In An Arid Land (21 page)

All morning, while Helen washes clothes and cooks a roast, Millhouse watches the sky as dark promising clouds move in from the west, obliterating the sun. Sprinkles come and go, hissing as they strike the hot engine and, after he puts away the mower, pattering among the leaves of the trees. But it never really rains maybe tonight, or tomorrow and when Gloria and Roger and Josh arrive, Millhouse is waiting for them on the porch. The car stops, a door opens and here comes Josh, his blond hair flying, running toward Millhouse. He throws himself into his grandfather's arms, screaming, "Papaw, Papaw," and his little hand smacks Millhouse on the jaw, reviving for just a moment the pain of the wound in the old man's mouth.

Millhouse at the pier, sitting beside Josh, who flicks the pole to make the orange cork bob on the brown water.

What I know I can tell in one word
furniture
. That's my line; I sell furniture on commission at a small retail outlet in an old clapboard neighborhood of Houston. Our customers are poor, most of them, blue-collar types who've more than likely averaged a job a year and been repossessed once or twice. Some are convicts we require cash of them but most, I'd have to say, are what my grandmother called the salt of the earth, people trying to get by on the little bit that God Almighty and the economics of this Great Land of Ours have seen fit to give them.

I've known all kinds. They come in looking for security, I call it, the security that the buying of furniture can provide. Feathering the nest, my wife Sherry likes to say. They're settling in, fixing a home. And when we can make a deal, sign the papers, they go out happy, laughing, talking like you're their best friend or their big brother. It's a good feeling to send people on their way after giving them what they want.

It's not always that way, though, and I know it far too well. Thirty-one years I've beat the linoleum at Green's Discount, worn out so many pairs of black wing tips that I long ago lost count, and I've seen sorrow, smelled the hurt, heard the pain in voices. It still amazes me what people show of themselves to a perfect stranger. I guess the nesting instinct is strong in people, and the wanting. Wanting, I've observed, and loss, too, these are what lead to sorrow and the hurt of living. When I think of this well, it's a clear memory that comes to me: of the short skinny man with a violent temper and of his tall fat wife whose eyes teared up so easily.

And then there's Sherry, and Darlene, and Gene Junior, of course, dead in the war.

"We're just looking," said the husband when they came in the first time. It was a Friday; Friday's the day the big truck comes and I recall the floor being crowded with hampers of new merchandise. I had met them at the glass doors up front. When a couple comes in, you hustle to get there ahead of the other salesmen.

"Look all you want," I said and fell into pace behind them. "My name's Gene. Gene Harris. Give a yell if I can be of help."

She gave me a nod, but he didn't. They sauntered up the center aisle past the appliances washers and stoves gleaming white and copper and harvest gold they paused for a moment, glancing at each other, and then she pulled him into Furniture.

"We've got a big sale on," I said.

"That so," said the man coldly, but the woman smiled for me, showing off a big gold tooth sparkling right up front.

"Care for some coffee?" I asked. If you can get them holding onto something then nine times out of ten they're yours for good.

"No, thanks," he said, trying to pretend I wasn't there. The woman smiled again though. She was young, very early twenties at best, with the kind of skin that brings to mind rich dairy products such as buttermilk. I don't mean to be cruel, but this woman was large, more than overweight. Shoulders like huge Christmas hams, forearms like Popeye the Sailor's and a pair of breasts so large she could have fed the whole state of Texas.

"How's about you, ma'am. A cup?"

"Well . . . " she began but quickly hushed herself and the husband gave me a glare the likes of which I hadn't seen in a while. So I excused myself and slinked off to the sales counter, sort of a corral at the center of the store, where I waited, watching those people. They'd linger here and there, inspect a chair or a coffee table, move together, discuss it. It was apparent they were country types. He was lean, wiry like a fighting cock, and at least ten years older than his wife I'd say by the way he held himself and the fact that his face had obviously begun the downward slide of real maturity. He was so short it seemed his wife spoke into a hole in his blue work cap.

Darlene's chair scraped against the floor and I felt her next to me across the counter. Darlene was the head office girl back then, a pretty, puffed-up, made-up redhead with more pearly teeth than a mattress has springs. She took payments, kept the books, actually ran the store in all practical matters.

"Looks like you got one there," she said, eyeing the people as they meandered through the French provincial and into the Early American. We had a bright new Early American suite from Bassett on the floor and I was hoping they'd stop and take a seat, bounce on the cushions, get a feel. We both watched.

"They're nibbling, sure enough," Darlene said

"I don't know," I said. "I think they're lookers."

"Naw, she's wanting. I can tell."

"How's that?"

"When you're that young, you're always wanting."

Darlene was smiling at me in her appealing way. We were having a time together just then, and once or twice a week I'd follow her home at the end of the day, and we went out on a regular basis for lunch or a cup down at the drug store.

"What's it like being that young, I mean. You remember?"

She gave me a look teasing with insult and slapped my arm.

"You know I didn't mean anything," I said.

"Take it easy." Her voice was husky too many Chesterfields.

"Well, then tell me," I said. "What's it like?"

"Good, mostly. But not always. You're always wanting. Look at her. She wants it so bad it's dripping from her eyes."

