Richard Ford - A Piece of My Heart

Except that back behind whatever little plans he had was at least the reliance that the place would hold him up long enough to do what he came to do, pay him, in a sense, for having been born there and having put a good-hearted attempt into staying when it was clear nobody like him ever should stay. And the moment he figured he had kept that reliance, in spite of all he had schooled himself to believe, he had had the strongest unfaltering feeling he had made a mistake somewhere, and that the thing he ought to do was turn around and go back without another say-so. Except it was way too late by then, and he couldn’t ever turn around now, not after getting this close. And it would all have to be worth it.

In Little Rock he ate breakfast and got back outside in the chill to the phone booth. He took off his shoe, got the letter, and flattened it on the shelf where he could see. He got Helena and wrote the number at the bottom of the letter just below where it said “This here is me,” and dialed the operator. The phone started ringing a long way off. Morning traffic came slowly. He watched two policemen saunter out of the café and stand looking at the truck, talking like they thought they wanted to buy it, then laugh at something and drive out of the café lot.

The phone was answered by a voice several feet from the receiver. “All right,” the voice said.

“Beuna?” He could barely get the word audible.

“What do you think?” she said. He heard the receiver strike something hard as if she were trying to hammer more words out. “Who is this?” she said, her voice drifting away then reviving. “W.W., it better not be your asshole trick.”

“It’s me,” he said, feeling the words stop up in his throat.

“I’m hanging up,” she said. He could hear her pounding the plunger. “Get the sheriff,” she said.

“It’s Robard,” he whispered. And everything seemed to slide back, like a whole panoramic world had moved into the background, leaving him in the calamitous center, alone and unprotected. A fishy sweat crept up in his palms, and his short hairs got stout.

“Who?”

“Robard.”

“Oh, shit!” she said, as if some foulness had happened where she was.

“Beuna?”

“Where are you? God!”

“Little Rock,” he said, switching hands and wiping his face.

“I’ll come meet you,” she said, all out of breath.

“No,” he said. “I’ll be there. Don’t do nothin.”

“Robard, I’ve been so awful,” she said, sobbing. “It’s giving me the shakes to hear you.”

“Don’t do nothin,” he said. His hands started trembling.

“Robard?”

“What?”

“I’m gonna come on the phone.”

“Don’t now,” he said.

“I’m going to, it’s just doing it.”

“Don’t, just don’t do that, goddamn it now!”

“I can’t help it, things comes on you.”

“No!” he yelled at the receiver.

“Robard?”

“What?”

“Can we go someplace? It ain’t got to be far.”

“We’ll see,” he said. His mind sunk into gloom, as if he were caught in some commotion he needed to control but couldn’t quite make slow down.

“Robard?”

“What?”

“I got my little bag?”

“I remember.” He could see the little bag, without knowing exactly what could happen with it.

“We’re going to have to go to Memphis to do it. There’s these rooms in the Peabody Hotel that’s got shower baths with eight nozzles that shoots you everywhere at once.”

“All right,” he said, gasping.

“Robard?”

“What?”

“I want to do it in that thing with you.”

“We will,” he said, wondering what you did. “I’ll call you.”

“W.W. ain’t here days. He’s workin at the BB plant and playing ball at Forrest City. He don’t come back until late.”

“All right,” he said, his mind whipping. “I can’t come today.”

“You got you some girl?”

“No,” he said, pressing his head against the window glass and leaning until the booth started to groan and he had his entire weight concentrated on just one cold spot of glass.

“Why can’t you?”

“Look, I’ll call you,” he said.

“You ain’t got to bite my head off,” she said.

“I got to go.”

“Do you love me?”

“I can’t talk about that.”

“You said ‘All right’ the last time. I remember.”

“What else you want me to say?”

“I don’t know,” she said in a small voice. “Say ‘All right’ again and that’ll be enough.”

“All right.”

A silence opened through the line.

“Just think about that,” he said, “and them shower baths.”

“God,” she said, moaning. “You’re going to make me come.”

“I’ll be there,” he said, wanting to get out.

“Robard?”

“Huh.”

“Is something the matter with you?”

“Nothing is,” he said. He folded the letter with one hand and stuffed it in his shirt pocket on top of the Butterfinger wrapper.

“I thought something was the matter,” she said.

“Everything’s wonderful,” he said.

“It is,” she said. “Don’t you think everything’s wonderful?”

“Yes, hon, I do.”

“I do,” she said sweetly. “Now that you’re here, I do. Everything’s been so awful.”

“I’m hurrying,” he said, unable to get his breath again.

“Oh, good God,” she said, and hung up.

He stopped in Hazen to buy cigarettes and walked toward where the old man kept his rooms. Hazen was fifty miles from Little Rock, a rice prairie town along the Rock Island, a white stone grain elevator by the tracks, a few cages and poultry houses catering to duck hunters, and a smatter of houses and mobile homes in the oaks and crape myrtles, and all the rest save a pecan orchard given up to the rice, planted in tawny, dented fields to the next town, twenty miles in all directions.

By the time he had come up from Helena eleven years ago and gone to work for Rudolph, watching his sluice gates in the summer and sitting out winters in the little shotgun house the old man had built as a warming house for the duck hunters, Rudolph’s troubles were all over with and there wasn’t anything left for the old man to do but sit up nights and wonder about it.

He crossed the Rock Island tracks and walked down the right of way through the suck weeds and across the gravel path to where he could see the white plank house with the old man’s rooms recessed in the dark corner under the south eave. He could remember the old man slumped on the broken shingle of his mattress, his undershirt catching the pale light in the room, coughing and snorting and staring across the empty floor, trying to think of something to say by way of important instructions, before he sent him back to the pump house to tend the gates. He could hear the landlady downstairs, rattling the tiny trays she used to coddle the old man’s eggs, while Rudolph rested his belly on his thighs, drifting in and out of sleep, waiting for the word to come into his head that he could give and that might make sense to somebody. Finally he would murmur something low out of the cavity of his chest, some gate to close or spillway to wind open for an hour or a ditch to inspect for seepage, anything to keep the help moving water from place to place. The old man would stop and snort and gaze out in the dark, and he would slip down the stairs, through the hot kitchen, and take out across the cold fields. Like that.

When he had first come up from Helena there had been, he remembered, a man named Buck Bennett who had worked for old man Rudolph, hired to run local fishermen off the reservoirs, patrol the roads, and see over the property when he wasn’t too drunk to find the deputy’s badge the old man paid for, or too drunk to keep his old jeep out of the bar ditches, where the old man promised it would remain, since he wouldn’t let a wrecker come on the property to pull him out, though he said Buck could come and look at his jeep whenever he wanted to if he had any doubts about its still being there.