Same Place, Same Things Page 2
When she stared away at a noisy crow, he stole a long look at her. The dress fit her pretty well, and if she were another woman, one that hadn’t just put her husband in the ground, he might have asked her for a date. A row of pale freckles fell across her nose, and today her hair was untied, hanging down over her shoulders. Something in the back of his mind bothered him.
“What’s your name?” he asked.
“Ada,” she said quickly, as though she had expected the question.
“I thank you for the sandwich, but I’ve got to get going up the road.”
She looked along the railway. “Must be nice to take off whenever you’ve a mind to. I bet you travel all over.”
“A lot travel more’n I do.” He bent down and began to pick up box-end wrenches.
“What you in such a hurry for?” she asked, stretching out her long legs into the dead grass. Harry studied them a moment.
“Lady, people around here wonder what the trees are up to when they lean with the breeze. What you think someone that sees us is going to think?”
He walked over to his truck, placed his tools in the proper boxes, row-hopped over to the engine, slung the flywheel with a cast-iron crank, and backed off to hear the exhausts talk to him. The woman watched his moves, all of them. As he was driving out of the field, he felt her eyes on the back of his neck.
* * *
That evening after supper in the Bell Pepper Tourist Court Café Harry looked up from his coffee and saw Ada walk in through the screen door. She moved across the hard-scrubbed pine floor as if she came into the place all the time, then sat across from him in a booth and put on the table a bottle of bright red strawberry wine. She had washed her hair and put on a jasmine perfume.
Harry was embarrassed. A couple of farmers watched them and Marie, the owner, lifted her chin when she saw the wine. He was at first grouchy about the visit, not liking to be surprised, but as she asked him questions about his travels, he studied her skin, which was not as rough as he’d first thought, her sandy hair, and those eyes that seemed to drink him in. He wondered how she had passed her life so far, stuck on a mud lane in the most spiritless backwater he’d ever seen. He was as curious about her static world as she was about his wandering one.
Conversation was not his long suit, but the woman had an hour’s worth of questions about Arkansas and Georgia, listening to his tales of mountains as though he were telling her of China or the moon. What he wanted to talk about was Missouri and his children, but her questions wouldn’t let him. At one point in the conversation she looked over at Marie and said, “There’s them around here that say if you hang around me, there’s no telling what trouble you’ll get into.” She put her hands together and placed them in the middle of the green oilcloth.
He looked at them, realizing that she had told him almost nothing about herself. “You said your husband was from New Orleans, but you didn’t say where you were from.”
She took a swallow of wine from a water glass. “Let’s just say I showed up here a few years ago. Nobody knows nothing much about me except I was kept back in that patch and never came in to drink or dance or nothing. Where I’m from’s not so important, is it?” She took a sip and smiled at him over the rim of her glass. “You like to dance?” she asked quickly.
“I can glide around some,” he said. “But about this afternoon—why’d you follow me with them sandwiches out in the field?”
Ada bit her lower lip and thought a moment. “Maybe I want to move on,” she said flatly. Harry looked out the window and whistled.
They took their time finishing off the bottle. She went to the ladies’ room and he walked outside, into the dark parking lot. He stood there, stretching the kinks out of his muscles. Ada came out with him, looked up and down 51 for cars, and threw her arms around his waist, giving him a hard kiss. Then she backed off, smiling, and began walking up the dark highway toward her place.
Oh my, he thought. Her mouth had tasted of strawberry wine, hot and sweet. Oh my.
Later that night he lay in his bed with the window open, listening to the pump engines running out in the fields, which stretched away on all sides of the tourist court for miles. They throbbed, as delicate as distant heartbeats. He could tell which type each was by the sound it made. He heard an International hit-and-miss engine fire once and then coast slower and slower through several cycles before firing again. Woven into that sound was a distant Fairbanks Morse with a bad magneto throbbing steadily, then cutting off, slowing, slowing almost to stillness before the spark built up again and the engine boomed back alive. Across the road, a little McCormick muttered in a ditch. In the quiet night the engines fought the drought, popping like the musketry of a losing army. Through the screen of his window drifted the scent of kerosene exhaust.
