Shiloh and Other Stories (30 page)

“This is nothing,” she says. “Two measly lines. I’m not exactly a star.”

“What if you were? Would you get an abortion?”

“What are you talking about? I’m not pregnant.”

“You said once you would. Remember?”

“Oh. I would if the baby was going to be creepy like those people on your bus.”

“But how would you know if it was?”

“They can tell.” Sabrina stares at him and then laughs. “Through science.”

In the early winter, the lake is deserted. The beaches are washed clean, and the water is clear and gray. Now and then, as they walk by the water, they hear a gunshot from the Land Between the Lakes wilderness area. “The Surrey with the Fringe on Top” is going through Edwin’s head, and he wishes he could
throw the
Oklahoma!
sound track in the lake, as easily as Laura Combs threw the Plasmatics out the window of the bus. He has an idea that after the play, Sabrina is going to feel a letdown too great for him to deal with.

When Sabrina makes a comment about the “artistic intention” of Rodgers and Hammerstein, Edwin says, “Do you know what Janis Joplin said?”

“No—what?” Sabrina stubs the toe of her jogging shoe in the sand.

“Janis Joplin said, ‘I don’t write songs. I just make ’em up.’ I thought that was clever.”

“That’s funny, I guess.”

“She said she was going to her high school reunion in Port Arthur, Texas. She said, ‘I’m going to laugh a lot. They laughed me out of class, out of town, and out of the state.’ ”

“You sound like you’ve got that memorized,” Sabrina says, looking at the sky.

“I saw it on TV one night when you were gone, an old tape of a Dick Cavett show. It seemed worth remembering.” Edwin rests his arm around Sabrina’s waist, as thin as a post. He says, “I see a lot of things on TV, when you’re not there.”

Wild ducks are landing on the water, scooting in like water skiers. Sabrina seems impressed by them. They stand there until the last one lands.

Edwin says, “I bet you can’t even remember Janis Joplin. You’re just a young girl, Sabrina.
Oklahoma!
will seem silly to you one of these days.”

Sabrina hugs his arm. “That don’t matter.” She breaks into laughter. “You’re cute when you’re being serious.”

Edwin grabs her hand and jerks her toward him. “Look, Sabrina. I was never serious before in my life. I’m just now, at this point in my life—this week—getting to be serious.” His words scare him, and he adds with a grin that stretches his dimple, “I’m serious about
you.
”

“I know that,” she says. She is leading the way along the water, through the trees, pulling him by the hand. “But you never believe how much I care about you,” she says, drawing him to her.
“I think we get along real good. That’s why I wish you’d marry me instead of just stringing me along.”

Edwin gasps like a swimmer surfacing. It is very cold on the beach. Another duck skis onto the water.

—

Oklahoma!
has a four-night run, with one matinee. Edwin goes to the play three times, surprised that he enjoys it. Sabrina’s lines come off differently each time, and each evening she discusses the impression she made. Edwin tells her that she is the prettiest woman in the cast, and that her lines are cute. He wants to marry Sabrina, although he hasn’t yet said he would. He wishes he could buy her a speedboat for a wedding present. She wants him to get a better-paying job, and she has ideas about a honeymoon cottage at the lake. It feels odd that Sabrina has proposed to him. He thinks of her as a liberated woman. The play is old-fashioned and phony. The love scenes between Jeff and Sue are comically stilted, resembling none of the passion and intrigue that Sabrina has reported. She compared them to Bogart and Bacall, but Edwin can’t remember if she meant Jeff and Sue’s roles or their actual affair. How did Sabrina know about Bogart and Bacall?

At the cast party, at Jeff’s house, Jeff and Sue are publicly affectionate, getting away with it by playing their Laurey and Curly roles, but eventually Jeff’s wife, who has made ham, potato salad, chiffon cakes, eggnog, and cranberry punch for sixty people, suddenly disappears from the party. Jeff whizzes off in his Camaro to find her. Sabrina whispers to Edwin, “Look how Sue’s pretending nothing’s happened. She’s flirting with the guy who played Jud Fry.” Sabrina, so excited that she bounces around on her tiptoes, is impressed by Jeff’s house, which has wicker furniture and rose plush carpets.

