Ann Beattie - Distortions

“What?” he asks.

She looks away, through the wheel. “I just wanted to see it. I’ll bet lots of people are driving there to look.”

“Sure,” he says, relieved that she’s talking quietly. “We just found the wrong road is all.”

She smiles at him and starts to drive again, carefully. Bob Nails begins to feel better, thinks about suggesting a drink. Which way is she headed … what’s closest?

“But we’ll find it,” she says evenly. “Is it this road?”

Bob Nails and Jeannie leave the bar. It’s almost midnight — Jeannie’s mother won’t stay awake any later with the babies, and she refuses to sleep in the spare bed. Bob Nails never liked Jeannie’s mother. She’s been at his mother’s house almost constantly since the funeral, when his father died after his second heart attack. Bob Nails drives the car because Jeannie’s drunk.

“Would you be mad if I still wanted to see where the accident was?”

“Why do you keep calling it an accident? She was murdered,” Bob Nails says.

“What’s the big deal about being so precise?”

“You’re the one who always thought you had to understand everything in detail,” Bob Nails says.

“You’re drunk. You always want to fight when you’re drunk.”

“I don’t know what I want. I’m sorry you’re having a bad time. I should of planned something.”

He looks over to see if she agrees, but she’s just smiling prettily. Her face is pretty even if her hair is messed up.

“Then if you don’t have anything planned why don’t we do what I want to do?”

“Hell,” he says, accelerating, “I’ll find the goddamn place.”

He makes a turn and drives a few miles. This is all familiar ground — where he and Tom Dutton used to hunt pheasants when they were young. He tries to remember what he read in the newspaper. Peterson’s old farm, he guesses. Around the corner he coasts to a stop.

“Okay,” he says.

“Where?” she asks, sitting forward.

“Must of been here somewhere …”

He turns the car onto the shoulder and the headlights illuminate a patch of field.

“Quiet,” she whispers, sliding close.

“Quiet? What for?”

Jeannie lights a cigarette and tosses the match into the ashtray. “How do they think it happened?”

“I don’t know. They figured she picked up a hitchhiker and he shot her.”

“She was riding along the road,” Jeannie says, before she hears his explanation, “and she picked up a man who stabbed her in the neck.”

“I thought he shot her.”

“Bang!”

Bob Nails’s hands tighten on the wheel. “What the hell was that for?”

“If you were her you’d be dead.”

What’s she doing now? What’s she starting to laugh about? But she isn’t laughing. She’s just the way she was. He shivers, feeling her finger on the back of his neck. She shivers too. Something is moving — an animal, trying to get away from the headlights. He’s not sure this is where it happened, because it could have been the other side of Peterson’s farm. He thought there would be a NO TRESPASSING sign, but there isn’t. He thought it was an animal, but it isn’t. It’s Wesley Dutton.

“Wesley?” Jeannie whispers. “What’s Wesley doing here?”

Bob Nails opens the car door. “Hi,” he says.

“Hi,” Wesley says.

It’s cold outside. Hunching his shoulders against the wind, Bob Nails walks into the field. Wesley has on his winter coat, a hat, and a scarf double-knotted at the throat. His hands are dirty and he’s holding something out to Bob Nails. Pictures. He’s been putting them in the ground, he tells Bob Nails. Why? Wesley tells him about a man in a movie who misses a dead lady and goes to her grave to put his picture in the ground there. Wesley’s eyes fill with tears. He sits and rubs his hands over the dirt. He says he just found out from people talking at the train station. They said it was Peterson’s farm.

Bob Nails gives Wesley a hand and tells him he’ll take him home. Wesley squats to pick up the remaining pictures.

“Hello, Wesley,” Jeannie says when he climbs into the back seat.

“Good evening,” Wesley says.

“Why were you out there?” she asks.

Wesley smiles politely. In a moment his expression changes. He remembers. He hitched a ride. He smiles triumphantly.

They ride the rest of the way to Wesley’s house in silence. When they pull up, it’s dark inside.

“Don’t worry, Wesley,” Bob Nails says, opening the car door. So Wesley’s mother won’t hear the door slam and wake up, Bob Nails drives off holding it shut. At the end of the block, closing the door, he notices his watch and sees that it’s two in the morning.

“She’ll stay with them. She just tells me to come back to bluff,” Jeannie says.

He passes her house and keeps driving. After a while he realizes that he’s driving in circles. He’s tired, there’s something wrong, and he’s not sure what. He drives fifteen more miles to a hotel and gets a room for the night. Once in the room, they talk. Even though they stay awake for hours, they can’t understand, can’t agree on anything for sure.

He oversleeps and goes to work hours late, leaving Jeannie at the hotel. She said she was going home in the morning, but when they woke up they both knew she wouldn’t. Bob Nails is exhausted. He begins to explain why he’s late to Sam. When he tells Sam about finding Wesley Dutton on Peterson’s farm, and what Jeannie thinks, Sam’s mouth drops open. His mouth drops open even before he hears what Jeannie thinks. He tells Bob Nails to get the hell out in the garage to fix the car on the lift before the customer shows up and the job isn’t done.

Bob Nails is surprised when the police show up at the garage. Later, Sam tells him that he was too dead tired to know right from wrong, so he decided to take care of it for him.

*

Bob Nails’s mother tells him on the telephone that Wesley was sent to the state hospital. According to Mrs. Dutton, when they were taking him away, Wesley just smiled politely and tried to help the detective into his coat, and the detective misunderstood and thought Wesley was trying to take it. The detectives exchanged looks. Bob Nails says he’ll listen to the rest of it when he comes home for his things. He hangs up and paces around the room, remembering the story his mother told him years ago about what Wesley did when he heard a TV newscaster say that Mrs. Kennedy put her wedding ring in her husband’s casket. He went to the graveyard the next day, and someone asked him what he was doing there. Wesley said he had his mother’s diamond ring and that he had to give it to someone who was dead. The man took the ring away and called Mrs. Dutton, but Wesley tried to fight, so the man held it on his tongue until Mrs. Dutton arrived.

Jeannie wants Bob Nails to buy her an engagement ring. That’s always on his mind, and Wesley Dutton is always on his mind. It’s quiet out on the street, quiet in the room. Jeannie’s sulking because he won’t drive to Peterson’s farm. She said it would be exciting, like criminals returning to the scene of the crime. They aren’t criminals; can’t she understand that?

He looks out the window. He’s started to hate the cheap room, the lousy furniture, the plastic lampshades. It will be better when they move to an apartment. The room is too cold. Jeannie sits wrapped in her coat, reading the same magazines again. His father died reading a magazine; when his mother came into the room his face was all red and he was staring at the page, but his mother knew he didn’t look that way from anything he read in Consumer Reports .

“Let’s get a drink,” he says.

“You know,” she says slowly, “there never was any such movie.”