He thought of the farmer’s widow and finally admitted to himself, there in the dark, that she was good-looking. What was she doing right now? he wondered. Reading? For some reason he doubted this. Sewing? What—traveling clothes? Was she planning how to sell the patch and move back, as many women had done, to wherever she had come from? If she had any sense, he thought, she’d be asleep, and he turned over and faced the wall, listening to the springs ring under him. He tried to remember what he had done at night when he was at home, when he was twenty-four and had three children and a wife, but nothing at all came to him. Then, slowly, thoughts of rocking sick babies and helping his wife can sweet corn came to him, and before two minutes had passed, he was asleep.
* * *
The next morning the sky was as hard and expressionless as a pawnbroker’s face. At eight o’clock the temperature was ninety-one, and the repairman had already welded a piston rod in Amite and was headed south. When he passed the woman’s lane, he forced himself not to look down its rutted surface. He had dreamed of her last night, and that was enough, he thought. Times were so hard he could afford only his dreams. A half mile down the road he began working at pouring new babbitt bearings for an old Dan Patch engine. The owners of the farm left him alone so they could oversee a group of inexperienced pickers, and at nine-thirty, while he was turning the blower for the forge, she came out of the brush to the north, carrying a clear glass jug of lemonade.
“I’ll bet you’re dry,” she said, giving him the jug and a tin cup.
“You’re an awful friendly lady,” he said, pouring himself a drink and looking at her slim waist, her long hair.
“I can be friendly when I want to be.” She rested her hand on his damp shoulder a moment and let it slide off slowly.
They talked while he worked the forge. He tried to tell her about his children, but she seemed not to be interested. She wanted to know where he had been and where he was going. She wanted to know how it was to live on the road, what people were like in different places. “Do you stay in tourist courts every night?” she asked, wide-eyed.
By the time he had finished his repair, she had told him that she had just buried her third husband, that she had never been a hundred miles from the spot they were standing in, and that she didn’t care if she never saw another strawberry for the rest of her days. “Sometimes I think it’s staying in the same place, doing the same things, day in, day out, that gets me down. Get up in the morning and look out the window and see that same rusty fence. Look out another window and see that same willow tree. Out another and see that field. Same place, same things, all my life.” She heard a distant train whistle and looked off toward it, caught up in the haunting sound.
Harry Lintel was at a loss in dealing with unhappy people. He remembered that putting his big arms around his young wife years ago would stop her from crying, but he had no notion why this worked. Looking at the delicate hollow of Ada’s cheek, he felt sorry he didn’t know what to do for her. He wondered if she would take up with him in his truck if he asked her, would just go off with him up the highway to Tennessee or Georgia, wherever the next drought was needing him to fix engines or windmills. Would this heal what was wrong?
; After a local freight train racketed by, three men in overalls drove across the track, got out of their pickup, and began telling him about a big engine in a dry field six miles west, and how nobody could get it to run all week. The men ignored the woman, and as the repair man packed his tools and dumped the forge, he watched her walk off. She went south, away from her place, along the dirt lane that sidled up to the railroad, keeping her thin brown shoes out of the heaped-up dust ridge. After he loaded the truck, he cranked it and headed not west, along the route given him by the three men, but north. Turning into her lane, he bumped down along the ruts to her farmhouse. He walked to the back of the property and noticed her berries blanched by the sun as if they’d had kettles of boiling water poured over them. Returning to the house, he opened the fuse box nailed to the rear outside wall and discovered that one fuse was blown, even though it was a special heavy-duty type. He used his pocketknife to pry off the faceplate and saw where a switch wire cut into the circuit and ran from the bottom of the box through a hole into the house.
