Paul Kavanagh - Not Comin' Home to You

Richard Sturdevant. That was the name. Richard Sturdevant of nearby Elbow Bend. No, that was wrong. Elbow Ridge. Richard Sturdevant of nearby Elbow Ridge.

Hell, his memory wasn’t so bad. His mind just had the sense to wash away those things that didn’t matter. And if anything turned out to be something he wanted to remember, he could always get it back in focus. Just a matter of knowing how, knowing the tricks for getting those memories where you wanted them. Richard Sturdevant of Elbow Ridge, that was his name, all right, and now he knew it as well as the man who would soon start carving it in a chunk of granite.

When the movie ended they sat still while the credits rolled. She had the aisle seat, and without looking at him she abruptly got to her feet and began walking toward the exit. He got up immediately and followed her. Something kept him from speaking to her or taking her hand.

On the street she turned to him and with a little cry threw herself into his arms. The intensity of her embrace stunned him. Weeping openly, she kissed him again and again, clung to him.

When her passion subsided he held her at arm’s length by her shoulders and looked into her eyes.

She said, “You don’t understand. Yesterday I walked out of the movie still all caught up in the movie, like being a part of it. And you were there. The only good thing that ever happened to me in my life.” She swallowed, wiped away tears with the back of her hand. He thought how small her wrists were; she was as fragile as a bird. “And today, I don’t know how to say it. Sitting there at the end of the movie, and you know how things have a beginning and an ending, and I thought, oh, here was the movie again, and I would walk out of the theater same as yesterday, still feeling like part of the picture. And I would turn around and you would be gone. I was so scared! And now I can’t stop crying.”

He took her in his arms. He would have to buy a handkerchief, he thought. And when she wept he could blot her tears with his handkerchief.

“I know it was silly, but I couldn’t get the thought to go away. A beginning and an ending—”

He took her hand. “Look,” he said. He drew a circle on the back of her hand with the tip of his forefinger. “No beginning and no end,” he said. “See? It just goes on, just keeps rolling along. See?”

“God, I love you.”

In the car she said, “What was Mr. Ferris like?”

A dumb cocky son of a bitch, he thought. “A real sweet old boy,” he said. “Kind of an old fellow, you know. A real Texas gentleman.”

“How did you meet him?”

“I was hitchhiking and he picked me up.”

“Hitchhiking?”

“That’s right.” He hesitated for a moment. “Well, see, as a matter of fact this was Mr. Ferris’ car. I was hitchhiking over in Louisiana and he was on his way home to Texas and he gave me a ride. Said he normally didn’t pick up hitchhikers but he was feeling poorly and had been driving all night and would be glad for someone to spell him behind the wheel.”

She nodded encouragement. He was into the story now, reliving in his mind the episode he was now describing, reliving it as he was describing it, as if it had indeed happened that way. Such lies were effortless; they molded themselves into a subjective truth, and it was simply a matter of speaking them aloud.

Except that he did not want to lie to her. To anyone else, yes, but to her he preferred to speak truthfully. And did so whenever possible, or lied obliquely, by omission. He knew, though, that there were things she could not be allowed to know yet. When the time came she would have to know everything, but first she had to get accustomed to him, had to become a part of him as he became a part of her, and until then a certain amount of lying was inescapable.

“Now about that time I would have been pleased enough sharing the back of a pickup truck with a dozen cages of fighting cocks, which I did one time in West Florida. Getting to ride in this car, and on top of that to drive it, was just a slice of heaven for me.”

“I can imagine.”

“So I drove and he sat and rested hisself. First I thought he was just tired, but he didn’t seem tired, talking a lot about how he made his money wildcatting for oil and all, and different stories about his life. And then he owned up that he’d been having these chest pains. Sort of like cramps in his chest, and then shooting pains up and down his left arm.”

“Oh, God.”

“Right. I thought just what you’re thinking now, that it was his heart, and I told him I was getting off that highway and getting him to the nearest hospital in a hurry. He said no, he wanted to go home. And then he started saying that home was all he had and that was where he wanted to be if he was going to die.

“I said that was the whole point, how there was no sense in him dying if he could get to a hospital, and then he admitted to how he had two heart attacks before and either he was going to have another one now or he wasn’t, and if he did, it was going to kill him as sure as hell.

“Well, just the same I took the next exit off the pike, because while he was talking he got this look of awful pain and made a sound I never hope to hear again, and I knew it was bad. I got off the highway and broke the speed laws until a cop came, and I explained what was happening and he gave me a motorcycle escort to the hospital. You want to know something? I don’t even remember the name of that town the hospital was in. The whole time, like, I was in a fog.”

“It must have been terrible for you.”

“Worse for poor old Mr. Ferris. I guess he was still alive when we got to the hospital. But he looked like death. They took him on a stretcher and put him on one of those tables with the little wheels and rushed away with him, and then I stood around drinking coffee and waiting, and I don’t know how long it was before one of the doctors came down and told me he was gone.”

He drew a long breath. He could feel it all now, pacing the floor in the waiting room, then turning at the doctor’s appearance and knowing without a word being spoken that the old man was dead. None of it had ever happened, but he could see and feel every fraction of it.

“So this doctor told me to have a seat; they would want to ask me some questions and get me to help them filling out a passel of forms. I was in a daze and all I knew was I wanted to be shut of that place. Gray-green walls and the smell of death all over. I went out and got in the car and just automatically started driving without knowing where I was or where I was going, just driving around and thinking.

“And then it came to me that I wasn’t going back to any hospital and filling out any papers, getting myself mixed up in anything. I mean, the old man was dead and wasn’t anything I could do for him. I was going to just leave the car, and then I thought, hell, why go and do that? Because Mr. Ferris had nobody, see. His wife had died a few years ago and his only son was killed in the war. ‘All the money I made, boy, and I don’t have anybody in the wide world.’ That was how he put it. And I don’t know how to explain it, but I got the feeling that it was meant for me to have the car. All his property was going to go to charities, and they would just be lumping this with everything else and auctioning it off, and I thought, well, why not use it to go where I’m going? Because the old fellow had taken a shine to me, you know. He was talking about giving me a job in his oil business. I don’t know as if I would have liked that sort of work, but at the time I acted enthusiastic for fear of disappointing the man.”

“I suppose you think it was wrong for me to take it.”

“No.”

“You don’t?”