Richard Ford - A Piece of My Heart

In Jackson, Mississippi, in 1953, his father brought him downtown and left him in the lobby of the King Edward Hotel while he went away to the mezzanine to talk to a man about selling starch in Alabama. His mother was home in bed and too sick to watch him, so he sat in the lobby and watched the men standing against the fat pillars smoking cigars and shaking hands for minutes at a time. In a little while a midget came into the lobby wearing cowboy boots and a Texas hat, and attracted everyone’s attention as he signed his name to the register and gave the bellboy a tip before he ever touched a bag. When he was ready to go to his room, the midget turned and looked around the pillared lobby into the alcoves and foyers as if he were looking for someone to meet him. And when he saw the boy sitting on the long couch, he came across in his midget — s gait that made him look as if he were wearing diapers, and told the boy that his name was Tex Arkana, and that he was in the movies and had been the midget in Samson and Delilah and had been one of the Philistines that Samson had killed with the jawbone of a mule. He said he had seen the movie and remembered the midget fairly well. The midget said that in his bags he had all his movie photos and a long scrapbook with his newspaper clippings which he would be glad to show him if he cared to see. Most of the men in the lobby were watching the two of them sitting on the couch talking, and the midget kept watching them and talking faster. When the boy said he would care to see the scrapbook and the photos, too, the midget got up and the two of them got on the elevator with the bellboy and went to the midget’s new room, which faced the street When the bellboy had left, the midget took off his shirt and sat on the floor in his undershirt and opened the suitcase and went jerking through the clothes looking for the book while the hoy sat on the chair and watched. In a little while the midget found the broad wooden-sided book and jumped on the bed, his cowboy boots dangling against the skirts, and showed the boy pictures of himself in Samson and Delilah and in Never Too Soon and in a movie with John Garfield and Fred Astaire. There were pictures of the midget in the circus riding elephants and sitting on top of tigers and standing beside tall men under tents and in the laps of several different fat women who were all laughing. When they had looked at all the pictures and all the clippings, the midget said that he was sleepy after a long plane ride from the west coast and that the boy would have to go so he could go to sleep. The boy shook hands with the midget and the midget gave him an autographed picture of himself standing on a jeweled chariot with a long whip, being pulled by a team of normal-sized men. And the boy left.

When he came back to the lobby his father was waiting for him, smoking a cigar, and he showed him the picture of the midget in the chariot, and his father became upset and tore up the picture, and went to the glassed-in office beside the front desk and had a long talk with the manager while the boy waited outside. In a while his father came out and the two of them went home where his mother was sick. And late in the night he could hear his mother and father talking about the picture and about the midget with the cowboy boots on, and he heard his father say that the manager had refused to have the midget thrown out of the hotel, and in a little while he could hear his mother crying.

He stood between the house and the Gin Den viewing the sky skeptically. Long purple flathead clouds were sizing up and the air had moistened and cooled and felt electric. There was the sense now, though not the sound, of thunder and it unsettled the air and made him feel that he wasn’t going to get across before it all broke down. There was silence on the island, and for a while he wandered back between the shed and the house steps, anticipating the old man and Newel, watching the sky.

He needed to get her shunted off to some motel since there wasn’t any way he could take the time to go to Memphis now. Just get in the room, he thought, with the lights off, and get her to work her trick and be done with it without ever leaving town.

And it wasn’t only that. He took a seat on the low rise of the step and watched the chalky sun being scrubbed out by the storm. The color of the sky was being altered on the minute, becoming more bruised and complicated every time he looked up. But the wind was low, and he figured the rain would hold off and come in when the wind was ready.

The real snake was two-headed. One, that any more time spent going through the motions with Beuna might be just enough to push it all over with Jackie, so that he’d arrive at an empty house without so much as a pencil pointed in the right direction — which would be ruinous, pure and simple, though he’d estimated that disaster, or thought he had, before he took the chance, and couldn’t complain if that’s what he picked.

The other head was that he didn’t feel so good about Newel claiming to see whatever he saw, though it was only a word in a million, and it might be anything, but probably was something, since he had little premonitions for it. It made him itchy.

Mrs. Lamb stepped to the edge of the steps and consulted the thermometer-barometer nailed to the porch stud. She held her glasses forward with her hand and peered up through them, then stared at the sky as if corroborating the opinion of the gauges. He looked up and saw her hair was flatted against her head and her eyes looked unrested. He stood up to walk back to the Gin Den.

“It’s smotherin,” she said, as if she had just seen the center of the turmoil and could do nothing about it.

“Yes ma’am,” he said.

“He loves smotherin days,” she said calmly. “He’ll just stay to dark if it don’t rain, if the other man don’t turn the boat over.”

He looked at his jeep as though it had just arrived, then looked down the car path to where it disappeared into the bottom. “Hope he don’t,” he said.

“Decamping?” she said.

“Yes’m.”

“And where is it you’re going again?”

“California,” he said, standing out in the grass. “My wife’s out there.”

“What are you going to do?” she said, passing time.

“Go to work,” he said. “Construction. That kind.”

“You’re not going to bring her back?”

“No’m,” he said, resting his toe against the step, watching her.

Mrs. Lamb elevated her chin as if she were catching some scent on the air and was diverted from the conversation. “Well,” she said, “come and go.”

“Yes ma’am,” he said.

She regarded him a moment majestically, then went back inside.

It occurred to him just as she was letting the door to that he could have asked her to pay him, gotten off the island while there was light and no rain, and made it to Helena before it was dark, where he’d feel better. But she closed the door and there was no chance now of reopening the conversation on the subject of wages, even though he knew she was in charge of disbursals, and once the old man arrived he would just have to go back and get it from wherever she had it squirreled away.

He walked across the yard to the Gin Den. Landrieu had limped into his house and not emerged. The puppy had sprung after the little jeep, but in a little while come back and gone to sleep under the steps. And there had been nothing since then but waiting. He took out the postcard and gave it a reappraisal. The laughing man in the sepia glimmer of daylight amused him. If he had a pencil, he thought, he’d write, “Be to home — Robard,” and stick it in the first chute he came to. And that might keep her until he got home again, some kind of promise.