. Say, “I knie said she&#x

He took the last Oreo out of the jar, walked back to his chair in front of the television. After just twenty minutes, he was feeling like an expert on the secret Soviet aircraft of World War II.

Behind him, down the hall, he could hear his wife and a couple of women laughing, coughing for the past hour. He tried to calculate how many more perms she’d need to give before they could pay off the hair-dryer chair and the shampoo-basin chair he’d had to drive up to Little Rock to get. His unemployment check barely covered the gas money. Still, women liked to look nice. And his wife had been the most popular stylist at Shear Ecstasy in Magnolia before they decided to cut back her hours. Leaving and taking her clients with her.

Maybe they’d get the chairs paid off and he could redo the living room. Get rid of the paneling. Paint it. Peel it off. Put up some of the wainscoting they were talking about last night on that remodeling show. A chair rail.

He knew they’d never have the money for that. He’d had to spend most of what they had in the bank for an alternator he’d picked up at the salvage yard. Now the battery was acting up again. And his truck was coughing like one of the pistons was going. He’d pulled the plugs. Checked the valves and figured it was a problem with the pressure on one of them. He’d look again in a little bit to see if there was something he could do, but it was like last fall when they’d had the leak over the kitchen. Sometimes all you can do is look for a pot big enough to catch the water.

Maybe the beauty shop would take off. Maybe ladies would drive from an hour away to have their hair done. He’d heard a woman at prayer meeting say her sister the other side of Waldo had opened a shop and people all the way from Texarkana had regular appointments. Said she was going to put in a tanning bed come the fall. He’d listened to her story, nodded at the right spots, but he knew some people were just born lucky. And some weren’t.

Something happens, the engine on the mower blows or you spend three straight days crapping blood, and you count back to the last bad thing. The tree through the porch. The rotten tooth. The burned-out relay in the septic tank. You ask yourself how other people do it. When it got so tough. How anyone ever gets ahead. Just a little, you say. Just a hundred bucks in a coffee can you won’t have to go into in a month when something else goes wrong.

He reached across the table for the hospital bill. Call the 800 number in who the hell knows where to set up a payment plan within ten days or they’d turn it over to collections. He knew the drill. Tell them you’ll pay twenty bucks a month for the next hundred years and they’d leave you alone. Which was all he really wanted.

He turned the envelope over and looked at the phone number he’d written down. He knew he shouldn’t have done that. Just act like you’re writing it down. Say, “Uh-huh. Got it. Thanks.” Then hang up. Don’t keep something like that around. That kind of temptation is just asking for trouble.

On the television, an image of Alexander Novikov faded in and out of airplane factories as the Soviets started anything,” he said.. hometimes building their forces. He’d watched the video a few times already. Knew the story of the air force commander who was stripped of his power and sent to a labor camp, then found his way back into favor.

Grady looked for connections in everything. Delsie wanted a mirror for the beauty shop, so he looked around Magnolia, Emerson, El Dorado for just the right one. In a thrift store he found one sitting on a VCR and remembered what Delsie had said a few days before. How she would have to miss her stories if women wanted appointments in the early afternoon. She’d miss
As the
World Turns
and
Guiding Light
. He’d said they could get another television and put it in the shop, but she said she had to concentrate on her work.

“Besides,” she said, “we don’t have the money for another TV.”

“We can find the money somehow,” he said, but they both knew they couldn’t.

He got the VCR for her as a surprise. A late anniversary present, he told her. When he set it up to record her stories last week, he found the Soviet aircraft tape wedged inside. The long black ribbon had pulled from the casing when he tried to free it. He had to cut it loose, then piece it back together, losing a few minutes about the Siege of Stalingrad about a half hour in.

He mouthed the numbers written on the envelope, stared at Novikov on the screen, looking for a connection. What was it like when everyone turned on you? What was it like in the labor camps? What was it like when you came back?

He set the envelope back down on the table, saw cookie crumbs on his shirt. He pushed himself out of the chair, walked back to the kitchen, opened the fridge, took a quick swig of milk, and put the container back. Looked for a toothpick to work something loose.

He heard one of the women in the back of the house cackle, “As if,” and thought about how much they’d have to raise to buy a trailer from Herschel’s place out on the highway. Couple thousand, probably. Then what? Lay a foundation. Run some current. She’d want sinks, of course. No, best just to keep the beauty shop in one room of the house for now. The women could laugh and jabber all they wanted. Could sneak across the hall and use the bathroom. He remembered he was supposed to empty the trash in the bathroom before she saw her first client.

He pulled a couple of plastic grocery store bags from under the sink, then walked down the hallway. The women were laughing about something, so he stopped by the beauty shop door to listen.

“Delsie,” someone said to his wife, “you really have just done a lovely job here.”

He heard his wife say, “Thanks.”

The woman went on, talking about how successful the shop would be and how wonderful it was not to have to drive all the way into town now.

He heard his wife say his name, say that he’d gone up to Little Rock to get the chairs and how he’d spent the weekend painting and repainting the room. Three coats of Sunburnt Sky, with Lakehouse Lilac for the trim. “Wouldn’t have thought,” she said, “but he was right. The colors make the room pop.”

