Richard Ford - A Piece of My Heart

The old man turned and scowled back at him, as if he were personally responsible for the sabotaging, then jabbed the cords back in the water and waggled them as if he were hoping to attract whatever fish were in the area of the hay crate near the surface so he could spear them. “Shit,” the old man said, again employing the stage whisper and staring at the ends of the wires. “It ain’t a good day to fish.” He turned and gave him another belligerent look and started cranking at the box again, the two inert leads squeezed side by side in his left fist.

This time Mr. Lamb cranked a much longer time, The boat sidled in until it gently tapped the impaled jug, then sat silently in the slack water. He kept his paddle across his thighs and patted his warming crown, and watched the old man get redder behind the ears the longer he cranked the telephone. Mr. Lamb turned and fired back another irritated look while whirring the crank, and he recognized the look then as the face of dead-out desperation, frozen on the old man’s face as a fierce grimace which would not relent. Mr. Lamb looked at him with the expression of a man trying to pump air into a blown-out tire while staring enigmatically into the face of someone holding an ice pick. It was, he thought, the look of unrecognized betrayal.

The boat, with the old man’s increasing gyrations to perturb it, began to waffle precariously and send lap waves heaving under the jugs, causing them to strain against their string anchors, and making him get a grip on the gunwales and begin inspecting the timber for a place to cling when the boat eventually swamped. Waves were licking up into the trees and rising under the deadfall where the turtles were sitting silently, staring back at the boat. He felt now he should do something to save them.

All at once Mr. Lamb stopped cranking, his ears grown scarlet, and sweat thickening the collar of his flannel shirt. The old man turned and gave him a defiant look, then grabbed for the wires in his other hand as if someone else were holding them out to him and had placed them just an inch out of his reach, so that by some miscalculation he grabbed onto both spiky ends at once and discharged the entire stored-up quotient of telephonic electricity directly into his body.

“Oops,” the old man said in an obvious surprise, and threw up both his hands, dropping the cords into the water and pitching straight over backward into the middle of the boat, making a loud whumping sound on the chinky curvature of his spine, his eyes wide open as if he were about to instigate another imitation of Landrieu but had somehow gotten sidetracked. He did not hit his head. The rocker effect of his spinal curve mediated the blow so that his head only lightly touched the slatted bottom of the boat the way an acrobat’s head passingly touches the mat at the start of a somersault. His skinny ankles stayed draped over the front of the forward seat on either side of the box, and his arms flailed out to the sides partially over the gunwales. He stared at the old man for a moment, his paddle still laddered over his thighs, expecting him to jump up and start cursing. But once down, the old man didn’t move again.

He crouched forward on his knees, losing the paddle, and sending the boat into even greater flailing gyrations. He pressed both his hands against the old man’s cheeks, which were warm and sentient, though his eyes were open and unblinking and his chest was relaxed. He stared into the old man’s face, welled in between his thighs, and yelled at him so that a tiny flower of spittle sprouted on the old man’s cheek and began to slide toward his ear.

“Mr. Lamb!” he yelled, his voice careening through the rank woods and disappearing. “Mr. Lamb!” he shouted, as if the old man were at the opposite end of the lake and could not hear him.

The old man’s blurry eyes turned pale and glaucous and his face became famished, the color of the sky. He sat back and stared at the face, shaded in the thick well of his thighs, until the adroitness of the old man’s death refrigerated his own insides and left him with a very businesslike feeling of needing to act efficiently and without excess of energy, and to become as unquestioningly useful as he could to anyone within a hundred miles. He pressed his hands again onto the old man’s cheeks and found that they were warm, but less warm than before, which seemed to him more or less correct. The idea crept into his thinking that perhaps in the fraction of a second between the time the old man had completed the circuit of the telephone and the time his eyes had frozen open staring straight up at the sky, his face becoming white as sugar, then gray, he could have done something, could have sealed his mouth over Mr. Lamb’s and blown for all he was worth and inflated his cavernous old lungs and started his heart to thumping by the simple gale force of all his own lung power concentrated inside the old man. But then, he felt assuredly, there simply hadn’t been the time. A year ago he had sat in Beebe’s apartment on Astor Place and watched a football player die of heart failure, draped over the thirty-five-yard line, and later the announcers declared the player was dead before he hit the ground, maybe even in the locker room hours before. If this was so, he supposed, the boat still teetering under him causing the old man’s face to wag back and forth against his knees, then this old man was dead before he even got in the boat, since nothing could’ve worked such a devastation on him in so short a time, unless it had gotten started some time earlier. And without divine prescience of whatever it was starting, he had been helpless to assist the old man at all.

His back began to tighten and his knees began to strain against the ribs of the boat. He sat back and rubbed the furrow in his forehead for a long time and gauged his own breathing. The old man looked thin as paper, his temples sunken considerably, and absolutely ridiculous lying in the floor with the mallards flying off his collar and his yellow suspenders gapped above his shoulders as if they had been made for a much taller man. He reached down between his legs and mashed his eyelids down and noticed how simple and unspectacular a matter it was to do that, since the lids closed willingly and stayed shut without the slightest effort, as if there were no difference in being closed and open. Though the old man looked unmistakably dead now, and the businesslike impulse rose in him again, and he reached for the stob where Landrieu had impaled the white jug, threw the jug off, and pulled the boat over to where the paddle had floated. With the paddle he piloted the boat over to a patch of quavery ground, got out and towed the boat up partially, took off his shirt and draped it over the old man’s face. He scanned the cluttered end of the lake and saw nothing. The turtles had departed the deadfall, and the lake was empty and somnolent. The sun was forty-five degrees off the top of the woods, shining out from behind a long peninsula of crusted clouds. There was the smell of rain mingled with the rank scent of the water, and with his shirt off he felt the breeze slide against his stomach, causing his flesh to run up into the hollow of his ribs, and he rubbed himself and turned toward the sun and tried to let it warm him, but it wouldn’t.

He pulled the old man’s arms off the gunwales and fixed them at his sides. He lifted his skinny ankles off the bow seat, folded his legs in such a fashion that his knees listed against the sides, and put the black box by his feet for support. He grabbed the bow handle of the boat and pushed off back into the lake, letting the boat scrape through the shallow grasses, perched on the narrow bow on his knees, poling the boat farther and farther into the lake until he could no longer touch the marly bottom with the blade and until the boat, with the old man down in the broad flat end, rose out of the water like a gondola cruising some still and rancid waterway, and he the fat and efficient and shirtless gondolier.