He found the front door unlocked. Walking through the house, he noticed there was little furniture: only a set of dark varnished chairs, two small, rough tables, and a rickety, curled-up sofa. The windows were dirty. In the kitchen he found the wall switch that activated the pump, and, peering close, he saw that it had been turned on. He was sure that many farms with electric pumps also had inside switches. But surely the man would have killed the circuit before he went out to work on the thing. And then he remembered that he hadn’t seen any switch out in the field.
He sat down at the oilcloth-covered kitchen table and squinted out the front window. He saw a rusty fence. Looking out a side window, he saw a willow tree. My God, he thought. He turned to look through the rear window, into a field. Near the broken tractor was a freshly dug mound of dirt. He put his face down into his hands and shook like a man who had just missed being in a terrible accident.
During the next ten days he worked the whole parish. Wild animals came out of the woods looking for water. Bottoms of drainage ditches cracked open and buckled. He saw pickers brought out of the field with heatstroke. The woman found him only twice, and he was polite, listening to her tell him about her nights and what she saw through her windows. She wore the same dress but kept it clean and ironed. Once, she asked him to come over for supper, but he said he had work to do past dark.
At the tourist court he avoided the café and went to bed early, putting himself to sleep by thinking of his wife, painfully, deliberately. He remembered the kindness of her meals in their kitchen and the fondness of her touch, which was on him still, teaching him.
On a Thursday morning, before dawn, he was awakened by a drumming sound to the northwest. At first he thought it was someone at the door, but when the sound rolled down on the parish again, he knew it was thunder. By first light the rain had started in earnest, and at eight o’clock he was still in his room, staring out at sheets of wind-tortured spray welling up in puddles along the highway—three inches at least, and more to come, by the looks of the sky. It was time to move on.
In the café, for the first time Marie had no repair calls for him. He paid up, gave her a hug, and headed out north in his groaning truck, rainwater spilling off the taut new tarp covering the back.
The highway followed the railroad up through a series of small towns, and he made good time despite a traffic of small truckloads of produce and an occasional horse-drawn farm wagon. He felt light-hearted for the first time in days, and whistled as he steered around slower vehicles navigating the rainy road. There was something good about getting out of this section of the country, he felt, something good about pointing his headlights toward Jackson or Memphis, where he would hole up in a boardinghouse and read a big-city paper until the weather reports would tell him where he’d find lots of dust, heat, worn-out pumps, and busted windmills.
About noon he pulled over at a café south of McComb. Walking to the back of the truck, he saw that one of the tarp ropes had come undone. When he raised the cloth to check inside, he saw the woman lift her face toward him, her eyes rusty and dark. “When I heard the rain start on my roof, I knew you’d be pulling out,” she said. “You can go somewheres. I can’t.”
He stared at her for a long time, trying to figure what to say. He looked up and down the red-dirt highway lined with spindly telephone poles and then at the café, which was closed, he realized, the front door padlocked. Finally, he climbed in and sat on a toolbox lid next to her in the oily dark. “You can’t come along with me.”
“Don’t say that,” she said, putting her arms loosely around his neck. “You’re the only person I ever met can go where he wants to go.” She said this not in a pleading voice but as a statement of fact. “I can go with you. I’ll be good to you, Mr. Lintel.”
He looked at her eyes and guessed that she was desperate for his freedom of movement but not for him. The eyes seemed already to be looking ahead, looking at a whole world passing by a truck window. “Where you want to go,” he said at last, “I can’t take you.”
She pulled her arms away quickly. “What you mean by that? You just going to toss me off on the side of the road like a wore-out machine? There’s something in me what needs to get away with you.”
Harry Lintel leaned toward her and took her hands, trying to re member the ways he had once brought solace to his wife. “If I could help you, I’d bring you along for the ride,” he said. “But I can’t do a thing for you.” He half-expected her to cry when he said that, but she only shook her head.
“You’ve got a heart like a rock,” she told him.