Grady caught himself smiling like an idiot. They’d had their trouble, especially after he got laid off. But he felt things coming back together for him and Delsie. He’d read in a magazine that when your wife says, “I feel like we’re not connected” the last thing you want to do is tell her she’s wrong. When
pu hadck they first got married twenty years before, he’d have pointed to things they’d done that week. “Didn’t we go out to dinner?” or “Didn’t I tell you this morning how sweet you are?” Things like that to prove her wrong. When he’d gotten the VCR and mirror in El Dorado, the woman there had thrown in some magazines for free, so Grady took them home, read them like they were passed down from the Almighty. Maybe there was something in there he was supposed to read. Why else would she give them to him? Meant to be. There’d been some magazines for men, mostly old sports issues. One of the magazines, one about relationships and diets, had an article about seven ways to keep the romance alive. He didn’t read the whole thing, but he skipped to the box with each idea numbered. The third one said that when your loved one says he or she doesn’t feel connected—and he couldn’t imagine a man saying that, but figured the magazine had to be politically correct these days—you don’t want to prove him or her wrong. Just say “I feel that, too” and then suggest doing something together.

So when Delsie said that, he said he felt it too, and that they should have a picnic on the hill by the old barn.

Soon they were working on plans for her shop and he was helping her pick out paint and putting it all together. And it felt good to be working again.

Grady leaned on the washing machine in the hallway, listening to the women talk.

“Well,” another one said, “that’s good to hear. I was beginning to think he was good for nothing.”

Then the women with his wife laughed. The women in the beautiful room.

The first woman, Grady recognized her as Birdie Cassels, said that maybe he could get a job as a painter.

“Like Picasso?” one of them joked.

“No,” Birdie Cassels said. “Like one of those homosexuals on the TV.”

Then the women laughed.

He set the bags down and listened for his wife, but she didn’t say anything.

• • •

He took a couple bags of trash around to the back of the house where the women had parked their cars, then tossed the bags into the bed of his truck, bungeed down the tarp.

Birdie Cassels’s car was blocking him in. The shop was on the other side of the house, so he couldn’t even knock at the window without walking around the house, feeling like an ass.

She’d brought the car to the church homecoming a few weekends before. A Platinum Cadillac DTS, the replacement for the DeVille line, she’d explained to everyone. “The largest luxury car they make,” she said. People lined up like it was a tour of Hot Springs, and she drove a few people at a time around the loop and back. Finally, Delsie and Berta Mae were the only two who hadn’t gone and had to give in.

“Very nice,” Delsie had said. “You’re lucky to have a nice car like that.”

Birdie Cassels laughed. “Oh, sugar. Lucky? My poor Jed works fifty hours a week at the office so we don’t starve to death. And I just had to get a new car. You know how unreliable cars can get when they turn two or three years old.”

Delsie just nodded and walked down to the dessert end of the tables to find Grady and tell him about the car.

Grady stood behind his house
pu hadck while the women were getting their hair done and wondered what sort of protective coating the Cadillacs came with. Then he unzipped his jeans and peed along the passenger’s door, cleaning the grime off the shining silver.

• • •

Grady had been standing at the corner of the house for a few minutes, wondering whether to go back inside to get the envelope with the phone number on it. Wondering if it was the right thing to do. He’d written it down, so maybe it was meant to be, he thought, knowing it wasn’t. Knowing it was probably one of those moments you look back on years later, thinking if just this one thing hadn’t happened, how different it would all be. Like the months after the problem at the Dixie Mart that time. If he’d just backed out. Said it was a bad idea. Or if he’d seen the woman and her kid in time. Or if they’d been five minutes later.

He hadn’t thought about that night in years. Hadn’t had reason to. He’d had a good job and a clean record since then. A good home. A wife who loved him.

Grady heard the rattle-pop of tires on gravel, looked up to see Cleovis Porterfield coming down the road, clouding out exhaust and dust, turning his ’69 Camaro into the drive and stopping. Grady waved at him, so Cleo got out of the car, walked toward the house.

Cleo nodded to the back of the house and the makeshift parking lot. “Delsie kick you out of the Tupperware party?”

Grady felt something in the back of his mouth, then gave up trying to get at it with the tip of his tongue. “Beauty shop.”

“Thought she quit.”

“Relocated.”

“Ah,” Cleo said, nodding. “Speaking of relocating—”

Grady swallowed. “Yeah. I got the message. Just haven’t called him back.”

“You gonna?”

“Dunno,” Grady said, leaning back against the house, feeling the bricks pinch through his thin T-shirt. His lucky shirt from the Muleriders’ win at the Aztec Bowl back in 1990. He’d gone to some night classes that year at SAU and followed the team. Went to some games as though he belonged. This last year hadn’t been too good for the team. Even the Baptist college had beaten them. Hell, hadn’t been too good for a lot of people.

“Good money in it for us,” Cleo said. “For you.”

“Yeah. I know about the money. Just trying to stay on the right path these days, you know.”

Cleo walked around to the other edge of the driveway, looked out past the fence where acres and acres had been clear-cut by the loggers. “Everybody needs money, Grady. Unless you’re just going to get your money from Delsie.”

“That supposed to mean?”

“Nothing. Just saying she brings in the money, what’s left for you to do?”

“You know I been looking. Had an interview last Tuesday but the woman called to say they already filled it before I even got a chance to talk to the man.”

“Yeah. That’s the way it goes.”

Grady nodded. That is the way it goes.

“It’s just a job,” Cleo said. “Just one little favor for Sawyer. And it ain’t like you don’t owe him.
pu hadck”

Grady straightened up. “Everybody owes everybody these days.”

Cleo nodded. Everybody owes everybody.

“Besides,” Grady said, “it’s not just a job, Cleo. You know that. If it was just a job he’d get some other guys to do it.”