Edwin drinks too much cranberry punch at the party, and most of the time he sits on a wicker love seat watching Sabrina flit around the room, beaming with the joy of her success. She is out of costume, wearing a sweatshirt with a rainbow on the front and pots of gold on her breasts. He realizes how proud he is of her. Her complexion is as smooth as a white mushroom, and she has crinkled her hair by braiding and unbraiding it. He watches
her join some of the cast members around the piano to sing songs from the play, as though they cannot bear it that the play has ended. Sabrina seems to belong with them, these theatre people. Edwin knows they are not really theatre people. They are only local merchants putting on a play in their spare time. But Edwin is just a bus driver. He should get a better job so that he can send Sabrina to college, but he knows that he has to take care of his passengers. Their faces have become as familiar to him as the sound track of
Oklahoma!
He can practically hear Freddie Johnson shouting out her TV shows: “
Popeye
on!
Dukes
on!” He sees Sabrina looking at him lovingly. The singers shout, “Oklahoma, O.K.!”

Sabrina brings him a plastic glass of cranberry punch and sits with him on the love seat, holding his hand. She says, “Jim definitely said I should take a drama course at Murray State next semester. He was real encouraging. He said, ‘Why not be in the play
and
take a course or two?’ I could drive back and forth, don’t you think?”

“Why not? You can have anything you want.” Edwin plays with her hand.

“Jeff took two courses at Murray and look how good he was. Didn’t you think he was good? I loved that cute way he went into that dance.”

Edwin is a little drunk. He finds himself telling Sabrina about how he plays disc jockey on the bus, and he confesses to her his shame about the way he sounded off about his golden-oldie format. His mind is reeling and the topic sounds trivial, compared to Sabrina’s future.

“Why
don’t
you play a new-wave format?” she asks him. “It’s what
every
body listens to.” She nods at the stereo, which is playing “(You’re Living in Your Own) Private Idaho,” by the B-52s, a song Edwin has often heard on the radio late at night when Sabrina is unwinding, moving into his arms. The music is violent and mindless, with a fast beat like a crazed parent abusing a child, thrashing it senseless.

“I don’t know,” Edwin says. “I shouldn’t have said that to Lou Murphy. It bothers me.”

“She don’t know the difference,” Sabrina says, patting his
head. “It’s ridiculous to make a big thing out of it. Words are so arbitrary, and people don’t say what they mean half the time anyway.”

“You should talk, Miss Oklahoma!” Edwin laughs, spurting a little punch on the love seat. “You and your two lines!”

“They’re just lines,” she says, smiling up at him and poking her finger into his dimple.

—

Some of Edwin’s passengers bring him Christmas presents, badly wrapped, with tags that say his name in wobbly writing. Edwin puts the presents in a drawer, where Sabrina finds them.

“Aren’t you going to open them?” she asks. “I’d be dying to know what was inside.”

“I will eventually. Leave them there.” Edwin knows what is in them without opening them. There is a bottle of shaving cologne, a tie (he never wears a tie), and three boxes of chocolate-covered cherries (he peeked in one, and the others are exactly the same shape). The presents are so pathetic Edwin could cry. He cannot bring himself to tell Sabrina what happened on the bus.

On the bus, the day before Christmas break, Ray Watson had a seizure. During that week, Edwin had been playing more Dylan and even some Stones. No Christmas music, except the Elvis album as usual for Ray. And then, almost unthinkingly, following Sabrina’s advice, Edwin shifted formats. It seemed a logical course, as natural as Sabrina’s herbal cosmetics, her mushroom complexion. It started with a revival of The Doors—Jim Morrison singing “Light My Fire,” a song that was so long it carried them from the feed mill on one side of town to the rendering plant on the other. The passengers loved the way it stretched out, and some shook their heads and stomped their feet. As Edwin realized later, the whole bus was in a frenzy, and he should have known he was leading the passengers toward disaster, but the music seemed so appropriate. The Doors were a bridge from the past to the present, spanning those empty years—his marriages, the turbulence of the times—and connecting his youth solidly with the present. That day Edwin taped more songs from the radio—Adam and the Ants, Squeeze, the
B-52s, the Psychedelic Furs, the Flying Lizards, Frankie and the Knockouts—and he made a point of replacing the Plasmatics tape for Lou Murphy. The new-wave format was a hit. Edwin believed the passengers understood what was happening. The frantic beat was a perfect expression of their aimlessness and frustration. Edwin had the impression that his passengers were growing, expanding, like the corn in
Oklahoma!
, like his own awareness. The new format went on for two days before Ray had his seizure. Edwin did not know exactly what happened, and it was possible Laura Combs had shoved Ray into the aisle. Edwin was in an awkward place on the highway, and he had to shoot across a bridge and over a hill before he could find a good place to stop. Everyone on the bus was making an odd noise, gasping or clapping, some imitating Ray’s convulsions. Freddie Johnson was saying, “
Popeye
on!
Dukes
on!” Ray was on the floor, gagging, with his head thrown back, and twitching like someone being electrocuted. Laura Combs stood hunched in her seat, her mouth open in speechless terror, pointing her finger at Edwin. During the commotion, the Flying Lizards were chanting tonelessly, “I’m going to take my problems to the United Nations; there ain’t no cure for the summertime blues.”

