Richard Ford - A Piece of My Heart

He got out, tied the painter, and with Landrieu limping out ahead, started toward Gaspareau’s, where there was a light in the front room.

He let Landrieu struggle on while he slid inside the truck and got a cigarette. Newel got in beside him, letting the tarpaulin stand in the rain.

“Where’re you going?” Newel said, gumming his face with his hands and wiping them on his tweed jacket.

He blew smoke at the windshield and watched it hang on the glass. “Motel,” he said.

“Going to see your sweetie?” Newel said, leering.

“Man.” He let the cigarette dangle off his lip while he wrestled his slicker off and stuffed it behind the seat. “Why don’t you turn me loose?” He felt in his pocket to be sure the card hadn’t gotten soaked, then sat back and hitched his knees against the dash.

“I’ve got a feeling you’re fucking up,” Newel said, widening his eyes to see better.

“Where’re you going?” he said.

“Chicago.”

“I ain’t going that far. I’ll carry you to the store.”

Newel nodded and looked wretched.

“You going to be one of them big-time shysters makes a lot of money?” He fished his key out and put it in the truck.

“That’s about it.”

“If I had the money I’d buy me a new truck.”

“You going to put on your license plate?” Newel said.

“One’ll hold me,” he said.

“It’s none of my business,” Newel said.

“Maybe we can get to the highway without you changin your mind.” He cranked the truck and watched the gauges climb.

“One thing,” Newel said earnestly. “You don’t really think the best way to solve a problem is just forget about it, do you?” Newel peered at him, his face shiny and smooth.

Rain hammered the truck. He turned on the wipers and cleared out a path where he could just see Gaspareau standing on the porch conversing with Landrieu, who was out in the rain in his yellows. He looked at Newel. “If you’re to where there ain’t nothing else, it is,” he said.

“Is that where I am?”

“Where?”

“At the end of my rope?”

“Sure,” he said, smiling. “I figure you were at it a long time ago.”

Newel chewed his cheek and faced forward.

He let the truck idle out from beside Mr. Lamb’s Continental, toward where Gaspareau was listening to Landrieu, jamming his finger at his disk every time he wanted to talk. When the old man saw the truck come up even with the house, he waved his cane and started out, leaving Landrieu standing in the rain.

Gaspareau stumped out to the side of his whistle bomb and poked his face in the window, obliging Newel with a sour look. He had on his hat with the green visor in the brim, and rain was loading it up and guttering off the back.

“Looky here,” Gaspareau said in a strangled voice, having a look at Landrieu before he spoke. “Feller come this afternoon, give your truck a good going over. Got in it and looked around. I told him you was over with the old man, and he had me point to where you was.”

“Must’ve wanted to buy my truck.”

“May-be,” Gaspareau said, his eyes flickering.

“What else did he say?”

“Wanted to know who you was. I told him I didn’t know who you was. I said you worked on the island and didn’t ask my permission to breathe.”

“What else?” He stared through the windshield at the rain.

“That was all. Just looked at the truck — that was before I could get around and tell him to leave it be. Me and him went out on the dock and he had me point where it was you put the boat in over there.”

“You catch his name?” It was raining on Newel’s arm.

“Didn’t say nothing about it.” The old man’s face was streaming. The rain was loud.

He gave the motor a little toe nudge. “I wouldn’t mind selling it if I could get out what I put in.”

“Why sure,” Gaspareau said, smiling widely.

“What’d you say he looked like?”

“Regular boy, long kindly arms.”

“I don’t know no regular boys,” he said, and throttled the engine loudly. “Except Newel here.”

“What do I hear about old man Lamb?” Gaspareau said, smiling as if something were funny, his ears dripping rain.

“He died. That’s funny, isn’t it?” Newel said right in Gaspareau’s face.

Gaspareau stepped back and scowled, his cheeks rising. A circlet of rain slid down his neck across the silver disk that fitted his throat, and disappeared in the hole. Newel put his hand on the window crank and looked at him, his legs getting wetter.

“Police might want to talk to you,” Gaspareau said, swaying on his cane. “Where’ll I tell them you’re at?”

“Chicago, Illinois,” Newel snapped, and raised the window halfway.

“I’ll be somewhere,” he said, letting his eyes roam. “I’ll get in cahoots with them.”

“What if that feller comes looking for you?” Gaspareau said, looking at Landrieu again, who had sheltered himself under the eave and was looking disconsolate.

“Tell him I’m sorry to miss him,” he said.

“He’ll be sorry he missed you, ” Gaspareau said. He stood back, and looked at his soaked feet, loosening a stream of water that shot off the brim of his hat and covered his shoes. Gaspareau grinned as if he had done it on purpose, and he suddenly gunned the truck and left the old man grinning at nothing.

The truck rumbled down over the hound’s carcass and up the side of the levee. Beyond it the rain was fierce, and the field rows toward Helena were blurred out. Goodenough’s was half visible and both the tractor and the combine mired in the field were past their hubs in blinking water. A single crag of blue sky was just apparent where the rain had passed and left the air clean. The sun was below the plane of the fields, refracting a bright peach light behind the rain. He let the truck swagger down the side of the levee into the fields and onto the bed that was draining water off the high middle.

“Who was it looking?” Newel said.

He kept his eyes to the road. “Couldn’t tell you.”

“Don’t you wonder?”

“Not a whole lot.”

“You said you didn’t like to advertise, didn’t you?” Newel said.

“I might have said it.”

“If you don’t advertise, who was it looking? You must’ve put an ad someplace.”

“I don’t know nothin about it,” he said. He tried to make out the outline of the store in the rain, and could only see the shadow above the dumpy profile of the land. He tried to put whatever it was Newel was trying to stir up straight out of his mind and concentrate on when everything would be over with.

“Wasn’t your gal’s husband, was it?” Newel said.

He kept watching for the store. “Let me go, would you do that?” He felt himself itching, concentrating on the dark little square emerging shade by shade out of the storm.

“A man diddling another man’s wife in the state of Arkansas is fair game if he’s caught in flagrante delicto,” Newel said.

“You have to talk English to me,” he said.

“My granddad knew a man in Little Rock named Jimmy Scales, who shot his wife in bed with another man. The fellow jumped up and climbed out the window and went running all hell down the street and ran in Walgreen’s to call a cab, and when the cab came the guy walked outside in his underwear and Jimmy Scales shot him in the eye. And when he came up, the jury found him guilty of murder two for shooting the man in a fit of rage. They didn’t even press charges for the wife. The judge suspended and gave him a lecture about being quick on the trigger. That man’s a urine tester at the Hot Springs race track right now, if he hasn’t died with everybody else.”

“Is that what you’re going to do when you get to be a big-time lawyer — amuse them judges about how they practice the law in Arkansas? I think you better figure out something else to do.”