I looked but I couldn't see it.

"Just what is it she wants?"

"Besides furniture, you mean?"

"Yeah, that's what I mean, Miss Psychology Professor."

"Now that I don't know," she said, twisting up her eyebrows. "Love, or a child maybe . . . who knows what anybody really wants."

We were quiet for a while, both of us thinking, then I said, sort of whimsical, "Would you want to be that young again?"

"Sure, I'd want to be young again."

"Even with all the longing and the wanting?"

"Even with that, sure. Wouldn't you?"

"Even with the acne and everything stirred up all the time?"

"Sure," she said. "What's got into you?"

I didn't answer. I said, "And what would you do different?"

She grinned, showing lots of teeth, showing off her heart.

"I'd marry you," she said. Then she slapped my arm again and laughed. She could be a hard woman, had to be hard to get by in a life that had left behind two husbands and a boyfriend that knuckled the fire out of her one night and later went to jail for it. But all of that was long ago and there were times when I really felt for Darlene. There were times when I loved Darlene.

"How's about coffee later?" I said and her red-painted lips crested into a smile.

Given what happened, I couldn't get my new "customers" off my mind. So at supper that night I told Sherry, my wife, all about those people, the McCarthy's. I told her how I had sashayed back over toward them, calling out above the lamp shades, "That couch fits you just like a new hat," and how they both stood up then, acting flustered like they'd been caught shoplifting, acting like for some reason they weren't good enough to sit on our furniture.

"Ready to take it home?" I said.

The man snapped, "No no," but his wife, running her eyes over the pretty fabric, cooed to herself and to me, "Sure is nice, comfortable too," and he gave her a hard look, a cold look. I told Sherry how the woman cowered then, if you can say that a woman of that size could ever really cower, and how the husband more or less strutted back and forth with his hands in his pockets like he was thinking too much about something, and how he suddenly stopped, giving me the same hard cold look he'd given his wife a moment before. I mentioned how he'd done an about-face then as sharply as a soldier in formation and how he marched toward the front, weaving through the furniture and the appliances until he placed his hand on the door. That's when he glanced back, expectant, as if his wife were a dog who came on that kind of simple, stern command.

"He likes to take his time about such things," the wife said. And I'd swear her lashes were batting back tears.

"Yes, ma'am," I said.

"And we've had a death in the family, you see."

"Yes, ma'am," I said, trying to be gentle.

"Well," said the wife, "I better go," and she started off after her husband. "We may be back," she called to me. Smiling, she showed me that gold tooth for just an instant.

I told Sherry what the woman had said and how the husband had given the wife a heap of nasty grief when she got to him at the door, and how he grabbed her arm as if she were a naughty child and spoke right into her chin while he pulled her by the elbow down to his level. I explained how he yanked her out the door and how she stumbled and how her hand came up to her mouth, the backs of her knuckles just barely touching those heavy soft lips of hers as if she were gasping, as if she'd just witnessed some horrible accident in the street.

Darlene and I and everyone else watched then as the husband dragged his wife by the arm out to a pickup waiting in the lot. And we watched even as the truck pulled away, coughing out black smoke so thick that anybody could see the man needed a ring job.

I said, "Are you sure you'd want to be that young again?"

Darlene just grinned and lit up a Chesterfield.

I didn't tell Sherry about my conversation with Darlene I never mentioned one to the other but I did tell her about the strange feeling I'd had the rest of the day after those people left the store and how I hoped they wouldn't come back.

"They're probably an unhealthy credit risk anyway," she said, mopping up the last of her gravy with her home-made bread.

I got whimsical again. "Imagine being that young."

She swallowed and said, "No way."

"How's that?"

"Not for me," she said, leaning back and reaching for a Winston. "I'm quite comfortable with the ripe old age of forty-five. All's I want now is for Gene Junior to get himself home from the war, find himself a pretty wife and fill up the house with grandkids. It's a powerful longing in me. I can't wait to help 'em do up their house."

I said, "You wouldn't want to be a sweet twenty-one again?"

She looked at me. "You can have it."

"Even with all the energy you had?"

"Even with all the energy."

"Even with all the good times?"

"What good times?"

This caught me short, but we smiled at each other.

I said, "We had some good times, didn't we?"

"If we did," she said, "I sure can't remember any of them."

"And just what do you remember, Ms. Hardass Housewife?"

Her sage look came on then, mouth lifting slightly at the edges, eyes going to wrinkled slits. She exhaled and a lungful of bluish smoke drifted over the table in my direction. She said, "I remember wondering for three hellish years if you'd ever come back from your war. And then when you did all's I remember is a lot of screaming and slapping and the slamming of doors. And I remember going home to Mother and you coming in drunk and mean late at night and acting like you wanted to beat hell out of me and Mama having to put herself between us to keep you from doing it." Her eyebrows rose, dropped. "That's what I remember."

"But it changed, of course," I said. "Didn't it change?"

She shrugged. Then she got up and started clearing the table, adjusting the Winston with her teeth so that it poked out of her unpainted lips at an angle. She moved around our old Dixieland dinette with ease, a kind of grace that had developed in her only within the past few years. I watched her move, heard the faint rustle of material across her hips, a mother's hips.