Edwin followed all the emergency steps he had learned. He loosened Ray’s clothing, slapped his cheeks, turned him on his side. Ray’s skin was the color of the Hershey bars the man with the clubfoot collected. Edwin recalled grimly the first-aid book’s ironic assurance that facial coloring was not important in cases of seizure. On the way to the hospital, Edwin clicked in a Donovan cassette. To steady himself, he sang along under his breath. “I’m just wild about saffron,” he sang. It was a tune as carefree and lyrical as a field of daffodils. The passengers were screaming. All the way to the hospital, Edwin heard their screams, long and drawn out, orchestrated together into an accusing wail—eerie and supernatural.

Edwin’s supervisors commended him for his quick thinking in handling Ray and getting him to the hospital, and everyone he has seen at the center has congratulated him. Ray’s mother sent him an uncooked fruitcake made with graham cracker crumbs and marshmallows. She wrote a poignant note, thanking him for
saving her son from swallowing his tongue. Edwin keeps thinking: what he did was no big deal; you can’t swallow your tongue anyway; and it was Edwin’s own fault that Ray had a seizure. He does not feel like a hero. He feels almost embarrassed.

Sabrina seems incapable of embarrassment. She is full of hope, like the Christmas season.
Oklahoma!
was only the beginning for her. She has a new job at McDonald’s and a good part in
Life with Father
. She plans to commute to Murray State next semester to take a drama class and a course in Western Civilization that she needs to fulfill a requirement. She seems to assume that Edwin will marry her. He finds it funny that it is up to him to say yes. When she says she will keep her own name, Edwin wonders what the point is.

“My parents would just love it if we got married,” Sabrina explains. “For them, it’s worse for me to live in sin than to be involved with an older man.”

“I didn’t think I was really older,” says Edwin. “But now I know it. I feel like I’ve had a developmental disability and it suddenly went away. Something like if Freddie Johnson learned to read. That’s how I feel.”

“I never thought of you as backward. Laid back is what I said.” Sabrina laughs at her joke. “I’m sure you’re going to impress Mom and Dad.”

Tomorrow she is going to her parents’ farm, thirty miles away, for the Christmas holidays, and she has invited Edwin to go with her. He does not want to disappoint her. He does not want to go through Christmas without her. She has arranged her Christmas cards on a red string between the living room and the kitchen. She is making cookies, and Edwin has a feeling she is adding something strange to them. Her pale, fine hair is falling down in her face. Flour streaks her jeans.

“Let me show you something,” Edwin says, bringing out a drugstore envelope of pictures. “One of my passengers, Merle Cope, gave me these.”

“Which one is he? The one with the fits?”

“No. The one that claps all the time. He lives with a lot of sisters and brothers down in Langley’s Bottom. It’s a case of incest. The whole family’s backward—your word. He’s forty-seven and
goes around with this big smile on his face, clapping.” Edwin demonstrates.

He pins the pictures on Sabrina’s Christmas card line with tiny red and green clothespins. “Look at these and tell me what you think.”

Sabrina squints, going down the row of pictures. Her hands are covered with flour and she holds them in front of her, the way she learned from her actor friends to hold an invisible baby.

The pictures are black-and-white snapshots: fried eggs on cracked plates, an oilclothed kitchen table, a bottle of tomato ketchup, a fence post, a rusted tractor seat sitting on a stump, a corncrib, a sagging door, a toilet bowl, a cow, and finally, a horse’s rear end.

“I can’t look,” says Sabrina. “These are disgusting.”

“I think they’re arty.”