Richard Ford - A Piece of My Heart

He ate the last cracker and bent and fingered the tread on the car nearest the truck. It was thick and warm and deep enough to lose a nickel in. He took a drink of his root beer and tapped the tire with his toe and went back.

He backed the truck up to the cabin door and let himself in. The room was damp and smelled hot like the room they had put the old man in. The ceiling fixture gave out a grainy light. He opened the bathroom, inspected the shower, and pulled up the casement to let a breeze circulate the mildew air out of the room. He washed his face, turned the light off, and stood in the window, letting his skin dry. No cars were running the road. The lot was empty. The ducks’ wings were buzzing in a soft green haze of light, and someone had turned on the red NO sign. He took off his shirt, lay on the bedspread, and let the breeze settle on his stomach and soothe his legs.

He could rent a big Pontiac, he thought. He could get a big room at Manhattan Beach, have a swim and see the movies, and come back while she was excited and love her like he hadn’t been off, make her forget it, say how everything comes down to choice. One day you think you never even made a choice and then you have to make one, even a wrong one, just so you’re sure you’re still able. And once that’s over, you can go back and be happy again with what you were before you started worrying. Though she’d say it wasn’t like that at all, he thought, since women tied themselves to men like men wanted to tie themselves to the world. But if he could make her see that, he could still make her happy, on account of choosing her after he had already had her when there wasn’t any reason to have her now except he wanted to. He lit a cigarette and smudged it and blew the smoke up and watched it sag off in the breeze. He could hear the duck sign buzzing outside. There was some mystery to Beuna still, some force that drew him, made him want to find her out, like a man plundering a place he knows he shouldn’t be but can’t help but be for the one important thing he might find. Something pulled him, over the squeezing and weltering that he thought he could just as easily dispense with now and would if there were some other way to get that close to her. Except that that was all she allowed and cared about and would just as soon for her own pleasures dispense with all that he wanted to save. W.W. came in his mind with the idea that she wanted to punish him and punish herself with one more thing she couldn’t have. Then he forgot it. His eyes closed and he slid backward in the breeze, and heard one fast car hiss through his mind and disappear down the road, and then he let it all go.

The radiator began to tick and whomp at three o’clock, and when he woke up it was daylight and his head was cottony as though the heat were a drug he’d taken to sleep. He put on his shirt and walked out in the lot. Clouds had pushed out ahead of the wind, and the sky was plush, delving over into itself creating a stiff wool of low mist. He thought it would rain.

He walked to the office to ask the time. The clerk’s face looked withered. His hair was stood up in back, and he had to close one eye as if he couldn’t focus them both but still needed to be able to see. He told the clerk he was leaving for a while and coming back and would be another night. The office smelled like hot coffee.

“If it had come up cool last night, you would’ve been hollerin for that heat,” the man said, fingering a styrofoam cup and looking sad.

“Don’t matter,” he said.

“If you like the weather this time a year, you just wait ten minutes,” the man said, and displayed a wound that had enlarged one side of his mouth and made it gap wide open when he smiled. “It’s gonna rain on us today,” he said, as if he understood it hadn’t rained in weeks.

He wished he had some coffee.

“What part of California you from?” the man said, sniffing. His shirt was unbuttoned to his belly and a little bleached-out Indian chief was tattooed into the flabby portion of his chest.

“Bishop.”

“I went out December ’47, in the Navy,” the clerk said, gravely staring down at his cup. “Stayed till”—he stopped to count it up—“four years ago. Come back and bought this.” He looked around the little office, admiring it. The man bent over the counter farther and cradled his cup in both hands. “I ain’t getting rich and I ain’t kissin ass.” He raised his eyebrows significantly. “Had me a putt-putt up in Oceanside. But she never liked it in San Diego cause of the spics.”

He tried to steal a look behind the portiere to see the man’s wife, who might, he figured, know Beuna, and be somebody who practiced recognizing the backs of people’s heads just as they disappeared through motel room doors, and grabbed the phone the second she saw something the least bit interesting. “How’s she like it?” he said, trying to get a good look in through the beads.

The man ran his hand through his slick hair. “She’s gone to Little Rock to visit her sister,” he said, and concocted a wry little smile on his ruined mouth and let his eyes roam the ceiling. “I’m ex-Navy.” The left corner of his mouth looked red and embarrassing.

“Yeah,” he said. He pulled out his postcard, laid it on top of the glass, beneath which were a lot of other postcards, picked up the motel’s plastic pen and scratched a note that said: “Be to home Tuesday.”

The man opened a drawer, tore off a stamp, and pushed it across the counter. “I stuck all them under there from people who’s stayed here,” he said proudly. “They come in and spend the night, a couple of weeks later I get a card from Delray Beach, saying how nice it was in the Two Ducks.” He finished his coffee and wiggled his cup in his hand and looked up in a comradely way. “I’m made hopeful,” he said.

“Yeah,” he said. He stuck the extra postage to the card, thinking it would get there before he could get there himself, and stuffed it in his pocket. “What time you got?”

The man consulted his wrist watch. “Four to.” He smiled and the corner of his mouth flapped down like the entrance to a bad place.

He drove off the hill and onto the little gravel streets of white mill houses with board-step porches and pink hydrangeas to hide the water meters. The street was bothered a distance by some young failing mimosas, but across the business spur the trees had been hacked down and a Red Ball store put up, and after that it was business to Main Street.

He turned a block before Main and drove to the south end, to a row of feed warehouses and the Phillips County Co-op, where the street ended in a weed lot, then turned up to Main and drove back the direction he’d come.

The street made him nervous right away. He knew the townspeople had gotten the forecast and got their business over and gone home, leaving him out by himself. The sky was higher, but the town seemed sunk and gray, only thin veins of light leaking into the air. He tried not to look sideways until he saw the old man’s maroon Continental angled into a row of pickups, with Landrieu slumped in the driver’s seat trying to stay out of sight. The car was stopped in front of an old two-story glass and granite building that had “R. M. Knox” stenciled on several of the windowpanes. Just as he passed he tried to see inside, but couldn’t make out anything but a high metal desk and a secretary walking around in a skinny skirt holding a flower vase. She disappeared into where the glass was darkened, and he wondered what finalities Mrs. Lamb was making for the old man, whether she already had him moved off the island back to Mississippi, or whether there were laws against hauling bodies across the line, which was why she needed R. M. Knox. It all seemed like someplace he hadn’t ever been but knew about, something away from his life altogether now.