Richard Ford - A Piece of My Heart

“What kind of car you got?”

“Shit-old Plymouth,” she said. “They give it to him when he played baseball. I wanted an Impala, but he wouldn’t say nothin.”

“What color?” The road twisted down the face of the bluff, went straight a ways, then angled south along the face of the grade. The Kudzu looked almost black in the heavy light.

“Dark green. Grunt green. Let me tell you, though, what the bastard done to me. Him and his big buddy Ronald commenced playing pool while I was sitting over in the corner minding my business pretending to drink that horse piss. And course they both got piss drunk and started missing the balls and laughing and pouring it on one another. Then all to once they seen another friend of theirs named Tooky Dyre, and he come in and sat at the bar and watched ’em like they was twin monkeys. And W. went over to where he was and whispered something in his ear. And in a little while Tooky come over where I was, and I don’t hardly even know him, cause he is a whole lot younger than me. He come up and reached in his pocket and took out a quarter and laid it on the table right in front of me, and just looked over at W. and said, ‘I’ll be next on this table.’ And they all just died, like I was a damned pool table they all played on.” She looked disgusted. “You think I’m a pool table, Robard?”

“I don’t know what you are.”

“That’s sweet,” she said. She opened her purse, took out a book, and started reading. The book had a photograph of a naked girl on the cover, swinging on a trapeze above a bunch of men in clown costumes.

He wanted just to let her out where there wouldn’t be anybody to pay attention, and get out of town as quick as he could. The hill road wound down into the same muddy streets with the little postage-stamp lots and one-step weed porches that ran all the way back to the middle of town. At every crossing he looked down the street to see if he could see W.’s Plymouth, but there wasn’t anything to see down any of them. He had his old picture of W. framed up in his mind again, inside the little pink bungalow in Tulare, wandering room to room in his white and orange uniform like he had a quince in his mouth and couldn’t get it spit out. He had left out the back screen in the middle of the night and driven back to Bishop without a minute’s sleep.

“Where’m I taking you to?”

“Turn right,” she said.

“Where we going?”

“I’ll show you,” she said, flipping a page in her book and biting off a sliver of fingernail.

He went down a block, and encountered a street exactly like the one they’d been on, low-roofed wood houses with cars in the yards, leading to town. He could see the docks at the Piggly Wiggly and didn’t see anything was unusual, except a queasy feeling in his chest like a sound he couldn’t hear setting up vibrations in various of his organs. His heart had begun to bump the wall of his ribs. He wished now he had hung on to the old man’s pistol instead of laying it in the Gin Den, since it might do him some good if things all of a sudden got hot.

In the next block the street got bad, and the old houses changed into little farms, with stumpy Bermuda lots ending in woods, and chickens and goats penned inside little square-wire fences. The rain had made the small animals go back inside the pens. A goat was standing in the rain, grazing nonchalantly, staring at nothing. The road slipped into a clump of gum trees and he could see where the first driveway opened right, though couldn’t see any more buildings for the gum trees.

“Where we going?” he said, watching the mirror and seeing nothing but pillowy clouds shielding the light.

“Home,” she said, closing the book and dropping it in her bag and giving him a big red smile.

The truck cruised to the end of a red dirt drive and he could see a trailer up amongst the stumps of the gum trees, set on cinder blocks with a propane tank at one end. W.W.’s Plymouth sat empty at the corner nearest the woods. There seemed to be a lot of sawdust on the ground from the cutting.

It made him furious. “Get the fuck out!” he shouted, reaching past her and shoving the door open, letting in the rain.

“I wasn’t going to walk in no rain,” she said, picking up the red pump she had let dangle off her toe. He raised his foot over the seat and kicked her in the shoulder and drove her straight out, sprawling onto the wet clay, her purse strewn over the seat and littering on the ground. Her red shoe was still inside, and he grabbed it and threw it out where she was just getting turned around in the mud, her hair smudged against her forehead and her gauze skirt up over her waist, showing her bare behind to the rain.

He revved the engine. She had one hand in the purse, pressing it down onto the mud, and the other fouled in several plastic sandwich bags that had spilled out. Mud clung to her eyebrows and under her chin. “You shit lick!”

“It ain’t me!” he yelled. “It’s you, goddamn it, that had to do it.” He hit the gas again.

Out the end of the trailer came W., dressed in a bright orange and blue baseball suit, his hair cropped like an onion, his long arms supporting a short little rifle that looked half the size of any gun he’d ever seen before.

He watched the rifle through the open door as W. came thrashing, trying to make out just exactly what it was, and deciding it was a BB gun. He gave W. an interested look, and pulled the truck slowly down into first. W. W. suddenly dropped to one knee, fitted the gun to his shoulder, and fired one loud round that broke in the passenger’s ventilator and went out his own window, filling the cab with a fine spray of glass, leaving both windows with ugly pucker-shaped holes and the rest of the panes intact. Beuna started shrieking, “Shoot him, shoot him,” and he let the clutch snap off his shoe and pinned down the accelerator until the floorboard began giving way under his feet, and the truck started bucking like a buffalo, and him shoveling himself in the corner ducking another shot, glass sprouting out the side of his cheek like tiny trees in a forest.

A dozen yards by the trailer the road offered one alternative to going back, and he twisted off to the left and went careening back in the direction of town. He took a fast look back and saw W.W.’s green Plymouth wallowing out the drive, exhaust furring the ground, the gun barrel stuck at an angle out the driver’s window. He could just glimpse Beuna, who had simply crawled to one side of the driveway to let the car get by, still sprawled in the wreckage of her white dress, looking as if she had dropped there out of the sky.

The roadbed ran out through another patch of gums, past a second sector of farm lots and rained-over houses that weren’t meant to be farms, with the goats and low-roofed chicken houses alone in the little scratches of stumpy acreage.

In the mirror, W.W. came skidding, the Plymouth flailing in the wet clay, already losing distance.

He tried to think in a clear-headed way what to do. He had an intuition the road would merge south with the River Road, and that it would be a peril to go back in town and risk getting pulled over by the sheriff and detained long enough for W. to start blazing away again at close enough range where it would be hard to miss anything not moving. The little prick wounds began to bleed down his cheek, and he raised up until he could see his face in the mirror and see where blood was popping out of several little vents along his jaw. Splinters were bristling on his neck but there wasn’t blood there yet, though there would be, he thought.

He shot down the row of scrub farms, the wind whistling between the twin bullet holes, and straight into the drizzly distance. A cab-over diesel was burning out of Helena heading for the bridge cutoff, smoke flagging in a long gray streamer.