“No, ma’am,” he said. “I loved a good woman once, and I could love another. You can’t come with me because you killed your old man.”
Her eyes seemed to pulse, and what softness lingered around the corners of her mouth disappeared into a flinty expression of fear and desperation.
He reached for his wallet. “I’m going to buy a ticket and put you on the southbound. You can walk home from the station.”
She grabbed a bill from him before he offered it, then straightened up, throwing an arm in back of her as if she was searching for the handle of her cardboard suitcase. Harry stared at his empty hand for a moment and turned to climb out into the drizzle. He heard the music of a tempered wrench being picked up, and then a bomb went off in his head, and he was down on the floorboards, rolling in cinders and wire, his arms and legs uncontrolled, his eyes letting in a broken vision of the woman standing over him, looking down the way someone might examine a stunned fish. “I’ve never met a man I could put up with for long,” she told him. “I’m glad I got shut of all of mine.”
His head roared like a forge, and he tried to rise, his eyes flickering, his arms pushing him toward the woman’s upraised fist, where his biggest box-end wrench glimmered like a thunderbolt. The blow was a star-giving ball of pain, and he felt the tailgate in the small of his back, the world going over like a flywheel, his face in collision with gravel and clay, a coppery rill coursing through his nose and mouth. The only thing in his head was the silver ring of a tool, and then the exhaust of a four-cylinder engine pulling away, fading into a clash of gears at the top of a hill, and then, for the longest time, nothing. Somewhere a cow bellowed, or a car passed without stopping, or wind blew through the grass around him like knowledge through an ear.
Near dusk he woke to a dove singing on the phone wires. He wondered where she would sell the truck, to what town she would ride on the train. It didn’t matter. She was a woman who would never get where she wanted to go. He was always where he was going.
One eye began to work, and he watched clouds, the broken pieces of the world hanging above like tomorrow’s big repair job, waiting.
Waiting for the Evening News
Jesse McNeil was running a locomotive while he was drunk, and he was doing a fine job of it, charging up the main line at fifty with the chemical train, rattling through the hot Louisiana night like a thunderstorm. He watched t
he headlight brighten the rails to mile-long silver spears sailing through the sandy pine wastelands of the parish. Another nameless hamlet was rolling up in the distance, one in a row of asbestos-siding-and-tin communities strung along the railroad like ticks on a dog’s backbone. He had roared through it a thousand times with a hundred cars of propane and vinyl chloride and had never so much as touched the air brake, had only to blow a signal for the one crossing, and then was gone like a gas pain in the bowel, discomfort and noise for a moment, soon forgotten by the few hundred folks who lived in wherever-it-was, Louisiana. He reached for the whistle lever in the dark cab and missed it, remembering the half-pint of whiskey he had gulped behind the engine house thirty minutes earlier. He was fifty years old today, and he wanted to do something wild and woolly, like get half-lit and pull the chemical train, known by enginemen as the “rolling bomb,” up to the Mississippi line on time for a change. He could make this run in his sleep. After he got the train stretched out and up to the speed limit, all he had to do was blow the damned whistle. The train was on tracks and couldn’t get lost or wander off among somebody’s cows.
Jesse looked over at his brakeman, who was watching for automobiles on his side of the train. A highway followed along the tracks and at least once every trip a noodlehead with the windows rolled up and the radio blasting would turn in front of the engine at a crossing, notice the train, maybe mess in his britches, and then shoot on across to safety. Jesse reached again for the whistle lever and pulled it, sending a five-chime-whistle note crashing off all the tin and asbestos for a mile around. The gravel crossing winked in the moonlight and was gone, the train invaded the town, and Jesse looked out his window at the black air, listening to the hollow thunder in his head and laughing at how free he felt, how nobody cared what he was doing, how lost he was in the universe. He was the anonymous taxi driver of ethylene oxide and caustic soda, chlorine and ethyl antiknock compound, a man known intimately only by his menopausal wife and the finance company.