Percival Everett - Big Picture - Stories

Wes said nothing, just tore into his meal, keeping his eyes cast down at his busy plate.

“How’s your car?” Joseph asked.

Cora was not ready with an answer. Her voice broke as she searched for words. She landed on, “It did fine today, for a while, but the noise started again.”

“The squeaking you described?” he asked, not really paying attention to her, but tossing a sidelong glance toward the boy.

“Yes,” she said.

He nodded and mumbled that he would tend to it later. He asked Wes to pass the bread. After a silence he asked, “By the way, where’d you go earlier?”

Her response was ready and clear and its suddenness pulled Wes’s eyes from his fork to her. “I was at Amy’s house, helping her choose wallpaper for her kitchen.”

“She doing it herself or having somebody come in?” Joseph buttered his roll.

“Having somebody come in,” Cora said. “And of course I picked up some groceries.”

The moon was unrelenting as Joseph stared out the bedroom window. The cornbread globe, just shy of full, sang a glow of restful light, but Joseph was up cursing it. He went to the window and looked down at the bay mare in the pasture. He couldn’t climb back into bed. He couldn’t lie between the sheets with that woman; he couldn’t have her foot brush his leg or her hair tickle his shoulders. He pulled on his pants and went down the stairs, outside, and across the yard to the corral. The night was cool and not very dark. He took up a handful of earth and looked at it. He knew that if he threw it as hard and as far as he could, all of it would still fall on his land. He let the dirt sift through his fingers.

The next weeks saw a steady rain that had come late, but had come. The pastures were soft and the horses stayed near the trees in the corner of the pasture. Cora’s car was gone more and more. He had seen her car parked in the same place in town several times. Refusing to acknowledge that a blind eye is just as vulnerable as one that sees, he went about his work, rising early, falling silent in the evenings. He could see her car in his sleep, through the windshield of his truck, the rain rolling down it, the wipers counting cadence.

Finally one day he greeted her with the same face he had for weeks and told her that he knew. She smiled, a cutting, wicked smile, Joseph thought, and his calm faded, his eyes narrowed and hardened. His brain spoke to her, telling her to feel his pain, the hurt of the betrayal, telling her to open his shirt and see the gaping wound.

Cora’s smile went away and she was afraid.

Joseph did nothing, said nothing. “Wes,” he called to his son.

Wes came into the room.

“Come on, let’s ride into town.”

Wes looked at his parents, one then the other. “Okay.”

Joseph did not offer Cora another glance. He followed Wes out the door and through the drizzle to the truck. It was dusk as they stopped at a diner.

Wes waited until they were seated and had ordered before he asked, “What’s going on?”

“Your mother and I are having some problems.”

“No kidding.”

Joseph looked at his son, not knowing what to say or whether he should say anything. “She’s been cheating on me, Wes.”

The boy looked at his father.

“She’s been with another man.”

Wes shook his head and looked out the window. “I don’t believe you. Who?”

“Doesn’t matter.”

The waitress brought the food.

Wes looked at his chicken-fried steak and moved it with his fork. “So, what’s going to happen?”

Joseph shrugged, and drank some coffee.

Joseph and Wes came home to a dark house. They said good night and Wes went upstairs to bed. Joseph sat in the kitchen for a few minutes, then climbed the stairs to the room he shared with Cora, and found her in bed. He sat on the edge of his side, holding his hands, his elbows resting on his knees. He heard her stir and sit up.

“Joseph, we have to talk about this,” she said, her voice looking for steadiness.

He wanted something to happen, wanted to talk, but he didn’t have the stomach for it. He stood up.

“Don’t leave,” she said.

He turned to face her and she switched on the bedside lamp.

“I’m not leaving, Cora,” he said, “not this ranch anyway. And I’m not going to ask you to leave. But I’m not asking you to stay.”

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“Yeah, well, maybe this will blow over. I don’t know.” He turned and walked away from her, but stopped at the door. “I don’t want to know who it was.”

“It didn’t, doesn’t mean anything,” she said.

Without looking at her, he said, “Oh, it means something.” He rubbed a hand over his head.

She said, “I want you to talk to Wes.”

“And tell him what?”

Cora switched off the lamp and lay back down. He could tell her eyes were open, fixed on the ceiling. He could feel her not looking at him.

Joseph stepped away, leaned against the wall outside his room and looked at his son’s bedroom door. Talk to him? He didn’t know what to tell him. He didn’t know what to tell himself.

It was hot again. Joseph was just about to climb the ladder and find out what was wrong with the vapor lamp on the barn. His stomach had felt uneasy all morning and now there was a pain in his gut. It had been giving him trouble for a couple weeks, but he had waved it off. He swayed a bit, thought about the dizziness, and passed out.

He awoke to the drawling voice of the retired doctor from Tennessee who lived down the road. The obtrusive space between his teeth made him hard to look at. Joseph sat up, and noticed he had been moved to his bed. His wife stood at the foot of the bed.

“Just a bug, eh, Doc?” Joseph said.

The doctor shrugged. “I can’t say. You need to go in and ‘get looked at,’ as we say.”

“Thank you, Dr. Wills,” Cora said.

“Yeah, thanks, Doc,” Joseph said, not looking at the man but out the window.

Once Cora led the doctor out of the room, Joseph wrapped an arm across his tender middle, and stood up despite the pain. He went to the window and looked out. Wes was on the ladder fixing the light. Wes looked back at the house and saw his father. The boy climbed down and came running across the yard to the house.

Wes came upstairs and gave Joseph a hug.

“Thanks for fixing the light.”

“I knew you wanted it done.” He studied his father. “Shouldn’t you be lying down?”

“I’m okay,” Joseph said.

Cora appeared, and stood in the doorway. Wes ignored her.

Cora sighed and left.

“Don’t treat your mother like that,” Joseph said.

“Yes, sir.”

Joseph rubbed the hair on his son’s head roughly. “Since when am I a sir?”

“I don’t know.”

“Go see what you can do to help your mother while I lie down for a while.”

Wes left the room.

Cora made an appointment for Joseph with the same doctor her father had gone to some months earlier. He drove into the city for the preliminary examination, which was short enough but ended with an invitation to return.

“Didn’t they say anything?” Cora asked when he returned. “They must have said something.”

“What do you care?”

Wes stepped into the kitchen just in time to hear his father’s words.

“Just that I have to come back,” Joseph said.

“Not even a hunch?”

He shrugged. “Said something about it maybe being an ulcer.” He sat at the kitchen table to eat the cold meat sandwich she had made for him.

“That’s what it is,” she said. “You hold things in. And you don’t eat right, Joseph.”

He nodded and looked at his son. “I guess I do,” he said, turning to look into his wife’s eyes.