Richard Ford - A Piece of My Heart

“I guess,” he said.

“He was a drunk, now.” The old man reached down and jerked his white sock up and plowed at his nose. “He took five bone sawyers from New Orleans back in there on two, forgot to light the jet after he’d turned it on. The bone sawyers got there drunk, and they all sat down to wait for shooting time, and every one of them went to sleep and didn’t wake up. They found Mr. Buck’s cadaver on the bed with a doughnut in his hand. He musta eat that doughnut and went to sleep, and all the rest of them just sat out there at the table and put their heads down. They didn’t even get a doughnut.” The old man pawed his face and gawked as if it had been a great inconvenience.

“When did that happen?” he said, trying to envision Buck’s old face, and unable to work it back out.

“December, six years ago,” he said quickly. “I didn’t see the bastard for two or three days. He didn’t come to get my instructions. So I figured he was drunk, and went out to his house and there they all six of ’em was, and the place smelled like hell. There wasn’t no way to get it out of the boards. So I went out, after they had carried them all off, with a gallon of gasoline and put a match to the son-of-a-bitch, and burnt it down and plowed it under.” He smiled. “So there ain’t no more house. I put soybeans in there right where you lived.”

“What do you do with the hunters?” he said, still trying to fathom up Buck’s face.

“Put ’em in Minor’s house. He’s got sense to keep a fire lit. I don’t employ no more drunks.” The old man’s tiny blue eyes seemed to hold tears in them.

“Buck said he wouldn’ta drunk so much if you hadn’t brought him the whiskey,” he said.

“He’s a goddamn liar,” the old man shouted, rising out of his chair, his eyes snapping. He grabbed the backing on the chair and squeezed it until the cane cracked. “Buck was on the goddamned hooch the first day I seen the bastard, and it was hooch that killed him by muddying his goddamned mind so he couldn’t even remember to light a goddamned pilot.”

“He figured you give it to him so he couldn’t do anything else and so you wouldn’t have to pay him nothing. He couldn’t do nothin about it, Mr. Rudolph, but he knew it.”

“Buck went to California — you know that, don’t you?”

He watched the old man’s face twist out of one angry expression into another one.

“He went out there and learned how to be a soak and come back here and tried to turn it into a skilled trade,” the old man said.

“Some people ain’t lucky,” he said, watching the old man grow madder and madder, and feeling better.

“Some people don’t know when they’re good off.” His eyes flashed. “They have to fuck it up. What’re you doing here, Hewes — trying to fuck up something?”

“I wanted to look at you.”

“What the hell for?” The old man was hunched up underneath the bulb, glaring.

“If I had a good idea, I might just think about twistin your head off.”

The old man smiled instantly. “Old Buck might not of known very much, but he knew how to kill hisself good enough. You don’t even know how to do that, Hewes.” Rudolph’s smile broadened until he could see dark splotches on his gums.

He looked at the old man in the cone of scaly light, leering out at him, until he felt the urge to go away and come back in the night and burn the house down and everything with it.

He went back out through the kitchen all the way to the truck without stopping. But when he got in, he tried to think about Buck killing himself, waking up in the cold little house and looking out and seeing nothing at all, knowing that in an hour or a half hour the doctors would be there, and there was nothing to look forward to beyond sitting there with the old man while he stared at the fields and cried, until he himself went to sleep and the old man sat there mumbling half-awake about Edwina and Tarquini and how he let it get away from him. And he thought that might finally just have been enough to make him turn on the propane and go to sleep, that it was all just a kind of weariness, and the best thing to do was to go to sleep. He sat in the truck and tried to think what all that meant to him. And he sat for a long time, listening to the trucks hiss on the highway to Memphis, and decided that while it made him feel bad, it didn’t mean anything to him, and didn’t affect his life at all.

When he had worked in the switchyards at Helena, the old heads used to say that once the river had been where the town was now, and that the town was set up on the Kudzu bluff that overlooked the present town, and where the town of West Helena is now. They said one night the river simply changed its course, removing itself five miles to the east, leaving a thick muddy plain for the residents of the bluff to stare at and get nervous about. They said little by little the people on the bluff ventured down and started establishing themselves where the river had been, and building stores and houses. And after a while everyone moved down and they changed the name of the town to West Helena and called the new one in the bottom Helena. The men in the yard called this movement The Great Comedown, and swore that the town, by coming off the bluff, had exercised bad judgment and would have to suffer misfortune because, and it seemed to make good sense, the town now existed at the pleasure of the river, and they believed anything that owed to the river would have to pay, and when it paid, the price would be steep.

When he had told Beuna she gave him a pained look and said, “Ah, shit, Robard. We’re all dying sooner or later. Them assholes think they figured the reason. But I’m satisfied there ain’t no reason.”

He got to Helena at noon and drove straight down the bluff into town, the sky pale and hot, and kept straight on through, uneasiness brewing inside him. The streets were wove up with country people in town for lunch. He thought everybody who noticed the truck was noticing him, and anybody who noticed him was a threat. He watched the doors and the alley mouths, in case W.W. should suddenly come striding out of some beer bar and stand mooning at something in the traffic he thought he recognized but couldn’t figure why, but would if he had another minute to ponder it.

When he had shown up in Tulare, W. had gotten gloomy, as though some bad idea was trying to hatch out in his mind that he wasn’t going to let live because of the slowing effect worrying had on his fast ball. Instead W. had gone around moping and frowning and acting as if he had a quince in his underlip and couldn’t talk, but was still highly agitated. He had tried to stay where W. could see him anytime he wanted to, thinking that might dewire whatever W. was trying to figure, but couldn’t quite get clear.

In the hot grandstand he asked her if she thought W. might be thinking, and she laughed so hard her flesh had gone into violent quivers. “What with?” she said, in the meanest voice she knew. “His mind ain’t nothin but a baseball. Baseballs don’t get suspicious, far as I know.”

Except, he figured, watching people traipse back and forth across Main Street in the sunshine, W. might not turn out to be so altogether slow if he found out what was happening to his wife while he was screwing parts in BB guns. All those years when he could’ve been cashing big pay checks, but instead ended up building air rifles for three-eighty an hour and pitching Industrial League at Forrest City, might just have built a big reserve of unrelieved nastiness that he could start relieving if he could just catch somebody diddling his wife and figure out a way of getting a shot off.

The only alternative then was just to be smart and stay off . He had figured that out long ago. But waiting for the light, thinking everybody who walked in front of the truck was having a look at his license plate and a longer look at him, he could see just how much business he didn’t have idling around town. He would have to come after dark, collect Beuna, and run her to someplace where they wouldn’t have to jump up every time a bug hit the screen or start grabbing clothes for fear it was W.W. coming to pick up his cleats or leaving his pail before going off to hit fungoes. He figured he had to park the truck, back in to a wall, and not get near it until he had to, since every time he got in it he ran a risk, and every time he got in it with Beuna, he was pleading to get shot.