Samantha Hunt - Mr. Splitfoot

“You need sugar?”

“No, thank you.”

Mr. Bell climbs out. “What’s become of our young man?” Closing the door behind him. “Nat!” he calls, ducking into the office for sugar.

Ruth reaches into the front seat. The cushion where Mr. Bell had been sitting is warm. She carries that warmth to her face, leans back again.

Mr. Bell returns shaking two packets of sugar like maracas, like the limbo lady. Ruth is sitting directly behind him now so that she can hide. He faces forward, prepares his drink, takes a sip, issues a yum of approval for the watery, sugary brew. “I want to ask you something.”

She tightens.

He doesn’t turn. He pinches his nose quickly. “Are you familiar with the concept of wabi-sabi ?”

Ruth watches the back of his head. “More bacteria?”

“Nah. It’s Japanese. It’s where a thing can’t be beautiful or perfect without an imperfection. Say, Nat’s teeth. The front two are crossed. Just the littlest bit wrong. Yes? They’re the snag that a person gets hung up on. Yes? Caught?”

“You mean my scar?”

“Yes. Perfection scribbled out or the imperfection that makes you, me, anyone perfect and complete because it includes the truth of our mortality. Get it?”

Ruth rests her head on the glass. She imagines Nat’s teeth tearing into raw meat, a bear in a cage. She imagines Nat’s teeth tearing into her scar. “Why?”

“I’m telling you I’m a faulted man who’s done bad things. Many bad things. But”—he turns—“I’m telling you with the hope that you might still be my friend.”

“Well,” she says. “That depends. What is it that you did?”

I WALK LIKE A COWBOY.Ruth waddles, making fun. “I need to sit down.” My belly’s more bomb than baby. I’m splitting in two. One way or another it’s going to tear me up. We find a seat across the road from the canal. The ground’s cold. “We should have gone someplace sunny.” She tilts her face up to the sun, milking any warmth from the pale disk behind a flat cloud. A corner of Ruth’s flannel blooms red. “What’s that?” She touches the ground beneath her. Her palm opens, wet and red. “Blood.”

We look up to see if it came from the sky. We look down and around. Ruth stands for a better view. I don’t know how we missed him, five or six feet away in the grass, his face turned into the dirt, and behind him — down a small embankment, through a path of broken pines and laurels — is the car that spit him out. The vehicle rests on its back like an insect. A pair of feet in tube socks are stuck out the upside-down window.

“Jesus.” I lift myself up.

Ruth runs to him, touches the man’s foot, spine, neck. She rolls the body onto its back. He’s an old man. His face lifts to the sun as well. His skin runs with blood and bits of road. Ruth touches his forehead.

The tube socks move. Someone’s alive in the car wreck, whispering. Ruth points me down toward the vehicle.

“Hello?”

The whispering stops.

“Do you need help?”

The legs pull back inside the window like a turtle’s neck. Whispering begins again as if this thing hiding inside the car isn’t a victim of the crash but the demon that caused it. I crouch for a look inside. “Do you need help?”

The tube socks belong to a middle-aged woman, the man’s daughter perhaps. “Yes.” She’s crouched on the ceiling beside the overhead light. She wears a man’s windbreaker over a light summer dress. “I need a ride home. My mother will be worried.”

She’s my age, maybe even older. “We don’t have a car.”

“No car.”

“No. We’ve been walking.”

“OK.” She climbs out the window feet first. “OK.”

The woman has lost her shoes. I just say it. “Your father’s dead.”

The woman walks slowly over to the body. “He’s not my father.” She kneels carefully beside him in the blood. Like Ruth, she touches his forehead.

“Who is he?”

“Just a kind man who gave me a ride home.” There’s silence for as long as it would take a pot of water to boil. She touches his cheek, wipes blood from his chin. “OK. Let’s go.” The woman scrambles up the embankment to the road. “It’s not far.” She’s oddly accustomed to death.

“To the hospital?”

She stares at my belly. “For you?”

“No. You.”

She looks down at her arms and legs. All are still attached. “I don’t need a hospital.”

“But we should get some help for him.”

“It’s too late to help him.” She sets off moving a good deal faster than Ruth’s and my customary gait. “I need to get home. My mother will be worried,” she says again. So we leave the guy there. We follow the woman.

I’ve never seen a dead body before.

After a mile or so, I ask, “Can we rest a moment?”

“Of course.” The woman stands on the shoulder. Ruth helps me to the ground. “You’re going to have a baby?”

I nod. In the gutter there’s a running shoe that’s sprouted some grass. The woman chews on her fingers. Ruth throws pebbles up in arcs. We watch them fall. “I’m sorry. About your friend.”

“Yes. You said.” Our rest doesn’t last long. “It’s not far.” She lifts under my armpits. Ruth takes one of my elbows. My joints are rubbery, and at times it seems a thigh could slip from my hip. I’d teeter on one leg until my belly tipped me forward. Ruth waits without complaining. She’d have to speak to complain.

“There it is,” the woman says after a bit.

“What?”

“End of the line.”

It’s a motor lodge. On the sign there’s a bosomy woman dressed in a hula skirt, shaking it underneath a limbo bar, though there’s nothing tropical about the place. It looks like one big plain cinder block.

“Thanks,” she says. “I’m OK from here.” The woman pulls a key from her pocket and lets herself in to one of the motel’s rooms, turning once to wave goodbye. “The office is right over there,” she says, directing us with her chin.

Ruth and I don’t discuss other options. We check into the motor lodge.

When I tell the young woman at reception about the accident, she nods. She already knows. “It’s happened before. It happens all the time.”

“It does?”

“Yeah. That road can be bad in the rain. Dead Man’s Curve. So. You guys staying the night?”

The paperwork is an old-fashioned index card. The young woman gives us a room key attached to a wooden spoon: #4. Ruth pays her, making exact change. I purchase a beer from her and drink it in our parking spot since we don’t have a car to put there. I’m sorry, baby, for drinking, but I need a small something after seeing that man’s face.

There are two double beds with polyester covers, darkly patterned and abstract in design. There are two metal luggage racks, a television, and a small table between the beds. There’s a framed print on the wall of a woman walking beside a river. In the picture the banks are covered with red and orange flowers. In the picture the sun is shining.

I draw a warm bath and climb in. A few curly hairs skim the surface. They are not mine. Gross. Who do they belong to? I fish them out aboard the paper soap wrapper.

I hear Ruth flick through the TV channels, stopping on a music program. I dip both hand towels into the bathwater, draping one over the baby and one over my eyes.

I don’t feel her. I don’t hear her, but in a few minutes when I lift the towel from my eyes to wet it again, Ruth is sitting on the toilet tank staring at me.