Richard Ford - A Piece of My Heart

Until that ended, after three years, without even a notice to old man Rudolph, or a message. He had slipped off with Jackie, under the nappy lights, blue and gauzy as if a chill fog had settled in between them, driving through Little Rock after midnight, all the way to Bishop, where he felt enough distance was opened between him and the shack and the fields and the whole life there that it would be too hard to go back. And when that distance was finally made, he felt safe.

He spooned coffee into the Thermos and poured water until it steamed in his face. He corked it, jostled the bottle, and snapped off the light. He walked back to the front room, sat by the door and listened for Jackie, for her breathing, for any sign, a groaning in the bed staves to indicate she was there, since she had gone without a word and closed herself in the room and never made a sound once the light was off inside. He sat, the chair squeezing in the dark, and waited, listening for the frailest sound. He could feel the breeze channel underneath her door, the gentian running east through the house back to the desert. He stood and walked to the window ledge, picked up his paper sack of rolled-up clothes, and went to the screen and looked across the plateau toward Bishop, dissolved in the night, the road to the mountains invisible except where a pair of elongated lights twisted down off the valley.

He thought that if your life was filled with beginnings, as he had just decided today that his was; and if you were going to stay alive, then there would be vacant moments when there was no breathing and no life, a time separating whatever had gone before from whatever was just beginning. It was these vacancies, he thought, that had to be gotten used to.

He lifted the latch and walked across the porch toward the truck. Jackie lay asleep, hearing him walk across the boards and the wet grass, heard his shoes in the gravel, and the nail settle of its own weight back into the eye of the latch, heard the truck heaving and hissing. And she lay still, unwakened by the sounds, unaware he was leaving, aware only of the sounds and of the cool air rippling the sheet and flowing out under the doorway into the room where, if she had awakened suddenly and sat startled in the bed, she might have called him, thinking he was there, sitting in the darkness smoking, and believed that all this had never happened.

Early in the morning he had lain awake in the gray light and let it all revolve through his mind again carefully.

Twelve years ago he had lain under the eaves at Helena in the little rose-wallpapered room, alert to the ticking through the cypress timbers, hearing the weight on the stairs, the coarse shuffing through the door, and turned his head toward it but couldn’t see.

“All right,” he said, startled, a heavy sweet smell riding the darkness. “I can’t see you now. Who is that?”

“It’s me,” she said, letting her quilt subside and releasing the gardenia smell into the room. “I can’t wait no longer.”

Her knees bent into the bedding as he was trying to climb to see her in the dark, and only saw her breasts rolling toward him and disappearing, and her arms taking him up and holding him until, when he tried to talk, he could only say, “Honey, honey.” And that was all.

In the morning she stood and kneaded her eyes and swung her arms through the dusty light, her underarms pale and dark at once. The bed smelled sour.

“Robard,” she said, stretching her fingers through her damp hair. “You wake up now.” (Though he was certainly awake.) She stared at him, her lips everted, and he strived to move his eyes, inch by inch, toward the painful sloping sunlight.

“I got a riddle,” she said.

“A what?” he said, smelling the sheets all around him.

“How come the birds wake up singing every morning?” She smiled and set her teeth edge to edge.

“What?” he said, not hearing it right.

“Cause,” she said, sticking her full belly out and smiling. “They’re happy to be alive one more day.” She laughed out loud.

And all at once her expression changed and she looked at him as if she had never seen him before and was surprised to find him lying there. And he had seen paleness in her eyes, some disappointment he couldn’t calculate but could feel commencing, like some dead zone inside her had uncovered all at once. He thought that it was the print of something lost, something irretrievable, though it was all he knew, and he felt that was only part of it.

A year ago a letter came unaddressed and sat a month in general delivery before the card came warning him to pick it up. It said:

Robard:

We are in Tulare now. W. W. pitches. Come and see me please. I still love you. Your cousin. Beuna.

After a month in the mail slot, it smelled like the same gardenias, thick and rank, flagging to the onionskin so his neck prickled when he smelled it, and he decided then that he had to go, if it was just to see what was there, and could work on explanations later.

He had sat beside her in the Tulare fairgrounds in the smothering night heat and watched W.W. on the brick dust under the lights expel one spiteful pitch after another that no one could ever hit or even halfway see, the last six batters going back without bothering to swing, so that the game was over in an hour and a half.

Beuna had on a red sunsuit printed with elephants running, the halter pinching her breasts up so that he doubted if she could swallow all the way down. Her stomach had forged over her shorts and he thought then that she was much fuller now, after twelve years, but ripe like a peach orchard pear, and womanish in a way that he had never ever seen before and never even really imagined to be possible. She sat beside him and slowly pressed her bare thigh against his until he began to feel like some great whirling gyro were being turned against him. And she never once uttered a word nor made a sound, and for the hour and a half he had sat as though some hot current were passing into his leg, turning a circuit through his body and passing out through his fingers, taking all his strength and resistance as it went.

When she released him, she set her head sideways and stared at him, holding him, like the high point on a compass.

“Robard,” she said, her voice sounding like a bubble rising up out of the cramped insides of her throat. “I love you.”

The first banquet of grandstand lights fell dim, sinking them in queer afternoon shadowlight.

“All right,” he said, looking across the dingy field for some sign of W.W., knowing he was baiting calamity by even being there.

“I’m so wet,” she said. “My God!” She fished her hand in his trousers and squeezed him there until he felt a noise down in his throat that wouldn’t come loose. “Robard?” she breathed, bringing her mouth to an inch from his ear and squeezing as hard as she could. “Do you love me?”

“All right,” he said, unable to get his breath.

“Is that all?” she said, her eyes pinching up meanly and her grip relaxing so that he had time to feel his saliva get thick as gravy.

“You do what you can,” he said, sucking air through his nose, trying to keep his throat constricted.

“Well,” she said reproachfully, staring at her toes on the next riser down. He could hear W.W.’s voice calling out of the dark across the field. Behind him other voices were laughing. Suddenly she had him again, foisting her hand in his trousers as if she were driving a nail and until he felt like some awful vision was about to appear in front of him. The last standard of lights died off, huddling them in a wretched darkness. “Since you put it thataway,” she said slowly, “I guess it’ll be fine.”