Richard Ford - A Piece of My Heart

He drove into town to the front of the post office and stopped, thinking, in the heat, that seeing Beuna as an impediment or as something to be survived was only one way of looking at her, and not by any necessity the way she was. He stepped in where the air was cool and dry. The lobby was a long empty arcade with wired-up skylights that clouded the room with submerged shadows. He picked up the letter at the registry and walked back out into the sunlight, looking up the street to see if he saw anyone he knew. He thought about breakfast and decided to let it slide.

He stuck the letter under the visor and started back toward the mountains. He drove out across the meadow until he crossed the Works Progress bridge at Inyo Creek and stopped and got out and walked back to the railing. The breeze stiffened and flicked the page, and he read the words over and over, poring over them, his lips forming the words each time. And after a while he walked down in the yellow and green checkered light and stepped into the sedge and laid the envelope on the surface and watched it turn and dance away until it snuffed like a flicker of light. He puzzled for a moment at the letter, the page fluttering in his hand, and suddenly folded it into quarters and backed out of the wet grass. He climbed the bank and crammed the page down inside his instep and started back toward the truck.

He thought again that to see Beuna as an obstacle was only one narrow-minded way of looking at her. And not the only way. Since another was to think that he was not finished with this part of his life yet, wife or no wife, this part left with Beuna, and with women in general, and that there was still this much left, this much of an opportunity to do with the way he wanted, and that thirty-four was still young, inasmuch as you only got to live one time and this was his time right now.

He drove down into Arizona and slept in the afternoon behind a motel in Flagstaff. He got up at four o’clock and drove straight until dark, and slept on the truck seat outside Bluewater, New Mexico, and woke up in the high sunshine and drove into Grants to eat breakfast. At Grants he stepped out in the breeze, between the highway and the Santa Fe yards, and watched cattle cars being switched onto the main line from south Texas, the cattle asleep on their feet in the cool tinted air. He watched the train get made up and disappear out to the east, then drove to Albuquerque and up again across the purple lip of the Manzanos back into the desert.

Out of Santa Rosa a Buick convertible was pulled down off the road and a blond woman in white pants was standing beside it in the sun, shielding her eyes with one hand and waving the other hand lazily as though she were signaling someone up the road. The Buick had had its left taillight bent in, and the warning signal was flashing dimly in the sunlight. He looked up the highway to see if someone was standing back up on the shoulder, but there was no one, only the black imprint of Santa Rosa quavering on the low table of the desert.

When he stopped, the woman quit waving and rested her hand on her hip, but kept her eyes shielded with her fingers. He got out and walked along the car, looked down in the back seat and saw it strewn with beer cans, some with beer spilling out.

“Sun’s real bad for your features, know that?” the woman said indifferently, removing her hand so he could see her small face.

“What’d you do to it?” He motioned at the car.

“He says the pump’s busted, but I don’t know nothin about it. I know it stopped.” She pinched up a piece of her blouse and pulled it away from the skin.

“So where’s he gone?” he said.

“Variadero, building a hamburger palace.” She shaded her eyes again and studied him as if she had heard something she hadn’t liked. He slid in and waggled the key.

“It wouldn’t do me no good to go turning nothin.” She stepped up into the shade of the car and plumped at her hair.

He tried the key. The motor turned over nicely, but quit short of starting. He held the accelerator down and twiddled the key back and forth trying to spark it, but it wouldn’t fire, and he finally stopped and squinted at her standing outside in the heat. She looked a lot like a lot of women he’d passed up, little blue-star ear studs, hot skin that made her look older than she was. It made him just want to slide away.

She stiffened her mouth. “Half them’s Larry’s,” she said, flicking her eyes away, “He drinks his breakfast on the way to work, I drink mine on the way home.” She laughed. “I don’t pick up no hitchikers, though.”

“Nobody said you did,” he said, staring at the big chrome dashboard trying to figure if one of the gauges was measuring what was wrong with the engine.

“I don’t, either,” she said.

“That’s good,” he said, and climbed out. “Look here, I can’t get your boat fired up.” He flicked the sweat off his chin.

“What the hell am I supposed to do?” she said, glaring out at him.

“I’ll take you down the road,” he said.

“Curvo,” she said, raveling her mouth into a smirk.

“How far is it?”

“What difference does it make if you’re going that direction?” she said.

“None,” he said, and started back toward the truck.

She reached inside, yanked up a split package of beer, and came behind him. “I got my valuables out,” she said, and laughed.

“You going to leave it blinking?” he said, looking unhappily at the beer.

“Hell with it,” she said, and climbed in the truck.

She sat high up on the seat, her hand flounced out the window letting the breeze flit between her fingers. She was different the first moment she got in the truck, a little more fragile a framework, he thought, than she had been standing outside beside the car. She had a small round bruise underneath her ear which she worried with her fingers, and every time the wind stripped her hair back against her temples, he got another look at it.

“Air temp makes a difference,” she said, watching the hot air through her fingers. “They put ’em in trucks.”

“Is that right?”

She looked at him, then turned her face into the breeze.

“What is it your husband does?” he said.

She cranked the window up and gave him a stern look. “Hod carrier. He’s eight years younger than I am.” She reached forward, ripped the package of beer a little more and set a can on the glove box door. “California’s the other way, ain’t it?” she said, pulling the top.

“Is that right?”

“You done stole something, ain’t you?” she said, letting her head roll against the window frame.

“Off.”

“You ain’t stole nothin , then. I steal off every day, but it don’t get me anyplace.” She laughed. “You think I look old?”

He looked at her short neck, and he tried to make out he was estimating. “How old are you?” he said.

“That ain’t the point,” she said, having another drink of the beer and setting the can on the armrest. “That ain’t the goddamned point. Point is, how old do I look ? Old? You think I look old?” She watched him carefully to see if he was thinking over telling a lie.

“No,” he said.

She raised her head slightly and widened her eyes. “I’m thirty-one. Do I look like it?”

“No,” he said, thinking that if he had one guess out of a hundred possible ages, thirty-one would’ve been second after forty-one. “That means the old man’s twenty-three.”

She gave him a surprised look. “I ain’t worried about that,” she said.

“Nobody said so.”

She took another drink of her beer. “I take him to work in the morning and come get him in the evening. Them little town bitches come wherever he’s at and switch their asses in his face, but they know I’ll be pulling up there in my white Buick at six o’clock holding a sack of beer in one hand and something better in the other, so he don’t have to go nowhere to have fun but with me. I’m the goddamn fun,” she said.